‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear’ – Ambrose Redmoon
‘There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great’ – GK Chesterton
A few villagers go to a lake to take a bath but they don’t go inside the water, waiting instead at the edge under a tree.
We managers are also like wagus at times. People are afraid to enter our work area and avoid coming to us due to the environment of fear we have created around us. Are you a Wagu in the office? Do check with your team members, albeit indirectly because of Gadhe ko Gadha nahin bolte, usko bura lage ga na. (You don’t call a donkey by its name as it might feel bad.)
Fear is defined by the Webster dictionary as “to be afraid of (something or someone).”
Fear is considered to be the emotion of the ancient man which saved him from his tough surroundings and built a sixth sense to ward off threats or danger.
At the same time, in a corporate high-energy, high-innovation culture, fear is not good for great work.
Organisations need a fearless top and middle management team instead of a powerful individual sitting at the top who instils fear with his or her authority.
In another scenario, there is a great highly intelligent leader but with only one opinion, one direction and one idea: his own. If this kind of a leader fails, then he finds a scapegoat to pass on the blame to. And the organisation has nil learning from that failure as the idea given by the leader was brilliant, but the execution was faulty. So, in the future, the organisation should adopt the same course, but with better execution. Unless the organisation is in a low competitive field, its future is surely doomed. By the time it can correct its course, it has hit the iceberg.
Many leaders believe it is lonely at the top. It is their battle and they need to direct the team, guide them and order them. Their stakes are multiple times their teams’ stakes, so they put 12–14 hours/day, hire consultants, forgetting the best consultant may be in-house, create self-made roadmaps and milestones and realise too late that nobody told them they were wrong.
Meanwhile, the team members think it would be ungrateful or considered incompetent if they questioned the words of their leader, their messiah, their hero. So, they keep quiet. Their heart shouts, their inner voice is so loud, but they choose to be “good” team members. After all, if they questioned the boss, they would be the boss, wouldn’t they?
Tough decisions are the boss’s purview. The consequences are also the boss’s responsibility (or so they think). But when failure comes and the boss asks, “Why didn’t you tell me your opinion?” they blurt out, “I was also blinded and believed in the same theory.” Their faces give a different picture though.
At the same time, before we give fear the same bad name as say cancer, let us understand that some fear (darr) is good. It makes you work hard before the big day; it protects you from a BIG failure as you do not venture and take unnecessary risks. So, fear can be a good friend at times instead of an enemy.
The idea is to manage this fear and not get conditioned to be managed by someone else. We are responsible for our choices, our actions, our words and our thoughts. If we surrender to our fear and compromise with the situation, we will regret it in the future: Kaash main us din bola hota to aaj iss daldaal main hum saab nahin fase hote. (Alas, if only I had opened my mouth the other day, we all would not be stuck in this quicksand.)
Why fear is not good for great leaders and great organisations?
If, as a leader, you are pushed into a corner due to failure, the immediate reaction is to be defensive – to blame the customer, the market, the government, your team, your boss or anyone except yourself. “I am perfect; I did my best. It is the external factors which are the cause of failure.” But this defensiveness is not good for a leader’s learning curve. He or she will be stuck with the failure with no lessons or learning from it.
A leader, automatically due to his or her position, has positional power. What he or she says is amplified across the organisation. A junior member is rarely exposed to senior leaders, maybe a few hours in a quarter, and listens to every word the MOR (Manager one removed) or leader has told him or her and works on it diligently.
At times, leaders fail to convert positional power to emotional power. Emotional power is the key requirement for change managers. In this case, the team is emotionally connected to the leader and loves and enjoys her or his company. The team shares wholeheartedly with him or her to their hearts’ content without fear of retribution or judgement.
Emotional power doesn’t come easily. One has to display in words and actions regularly that one is aware of one’s responsibility. At the same time, the leader is humble enough to not let one’s position go to one’s head. In the eyes of a leader with emotional power, all are equal and the leader is more human. S/he accepts her/his responsibility with humility and underplays her/his authority. Problems turn out to be challenges which need to be solved bottom-up instead of top-down.
A humble leader will also be able to easily accept her/his mistake in public or private as success is a journey from one corrected mistake to another. S/he is keen to learn from the past from her/his people and from situations.
The team members feel free to speak their minds as their leader pushes them to think, act and speak in sync, without the fear of making a mistake or saying something foolish.
In meetings, if the leader is talking for more than twenty percent of the time, then something is not ok. It is one-way communication to darpok (fearful) team members who just shake their head in collusion, just giving a momentary thought leader soch raha hai… main kyu fikar karoo. (the leader thinks… why should I worry.)
It is the requirement of leaders that organisations take well-thought decisions with the bottom-up logic that get executed seamlessly because people believe in its thoroughness and success.
