TOXIC BELIEF #6: “Fear is an effective motivator.”

Many managers hold the threat of firing or demotion over employees’ heads. The message is clear: “Work hard or you’re outta here!” and recent changes in the economy have made that threat all the more cogent.  In the United States alone, tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs as a result of an economic downturn. This resurgence of insecurity in the workplace has reawakened the fear of joblessness in many workers in all fields.


The problem with fear as motivator is that it makes companies less competitive and less adaptable, because it causes workers to become less, rather than more, productive. People become paralyzed and won’t take any action whatsoever lest they be blamed if it goes awry. Or worse, they act out of panic, making things worse.


Organizations where fear rules are truly miserable places.  Managers start demanding detailed plans for everything in a vain attempt to guarantee that nothing goes wrong. Decision making to a crawl while everyone seeks to cover his or her behind. Distrust leads to bureaucracies that insist on checking every last detail. Tasks that, in a reasonable organization, could be handled in a few hours, in such an organization might take days, weeks, or months, or never be completed.


Fear also degrades the quality of communications inside an organization. In an effort to deflect potential blame, employees engage in double-talk and “weasel words.” Whenever you see a memorandum that’s a soup of industry buzzwords and half-truths, carefully crafted to spread blame and communicate next to nothing, you can bet that there’s a terrified executive or two cowering nearby.


The result of double-talk is that people in an organization stop valuing truth, even if they can still recognize it. Information that is difficult for the culture to absorb gets buried and avoided. Over time, managers and employees alike lose track of what’s going on in the market because everybody’s afraid to state the facts.


Rather than increasing the level of fear in the organization, effective managers seek to minimize it. They want employees to feel that they are in charge of their destiny-not waiting for the proverbial axe to drop. They want employees to claim ownership for their decisions, not seek to pass or share blame.


Employees who are afraid don’t make good decisions, they don’t take well-considered risks, and they don’t act rationally. Go into almost any conference room in a traditionally run company and you’ll see them. They glance around the room frequently, waiting and worrying, laughing a little too loudly when the boss cracks a feeble joke, agreeing with whatever idea seems popular or politically correct.


I once heard a VP give the following advice that to a group of line managers: “You gotta put the fear of God into them.”


What a jackass.