Pilar Jerico

Fear cloaks itself in many different disguises, and some of them are very difficult to penetrate, such as stress, “respect” or not feeling at one with the world. What’s more, tracking fear down from behind its various masks often requires you to become your own personal Sherlock Holmes. You should never run yourself down because you feel afraid, and start telling yourself that you are a coward or something worse. This is completely counterproductive and pointless. Rather, you need to be positive and proactive: the really interesting thing about fear is that it can provide a path to help you get to the bottom of what lies behind it. Asking yourself questions can help you along this path, questions such as What am I afraid of losing? or What good is fear doing me? When you’re concerned about your health, your loved ones or your belongings, answering these questions is simple: you are striving to protect yourself from pain and loss to ensure your basic survival in areas such as your health, work, house or money. As a curious aside, research carried out at University College, London has demonstrated that when we lose money, areas of our brain related to aggression or frustration are activated. Just think of the last time you couldn’t find your wallet or purse and you’ll immediately see the real-life confirmation of this research!

The problem of fear becomes more serious when its root cause is more subtle and difficult to pin down. Behind our fear of rejection (what will people say?), failure (not living up to your own or others’ expectations) or loss of power or status (position in the company, having a particular make of car), lies the fear of losing a mask or a role. This mask can take many forms, for example: being popular, always appearing to be on top of things, being the personification of success, etc. Moreover, if you dig a bit deeper, you come to realize that this mask is what gives you the security of feeling appreciated by others and is also very often what gives you your own sense of self-worth. And therein lies the trap. For example, when they’ve had a project go down the tubes at work, many people are more affected by their wounded pride than by the strictly work-related consequences. And this is bound up with their self-image and the role which they have assigned themselves.

If you are able to pinpoint what lies behind your fear and whether your fear is actually doing you any good, you’ll have made great strides in any process of personal change; because change is only possible once all the masks have fallen to the ground.

Angela Mendez and Montse Mateos recently wrote an excellent article about the impact of fear in the workplace. In this post, I’ll elaborate on their ideas to help people face up to fear.

1. Don’t deny your fear. Accept it as a normal emotion which is felt by everyone. We don’t usually speak about fear because it is considered a sign of weakness; however, never experiencing fear would be highly dangerous. Fear is part of the make-up of our brains, and is the emotion which has most helped us to get to where we are as a species. So, being alive means experiencing fear from time to time. Don’t try to avoid something which is a natural part of all mammals’ brains!

2. Cushion the impact of fear by looking at each situation calmly, and rationally. Define an action plan when faced with circumstances that induce fear in you. How many of our fears actually come to pass? I once read a study carried out in the USA which said that the figure is less than 5 per cent. Whatever the exact number may be, you only have to look back at your childhood and teenage fears to realize that they were greatly exaggerated. Fear is useful, but we have a tendency to be overly affected by it. A good technique which you can use is to imagine what you would do if your worst fears were fulfilled. A manager in a company once told me that at the beginning of his career, he was afraid that he would lose his job, and end up penniless and begging on the street. He took a brave decision to face up to this fear: he went to speak to some beggars and, although he learnt about the hard life which they led, he also saw that they were able to get used to it, and to find room for friendship and small pleasures in their lives. The experience gave him the strength to unmask his fear.

3. Realize that we all have the strength to face up to the fears which beset us. Don’t let fear paralyze you. Resilience is the name given to the strength which enables us to overcome difficult situations. I think that hardly anyone is fully aware of how resilient they can be. At the current time we are in the middle of an economic crisis. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that humanity has had to face up to far more difficult situations, such as war or epidemics. We need to see things in perspective, and trust in our innate capacity to face up to difficulties, and in our basic survival instincts.

4. Seek help. Speak to friends, family, colleagues, or specialists, and tell them about your problems. You don’t need to deal with your problems all on your own. If you’re going through a bad patch, tell others about it and don’t keep it to yourself. As Iñaki Gómez told me after confiding in a friend, your unshed tears stay trapped in your body. Or, to put it more prosaically, silence and isolation make us weak and more prone to fear. So, seek the support of friends and people you trust. Speak openly about what is troubling you and about how you feel, without blowing everything out of all proportion. There are some people who seem to positively enjoy painting a completely bleak picture of their situation. If you know someone like this, don’t be sucked in by their pessimism, but try to see the opportunities and alternatives available.

