How Fear Causes Failure
The absolute joy of writing this letter to you each week is the generosity that comes back.
After last week’s letter I was given copies of Oliver Sacks’ autobiography On The Move and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. Thank you to photographer Ed Suter and Labs.fm founder Richard Oakley for their thoughtfulness. Both books will be woven into these emails at some point in the future.
Today’s email is about the costs of silence, or more specifically how fear causes failure.
Given that backdrop I thought I would share Mookho Ntho’s works Weight and Shake The Room, characters who own their space in the world.
As you read today, I hope that you are moved to think about ways in which you can become more you, I hope that you are moved to act to enable others to bring more of themselves into the world.
/ STRATEGY
“No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
This Edmund Burke quotation is how Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, starts her book The Fearless Organization.
Edmondson’s book focuses on psychological safety.
She is careful not to present as a panacea for all organizational woes saying, “psychological safety takes off the brakes that people from achieving what’s possible. But it’s not the fuel that powers the car.”
In the chapters “Avoidable Failure” and “Dangerous Silence”, she explores case studies of Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, Nokia and others to illustrate how psychologically unsafe environments create failures.
The case studies reveal a toxic mix of unrealistic expectations and psychologically unsafe environments, both silencing people in the face of danger and steadily nudging them to risky, sometimes unlawful behaviour.
Fear. Silence. Failure.
She ends the Wells Fargo case study, entitled Stretching the Stretch Target, saying;
“Well Fargo’s avoidable failure was not the result of one bad apple but of a system that demanded hitting targets so ambitious that they could only be met by deceit. Employees operated in a culture of fear that brooked no dissent. Rather than manifesting interest in salespeople’s experiences… managers sent a clear message: produce or else.”
Wells Fargo had to pay an $185 million dollar fine, fired over 5,000 employees for ethics violations and the CEO resigned.
Turn the lens to your own environment.
High standards are a critical component of creating success, but have you set ones for yourself or your business that are patently unrealistic?
If you combine unrealistic standards with a punitive context expect failure, expect violations of policies and potentially even laws. Certainly, expect that your competitors who create environments in which people are listened to, will pull ahead of you.
If you’re leading an organisation and you’re seeing violations, before reducing it to ‘the one bad apple’, pause and zoom out, ask yourself “What is happening systemically?”
What appears as violations, may in fact be data pointing to a systemic problem.
Edmondson points us to how subtly toxic environments evolve.
It is not the necessarily the stuff of yelling and profanity, it can simply be the stuff of erosion, of asking teams to perpetually account for factors outside of their control, or of consistently disregarding their input.
Overtime you create the conditions in which shortcuts are taken.
Innovations and warning signs are missed as people make the micro-calculation that it is not worth the psychological cost of speaking up. They silence themselves.
You never know when someone has chosen not to speak up.
Yes, courage is an important dimension of a life well-lived, but we cannot consistently rely on people drawing on their personal reserves.
If the environment is hostile, or even just unhearing, they will stop. It is incumbent on us to create environments in which people want to and can contribute.
/ SELF
In Zia Hader Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, the narrator observes;
“This is how fear works. It transforms our perceptual field. It changes how we allow ourselves to experience the world—in order to circumvent the fear.”
Feeling unsafe affects how we see the world, and therefore affects the actions we take and the possibilities we explore.
Edmondson points us to listening as a tool to build psychological safety.
Listening deeply allows people to feel seen and heard. So put that phone away when you listen.
Organisations are by their nature hierarchical.
Be aware of how your positional power may impact on how safe others feel. Actively encourage their input. Show that you value it by implementing suggestions and publicly celebrating their originators.
The best listeners ask questions that help others discover new aspects of themselves or the situation they’re in.
The best listeners reflect and reframe what has been said, helping the speaker to gain new insight.
How might you bring this to yourself?
What mechanisms have got in place that allow you to listen to what your soul might be telling you?
Our world is filled with messages both obvious – buy me! – and subtle – ