Fear-based Leadership

I came to India four years ago with a hypothesis, born out of my time working with Katzenbach: that the true challenge to social enterprises scaling up is around talent -- much more so than financial constraints to scale.  This is not, of course, to belittle the need for capital that is aligned with the organization's social goals.  Yet in my experience, this aspect, while challenging, is also much more straight-forward than recruiting/developing/retaining talent.  So often, what I've seen in India is an inspiring entrepreneur, intent on growing his or her idea.  Yet the challenge soon becomes building not only the leadership team, but the front lines -- which becomes much more difficult with scale.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about leadership styles -- particularly with the a plethora of articles being written about fear-based leadership in the US, based on uncertainty and the economic environment.  When I first got to India, I got feedback that I was being too "nice" to people who reported to me; that I needed to instill more fear.

I recently did some consulting work for a Delhi-based organization whose staff was so fearful of the CEO that no one would speak up at meetings (not so uncommon in Asian organizations, as I saw this trend in Thailand as well, when I wrote a business school case on a leading conglomerate there).

In thinking through these cultural differences, as well as the current trend in US management styles to veer towards fear-based leadership, I found this Strategy & Business interview with Meg Wheatley particularly interesting.

In part, she says:

"I notice that when I ask people how much time they spend thinking together with colleagues, reflecting on what they’ve learned from their most recent efforts, they just stare back blankly at me. It’s getting hard to remember what it felt like to manage reflectively — to take time to figure things out together and to learn from experience...

In most companies, we do not have (and I believe won’t have for the foreseeable future) the money to fund the work that we have to do. Leaders have two choices. One, they can tap the invisible resource of people who become self-motivated when invited to engage together. This approach has well-documented results in higher productivity, innovation, and motivation, but it requires a shift from a fear-based approach to a belief in the capacity of most people to contribute, to be creative, and to be motivated internally. Alternatively, they can continue to slash and burn, tightening controls, and using coercive methods to enforce the cuts. This destroys capacity, yet it is the more common approach these days.

Around the time I began writing Perseverance, I read a book by Laurence Gonzales called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why: True Stories of Miraculous Endurance and Sudden Death [W.W. Norton, 2003]. Gonzalez says that when people are truly lost in the wilderness, they go through predictable stages. First, they deny they’re lost; they keep doing what they’ve always done but with a greater sense of urgency. Then, when they begin to realize that they’re lost, they search frantically for any shred of evidence that would indicate that they’re not. Next they deteriorate, both physically and mentally. Their frantic search for the familiar, and their inability to recognize that their current maps aren’t working, leads to the ultimate moment when they realize they are close to death. If they don’t acknowledge that they’re lost and that they need new information to construct an accurate read on their situation, they will die.

When I read this, I thought, “That’s exactly what I see in organizations (and in our political leaders).” Too many leaders fail to realize that the old ways, their mental maps, aren’t giving them the information they need. But instead of acknowledging that, they push on more frantically, desperate to have the old ways work. When human beings work from fear and panic, we lose nearly all of our best reasoning capacities. We can’t see patterns, think about the future, or make moral judgments.

This leads to a terrible cycle, a death spiral. People in fear look for someone to blame; so leaders blame their staff, and staff blame their leaders. A climate of blame leads to self-protective behaviors. People take fewer risks; creativity and participation disappear. New rules and regulations appear, with unintended but predictable consequences: more staff disengagement, more wasted time, more chaos. People spend all their time trying to cope or writing reports to confirm that they aren’t to blame. When I’m speaking with a group and comment about the number of reports people have to write today, or the number of measures they have to track, the audience members roll their eyes and groan...

When you’re lost in the wilderness, the only way to survive is to admit that you’re lost — and to stop looking for signs that might confirm that you know where you are. Your old ways of doing things won’t get you out of this situation. Once you realize this, you can look clearly around you, and seek information that will help you rethink what to do. You don’t have to change the situation you’re in; you have to change your mind about it.

For any situation where the old maps are failing, you need to call together everyone who might have information that’s needed to construct a new map. This includes people at all levels of the system — anyone who plays a role that’s relevant. Especially as you face increasingly complex problems that have no easy answers, you need to be brave enough to seek out perspectives from all parts of the system. It takes a lot of courage for a leader to say, “Our problems were caused by complex interactions. I don’t know what to do, but I know we can figure it out together.”