5. Look to the future, and set yourself motivating goals and challenges. In the end, the best way to get rid of fear is to look at the other side of the coin: your hopes, dreams and new plans. The past never comes back, but you can create your future if you fully embrace it. Learn to enjoy your new situation and to laugh about what has happened to you. Start making new plans, whether work-related or personal. All this won’t happen overnight but, little by little, by trusting in yourself and with the help of friends or people you admire, you can build a new future. In the words of Nelson Mandela: “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear”.

I have put together a Powerpoint presentation  about my new book NoFear and some ideas that I discuss in conferences.

Control for control’s sake could well be the motto of many companies. A friend of mine, who has just been appointed as the managing director of an American multinational corporation, told me about his own frustrating attempts to improve the people management in his own company. He had aimed to present his strategic plan in person at the main offices of the company around the world. However, owing to the demands of innumerable meetings and videoconferences at the company’s headquarters, he was barely able to move from his seat! I fear that his experience is very much the rule, rather than the exception.

We’ve been speaking for years about managing people from a humanistic, rather than mechanistic, perspective. However, the fact of the matter is that very few companies have been impregnated with this person-centred approach. Instead, many companies are overwhelming their staff with demands for more and more information. No one would deny that information is crucial for effective decision-making. However, how much information do we really need? What is the opportunity cost of swamping different departments with demands for all kinds of reports? Time is a very precious commodity. If people are spending their time cranking out reports, as is the case in many organizations, then they can’t be devoting it to the customer. Quantum mechanics tells us that the observer affects what he observes. So, if as managers we are geared towards analyzing endless streams of data, we will most definitely influence the day-to-day work of our teams.

Years ago, I worked with a manager who insisted that all the purchase orders were input manually into the computer, simply because he couldn’t wait till the next working day to get the automatically generated report! His impatience meant that some poor soul had to spend three hours a day inputting duplicated information. Completely absurd, but all-too-common in many companies even today.

If we want to eliminate this control mania, we need to overcome two main obstacles. First of all, the fear experienced by many managers in these difficult economic times: the greater the crisis, the greater the need for control, which in turn leads to increased stress levels. Secondly, the large number of departments whose raison d’etre is purely to produce and analyze information.

Does control produce genuine added value for companies? We can only hope that the current crisis leads many organizations to re-think the systems which they use, and that they decide to prioritize those areas which create real added value, and not those which merely serve to sooth the anxiety of managers or to justify certain jobs.

People sometimes ask me why I decided to write a book about fear. It all goes back to 1998 when I was writing my doctoral thesis about knowledge management (which ended up being about talent management). What really intrigued me at the time was to get to the bottom of why people don’t share everything they know. Back then the buzz words were databases, technology, quality and, yes, people management. But I don’t remember anyone speaking about the barriers to sharing information … except one article in the Harvard Business Review. Gerald Suárez, Director of Presidential Quality at the White House, introduced a relatively new concept: fear. The article he wrote got me thinking about our fears, which we almost always cover up with consummate skill.

I have to say that that article was an exception and it only skirted over the idea of fear. When I had the chance to go to the USA and to have access to the research databases of some universities, I found that there was hardly any mention of fear in the business world. It was -and still is- taboo. It seems as if admitting you are afraid were a sign of weakness, when in reality it’s what helps us survive. Thanks to fear we are cautious, and this is healthy. However, the negative flipside of fear is that it hinders our development and our capacity to take risks. I call this phenomenon “toxic fear” as it undermines our talents.

In the process of writing about and working in the area of talent, I discovered that fear is indeed the negative flipside, and that sometimes it is more productive to work towards people overcoming their fears rather than focussing on the area of motivation. I use this approach in my own seminars and coaching sessions and find that it produces very positive results.

