Is Fear Limiting Your Team's Performance?
Fear is key to our survival. Fear’s job is to protect us from danger by pointing out risk, physical and social risk. It tells us to avoid situations that put us close to risk and it does this by triggering a physiological system designed to help us fight, flight or freeze. Clever. Except, when it gets involved in things that they need not. Often our fear voice tells us to avoid risks that would be good for us. Here are a few common ways fear can interfere with our performance in a team. Fear wants us to:
Hide that we do not understand something in case people think less of us. But then we might not know how to support each other, or we may have gaps in our knowledge, worse we hide mistakes or errors. We also get some people anxiously striving for perfection which slows down workflow.
Agree with the most powerful person in the room. Fear tells us to only voice opinions that are safe and sanctioned. This makes for much less useful conversations or ideas. It promotes groupthink and makes true inclusion of any difference very hard. We also see over-reliance on the leaders to make decisions and we become vulnerable to command control leadership styles.
Keep quiet or in the background in case we get judged. Employees may feel they need to present a mask instead of their true self. We get people who are not psychologically safe enough to point out new ideas, mistakes, or misunderstandings. This breeds silence, disengagement and wasted potential. The team fails to build on each other’s potential, and we get silos of workflow or relationships.
Put walls up, defend or attack to protect our status or position. Even when this is not toxic, we can end up battling in ways that stop the progress of good ideas.
Stick to what you know, do not risk failure. This is of course why and how we struggle to change or be agile.
As individuals in a team, the more we fear, the more we protect ourselves. The more we protect ourselves, the less we trust, each other and ourselves. Fear limits our performance as a team.
Our collective intelligence is moderated by fear.
Recognising where fear reduces our team performance is a business imperative.
This is an excerpt of an article I was asked to write for the industry journal InsideHR, for HR Leaders
When our fear voice is in control and we are not, our behaviours become guided by fear-based intelligence.
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Amy helps teams use the psychology of groups to their advantage. Her programs drive connection, communication and courage for remarkable achievements. Please see The Safe Space and DrAmySilver.com