Queen Latifa once quoted “Fear can be good when you're walking
past an alley at night or when you need to check the locks on your doors before
you go to bed, but it's not good when you have a goal and you're fearful of
obstacles. We often get trapped by our fears, but anyone who has had success
has failed before”
Most of us
have worked in an organization where your peers, direct reports, managers,
directors, VPs, or even someone on the executive team displays some sort of
fear. Fear can be good in some cases as
it highlights the need for a better risk management or a solid strategy before
moving forward but in certain scenarios, having employees that live in fear,
especially management is dangerous for the department and can be very harmful
to the overall organization. In my
opinion, there are three reasons why fear exists in the organization and key
decisions that you as an employee can make to handle the fear.
First is the fear of unknown.
This could be caused when employees think of ideas that are very “green”
or otherwise known as original, brand new or have never been tried or
tested. Often these precedence setting
events come with a lot of resistance due to the lack of knowledge that others
have in the organization. In my
experience, this fear comes into fruition when people in the organization that
hear these “green” ideas start immediately saying no or the word “but”.
Second type of fear that is
detrimental is the fear of change. Let’s face it, we
are creatures of habit and we like stability.
An article from HR Focus highlights 50% of quality improvement programs
and 30% of process reengineering efforts are unsuccessful due to lack of change
management. When new ideas or a
different way of managing a problem comes into light, it often triggers a fear
in people. This is especially true when
the change involves a re-organization, mergers and acquisition, new enterprise
resource planning applications like Oracle or SAP get introduced. Questions start arising such as, “Am I going
to lose my job?”, “How will this impact
my current day to day?”, “Who will be my
new management?”, or “Do I have the
skills to do my job?” These questions
start generating fear which creates a brick wall in some individuals. A great example is when I was a business
analyst 9 years ago and was introduced a process that took an individual hours
and sometimes days to reconcile. I found
a way to automate the process and was really excited to share it with the
individual. Rather than welcoming me
with open arms and sharing my same enthusiasm, the first comment that came out
of her mouth was “Why are you automating my process? I had a system down in handling this. Now I’m probably going to get replaced”. I’ve noticed this attitude with some of the
tenure employees in the organization and it is a fear of being replaced or
letting go before retirement that exuberates the fear of change.
The third type of fear in my opinion
is the worst of all, which is the fear of perception.
“How is this going to make me look?”
It is less about the organization and more about “me” as an
individual. An example that made
me really think about this type of fear is when I shared an idea about a use of
a particular technology. As an employee
of an organization, I believe it is our job to bring best practices or new
technology to the right individuals that can evaluate and provide support. When I met with my superior to share an
article that I read and how we can leverage the technology in our organization
to our benefit, the immediate reaction was NO. Few weeks passed and another manager
approached me about this particular technology.
I shared my findings and my opinions.
This manager decided to take action and found a way to fund this project. This information came back to the individual
that I had originally discussed and he was not happy. He had a conversation with me and started stating: “This is making me look bad. Why did you share your thoughts…I now have to
pretend to support it”. These comments made me feel that this
individual was basing his decision out of fear – fear of how he is looking to
the organization.
As an
employee, when you face fear of the unknown, fear of change, or fear of
perception, you can handle it in a few ways.
First, Educate!!! Educate your
direct reports, indirect reports, peers, management, and etc. Find creative ways to educate such as email,
face to face, or internal social media.
Second, communicate to the people that will be directly or indirectly
impacted. The more they know, the more
people are likely to understand the impact.
Third, practice great listening skills.
One of my favorite authors Stephen Covey wrote, “Seek first to
understand, then to be understood”. If
we don’t embrace change or find creative ways to bring people along to embrace
the change, we will become like an “egg” described in the quote from CS
Lewis. “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a
jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like
eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary,
decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