I too was afraid to speak about fear! This may seem somewhat paradoxical. I thought: Are people really going to want to examine their fears when they spend all their lives trying to hide them? But in the end I thought, and still think, that we are all capable of something better, that our barriers to happiness are closely related to our fears and that there is a better way to live and to manage people. That’s why I wrote NoFear -which does not mean not to have fear but not to let fear have mastery over us-  and why I was able to overcome my own fear.

The competing theories on how to develop leadership qualities can be neatly divided into two camps. First of all, we have the “development looking out” approach which involves identifying positive role-models to follow. On the other hand, we have the “development looking in” school which advocates harnessing our emotions to achieve our full potential. Obviously, there is also a middle way which combines both approaches. This is probably the most fruitful course of action.

When management studies began to focus on leadership, the “development looking out” model was the order of the day. Writers analyzed great leaders from history or in business, such as Jack Welch, Napoleon or Churchill. They looked at how these figures acted to try to extract patterns of behaviour to hold up as a model. This approach is interesting. It gives us clues as to how we can improve, and it also provides a wealth of famous quotes to try out on friends and clients.  However, when we read biographies of famous people or heroes, we are often drawn into thinking how short we fall of their standards. And this is indeed the case. It’s as if being a leader meant becoming a combination of John Wayne and Albert Einstein, as the authors of Karaoke Capitalism, Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström, say.

The essence of being a leader is much simpler than that, although no easier. The necessary, but not sufficient, condition of being a leader is to have followers. Whereas managers are in charge of teams who follow their orders, leaders have people who want to follow them. This fundamental difference has many implications. First, we all have been, or may in the future be, leaders in a particular situation. This may come as something of a relief. Secondly, leadership is a question of emotions. For this reason, any effort directed at developing our potential as leaders has to be based on “looking in”.

We all know that we have to delegate. We don’t need a consultant or a book to tell us that. What we have to find out, and afterwards deal with, is what makes it difficult for us to delegate in the people we manage or to spend more time with them. At root, the answer is always a silent but important emotion: fear. As a corollary, the development of leadership skills is bound up with dealing with our fear, since it is fear which stops us using all of our potential and making the most of our talents. I don’t think that we can become better leaders without becoming better people; and that takes a lot of courage. Looking in is not always a pleasant task, and I know too many people who find  thousands of excuses not to do it.

The current crisis has opened a veritable Pandora’s box of fears. Fear is an emotion we are born with and which helps us to take necessary precautions. The problems begin when it paralyzes us, and that’s exactly what is happening at the moment. What many people are suffering from now is toxic fear, a variety of fear which undermines our capacity to act and take decisions.

What are we really afraid of? Fear and motivation are closely related, yet they do not receive the same attention in the media or in company policy. While motivation is accorded a star role in books about management and often proves a read headache to heads of human resources who pursue it as the Holy Grail, fear on the other hand is barely acknowledged in company policy, even though it plays a key role in the day-to-day workings of many companies.

Motivation and fear are two sides of the same coin. Someone who is very success-oriented, for example, will probably try to avoid failure like the plague. Someone who needs to feel part of a group will be terrified if they feel rejected or alone. For someone who likes to influence other people, loss of power will be the worst possible nightmare.

We need to add two equally important fears to those already mentioned: fear of not surviving (not having enough money to pay the bills, in today’s society) and fear of change.

All these fears give rise to lots of others, as the following table shows.

What is our overriding fear? This depends on many factors: age, our position in the hierarchy, our degree of personal growth, our economic circumstances, etc. In the current environment, the fear of not being able to pay the bills or of being laid off have sadly become all too common.

For managers, the main fear is fear of failure. At any rate, this was the finding of a survey carried out three years ago among over 185 executives in positions of middle and senior management. (Most probably this same survey might well throw up different findings if repeated today.) The results of the survey also threw light on other areas which are worthy of mention. This survey was carried out in Spain which has a culture which values the collective highly. It’s not surprising, then, that fear of rejection also scored very well. And it’s not unexpected either to find that fear of losing power was the least voted. In a country like Spain, it doesn’t look good to say that you like to give people orders.

If we’re not very sincere when we speak about motivation, are we going to be sincere when we speak about our fears?