Managing Employee Fear - Running An Unstoppable Business
Nothing else saps the efficiency from you or your workers faster than fear. No matter what business, industry, country or culture, a person comes from, everyone has felt this powerful emotion.
How then can you make your business an effective and unstoppable force? Gayle Gregory, motivational coach, leadership consultant, and co-author of the book “The Grand Experiment: An Expedition of Self-Discovery”, feels that the key to an unstoppable business is identifying and eliminating the fears present in the minds of its employees. “The source of innovation is a place of fearlessness where we are not trying to force things to happen,” says Gregory.
There are seven fears fundamental to the human psyche that Gregory has identified. These fears show up everywhere from personal choices to business activities. Although a person might not be aware of a fear are on a conscious level, it still has a marked effect upon the worker’s ability to innovate, communicate, and be efficient. Everyone in the workplace, from executives and managers to entry-level interns, can find some aspect of each of the seven fears within themselves. “The seven fears are universal,” Gregory observes.
Gregory believes that the world is not a scary place, but rather, an individual’s own perspective determines their fear. In fact, it is rare for two different people to feel the exact same about any given situation. Gregory challenges people to be aware of the choices they make when they’re deciding how to react. To dismantle the fear of the world, be proactive by making a conscious decision to react positively to a challenge rather than in a negative manner. “The world just is,” advises Gregory, “You give it meaning.”
To determine the unstoppability factor of your workplace, you must first identify the fears that are present within it. When fear is present, employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, and lose passion for the work they do. Without this passion, your employees’ creativity and power of innovation moves elsewhere, away from the workplace, decreasing the force your business achieves. “Go out into the workplace and find out what prevents people from doing their work,” Gregory says, “Why are they standing around vending machines having conversations? What are those conversations about? Its all fear based.”
The next step to making your company unstoppable is to take the power out of each fear. At first the process is difficult and uncomfortable because it requires open discussion and admission of individual fears. Take the initiative and lay out each of the fears to be discussed. This way you can manage the discomfort associated with sharing personal fear and turn it into a proactive game that can be won. “The only thing that holds fear in place is our unwillingness to look at it,” Gregory shares, “As soon as you place your fear out on the table, it begins to dissolve and lose it’s power.”
Gregory, who once held a lucrative position in a Fortune 500 company, left to explore the human condition by sailing to Mexico. Through her own introspection and spirituality, while sailing the Sea of Cortez, she realized what she learned about human fears realized had held her back. Knowing how costly fear can be in a work environment, Gayle now enjoys motivating and energizing the business world by purging their workplace fears, which she sees keeping all companies from reaching their fullest potentials.
To gain a competitive edge, your business needs to be bold and innovative. Fear prevents your company and it’s employees from using their energy to be courageous and innovative. In an enterprise where fear is present, internal conflict also often diminishes a workplace or department’s ability to function smoothly as a team.
A business that is has fighting amongst its workers cannot also effectively fight its competition. “We’re so busy competing with each other that we forget to compete with competitors in the marketplace,” warns Gregory. Fear that there is not enough resources, time, favor, and other commodities for all breed individualistic attitudes rather than team players and undermine the innovative ability of a team. To stop this, encourage an attitude of even cooperation among your employees. Employees that are afraid to share their ideas or work together cripple the overall productivity of the workplace with their fears.
Ultimately, the unstoppability of your business lies with your decision to expose fears rather than let them rest. A fear kept in the dark, no matter how small, decreases your company’s performance. Even if your business achieves its highest visions for the future, you are settling for far less than your maximum potential when you do not dismantle the fears within the organization and individuals. The resulting environment expands exponentially the vision of what you and your enterprise can do. “When you take the fear away, the automatic outcome is you energize your performance,” says Gregory.
