Removing Fear: The Managers Role

The fear out of managing can be removed by management training but the fears that

cause problems in the work place must be managed by that very manager. Fear is a key cause of problems in the business world. As a manager you must be able to recognise and manage fear in your own team. All internal organisational problems, such as unclear targets, never ending discussions, broken promises, pressure and resignation, resistance and cowardice, inter-departmental conflict, poor decisions and issues of acceptance are, at the end of the day, the result of known or unknown fears in people.

Fear grows primarily out of incorrect self-assessment. A person may feel that a certain task, new challenge or situation, such as a meeting with their line manager, is threatening. The believe they can not manage the situation and because of this behave in an unreasonable way and react excessively. Psychologists call this 'overshooting' or 'over-compensatory' behaviour. Anxious people feel inferior and this makes them dangerous. They are constantly attempting to compensate for their feeling of inferiority and doubt by attacking or belittling their managers or team mates.

Conflict management training teaches that if your people are working in a relaxed atmosphere they feel equal and have a sense of affiliation to the company. As a result, they are more likely to react reasonably to requests from superiors and colleagues. The more inferior and anxious your people feel, on the other hand, the more aggressive their behaviour will be.

Therefore, if you succeed in removing the person's fear, they will lose their aggressiveness and feel motivated to pull together with you and the rest of their colleagues. This can only be accomplished if you understand how a sense of inferiority and fear arise in the first place.

The famous psychologist Alfred Adler once said "Being human means feeling inferior". As a child every human being is small, helpless and also physically at the mercy of their environment. There are some interesting comparisons between aggressive people and kids. Former Chrysler Managing Director Lee Lacocca said "If you imagine ten boys in pinstripe suits in kindergarten playing with building bricks, you have a rough picture of what it's like in a large company". He continued, "Grown men in a meeting are capable of doing anything to avoid attracting any unwanted attention to themselves. If someone doesn't have the facts to hand for a certain subject, they will just spout drivel as they are afraid to admit they do not know or appear less clever than the others".

A sense of inferiority is therefore in no way exceptional, but is part of the human make-up just as much as hunger and thirst are. The exceptional thing is how some people deal with their feelings of inferiority.

It is a phenomenon of our time that an increasingly large number of people behave in an over-compensatory manner. Never before has the framework of our working life changed so quickly and the time pressures been so great. In many people these factors generate the feeling of no longer being able to keep up and accomplish the essentials.

When the changes in the working world are taking place faster than our emotions can digest your people will almost inevitably develop the idea that they are constantly lagging behind developments or are being steamrollered by events. This results in a not directly explicable fear, which insidiously eats away at their courage and motivation. Denial is a symptom of this fear and this is expressed in increased sickness leave and the avoidance of situations where there is competition.

To remove fear, your staff have to be constantly informed about decisions and developments that directly affect them. It is also important that you provide feedback that indicates whether the person is on the right track or not. Conflict management training thus shows managers that the main way of freeing their people from their fears is by being open and honest with them.

by: Richard Stone

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