The Fear Factor

Much of the accountability literature spends a great deal of time talking about the victim mentality and describing victim behavior. It is helpful to understand and assess victim behavior because it is a clear indicator of fear in the workplace, which, as discussed earlier, is a detriment to accountability. In tremulous times, these may be very real fears of demotion or job loss. More often, small doubts have a way of growing into full-scale paranoia when ambiguity, uncertainty, and a general lack of information are present.

Fear in the workplace is most often centered around feeling threatened by possible repercussions as a result of performance. The relationships of authority are the primary important focal points for fear, and the primary issue is trust—low trust is often a secondary indicator of fear in the workplace. However, in spite of fear in the workplace, many organizations operate successfully. But even these successful organizations could improve if fear were reduced or eliminated.

Organizational cultures often harbor subjects that are not to be openly discussed, such as cross-departmental and regional conflicts or poor financial performance. Problems can occur when there are too many things that people are not supposed to talk about. The health of an organization can commonly be determined by the number of issues that can be discussed in open meetings and the number that require conversations behind closed doors. If people are afraid to speak out about what they know, focus is diverted from productive to nonproductive work, creating a cycle of mistrust. This cycle is reinforced over time, resulting in more fear, gridlock, and other destructive and nonproductive conditions.

Trust can be built through three key behaviors. People are trusted according to whether others see them as

• competent in the task they are required to do
• communicating openly when necessary and keeping things in confidence when asked to do so
• following through on what they say they will do

Trust is built slowly, and when it is lost it takes a long time to rebuild. The best advice is to build it consistently over time.

In organizational life, people are most concerned with:

• negative repercussions or punishment
• a belief that their efforts will not have an effect or change anything
• conflict avoidance
• not wanting to bring attention to themselves

When there is fear, people tend to hide, hold back, and do only what is expected.

Fear is often considered a base emotion that can generate many other secondary emotions, such as aggressiveness, anger, micromanaging, defensiveness, lack of engagement, and victim behavior.

It is important for every manager in an organization to recognize and correct a culture of fear. Here are some steps that leaders can take to turn fear around:

• Listen and observe how employees behave in meetings. Judge the health of meetings by the amount of questions asked as opposed to statements made. Good dialogue suggests that there is a balance of inquiry and advocacy.
• Catch employees doing something right rather than doing something wrong. Provide rich developmental feedback to foster learning and appropriate risk taking.
• Talk to employees and managers who you can count on to be straight with you about their observations on the issue of fear and ask them questions such as: “Are people encouraged to innovate rather than conform?” “Is dissent tolerated in the workplace?” and “What happens when mistakes occur at work? How does leadership respond?”

Most importantly, managers should be encouraged to acknowledge and share their own mistakes and the learning achieved.