How to inoculate your organisation against Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt with a set of positive dynamics. This week: Fear.
In my journeys with No Moss and with our clients from fields as diverse as finance to start-ups to non-profits to the military, the commonalities in the organisational dysfunctions we’ve had the opportunity to uncover seem more frequent than the exceptions.
Today I’d like to highlight one of them and suggest to you practical levers that you can use to combat this specific dysfunction.
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) is a behavioural level pattern that is highly ‘infectious’ within a team and its wider organisation, in the sense that these behaviours spread quickly and easily amongst teams and teams-of-teams. This cascade is inherently human, due to the “emotional mirroring” and “distress at others suffering”, the first two of the three components of emotional empathy (ref. Hodges and Myers, Encyclopedia of Social Psychology).
Let’s examine each element of FUD and suggest an alternative dynamic to instigate to ‘inoculate’ against this element.
Fear and Compassion
First off: Fear is normal. Fear is evolutionary. Fear is useful, and deeply human. It’s an emotional response due to perceived danger or threat. There’s nothing inherently wrong and therefore nothing to judge about it as a human emotion; but obvious to see that in the modern world, we need to take some steps to re-wire ourselves to exist in a safer environment than the one we evolved in.
In a day to day work environment, there is much that triggers our fear. Imposter syndrome, that fear of being ‘caught out’ in a role we feel like you’ve yet to belong to; fear of losing our jobs; an unhappy boss; an annoyed customer; a difficult colleague. Fear of change, fear of stagnation, fear of uncertainty – so much organisational, political and personal energy is spent on this in organisations large and small, explaining so much otherwise inexplicable human behaviour.
What’s the opposite of fear? Is it courage? I argue that it is not, since courage (an admirable trait) requires that one have some semblance of fear; to be courageous is to recognise the fear, and rise above it for a higher reason and react appropriately despite the fear.
The true counter-dynamic to fear is compassion. Compassion, defined as that emotional driver that motivates someone to go out of their way to alleviate the suffering of another, is a powerful, equally infectious behaviour. A person who sees someone else being compassionate can be emotionally moved to also emulate this; with active effort and perhaps environmental/cultural encouragement.
In my organisation, we use the motto “it’s okay not to be okay” as a mnemonic phrase we use to remind ourselves to focus on compassion. For an individual – and all of these are individual actions, none are magic bullets requiring someone else to work and/or change but none on your part – this means centring your day, our work purpose, your efforts on caring for other people. It means coming from an enabling position of having had established in yourself a personal equanimity (outside the scope of this discussion!) that means that you don’t react to fear; and instead to adopt a curious, compassion mindset that begins to ask questions like:
· why does my boss/client/co-worker react in that way? What are their emotional and or environmental factors that cause them to act in this manner? How can I make efforts to assist, alleviate, recognise, reassure?
· what is the experience that the customer and/or stakeholder has had (within our control or not; perhaps sometimes unknown even to themselves) that make them react in this way? How can I explore or understand this more deeply?
· Compassion extends to yourself – why do I feel the need to follow negative established patterns; or fail to continually follow new, aspirational patterns of behaviour?
You can take action by having these kinds of stop-and-consider conversations when presented with the opportunity to be challenged by fear. At any level of the organisation, you can be the person who constantly asks questions with the angle – what does this person really need? Where is their pain, their anger, their fear? It requires a significant amount of personal emotional control; and more than a little mindfulness to be able to pull yourself and others out of their daily patterns. If you are successful, you’ll find a new, human-centred dynamic that can take root in the shared psyche of you and your co-workers.
Let me know how you go with this!
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My purpose is to make work more human. I do that by (1) growing myself with Stoicism; (2) creating evolutions by applying Agility everywhere; (3) creating revolutions of what could be, leveraging my background both as a science fiction author (“to imagine better worlds”) and general manager (“uplifting humans every day in the noblest profession.”)