Case Study 1
Nov 8, 2016, was a landmark day in India’s history. Old currency was banned. A2B2 (P) Ltd who did ~99% of its transactions by cheque was in a quandary. Its two key dealers said that they would pay their total combined outstanding of close to one crore rupees by old currency only, or else they would not be able to pay.
The managing director (MD) of A2B2 was cornered. He did not know what decision to take. As the other option of not receiving payment was riskier, he grudgingly agreed to accept old currency notes. He decided to deposit the entire amount in A2B2’s current account.
The financial controller agreed with his boss, but the finance manager was sceptical. In the entire twelve-year history of A2B2, there had never been large cash receipts, and this was a sensitive period. He had an inkling that there may be a query from the Income Tax department. But then, “the boss is always right,” and here his two bosses were confident of this decision, so he decided to let them go ahead. Mere Baap ka kya jata hai? (What does my father lose?) The end result was that there was an Income Tax query and A2B2 was made to declare that the one crore was black money (whereas it was actually of the dealers) and they had to give 50 lakhs as tax + deposit in a nil interest scheme. Thus, were the perils of a fear(ful) organisation.
Case Study 2
A meeting is going on as a set of marketing material is presented. The two senior managers seem to like the catchy message and the innovative design, and all around the table are appreciating it.
The big boss enters, and as soon as his eyes fall on the marketing material, he hates it. He makes fun of the silly schoolboyish message and then turns to his next in line, the same people who had praised the marketing material, for their opinion. What do you think they will say? They had just praised the material in front of the team.
Well in front of the boss, one needs to be different. One needs to say what is politically correct, and lo and behold, to the horror of the team who had created the material, both the senior managers also start finding fault with the design and the message.
The big boss comes out of the meeting satisfied. He and his next line are so synchronised in their thinking. He has good deputies he thinks.
Meanwhile, after the big boss leaves, the design team politely pounces on the senior managers for changing their opinion. The managers are non-apologetic, saying they had not seen the material from the boss’s perspective before and so the team needs to redo the stuff.
What does this say about the organisation and the senior leadership team?
Case Study 3
T5 was the Executive Assistant to the Chief Operating Officer (COO), F7, of D5W1. Their relationship was healthy in the initial days and T5, who was a fresher with just a B Com degree, enjoyed doing work for F7. But as F7 became older and stronger in the company, his behaviour changed. He started dominating T5 and giving him work at the last moment, expecting him to complete the same by staying late and at times overnight. He regularly used to threaten T5 saying, “You are a good-for-nothing fellow. If you lose this job in D5W1, no one will employ you.” T5 took the threat to heart as somewhere he also believed that because he was not highly educated, he would not be able to get another job easily. And the ********** and threats continued till finally one day T5 got fed up and gave it back and told F7, ”Do what you want; I’m not bothered.” He took a three-day sick leave.
When he went back to the office on the fourth day, things seemed somewhat changed. He came to know that F7 had got a firing from his boss as he was not able to give him the information that T5 collated on a daily basis. When F7 called T5 into his room, T5 was slightly scared that maybe that day was his last day. But, what a change! F7 apologised to T5 for his rude behaviour in the past and asked for forgiveness with a promise that he would try his best to respect T5 and his work.
CS 1.4
A2C2 was a proprietorship company, quite top-down. It hired a new director C7 who was given the task of turning around the fortunes of the company and making A2C2 future ready. One year into his job and C7 realised that the team, especially the old employees, were in the fear(ful) Ji Huzoor (Yes sir) mode and were not ready to take the risk of standing up to the senior management with their opinion or feedback.
There was an annual conference coming up. If it were going to be a one-sided top-down affair, the full potential of the leadership and the organisation would not be realised. The task for preparing the agenda was given to a team of Management Trainees (MT) under the Human Resources (HR) head and the theme chosen was “Haste Khelte (Laughingly, playfully) we will reach our set goal.” The MTs, because of their newness, saw the idiosyncrasies in the team and the negative impact it had on teamwork and the culture of the organisation. They decided to make videoed role plays around the key behaviours visible in A2C2, acted by the team member most closely impacted by that behaviour. Initially, the old employees did not co-operate, but egged on by HR and the MTs, and seeing an opportunity to show their theatrical skills, they yielded. The role play videos were made and were the highlights of the conference. The seniors also saw themselves in a new light in the eyes of their fearless (albeit temporarily) juniors, and it was taken in a positive spirit. The fear was exposed in the centre, and it kind of disappeared during the conference. WOW!
-The article is syndicated from the Book ‘Experiments in Leadership – A Comprehensive Guide for Leaders with 80+ real-life case studies’ by Girish Batra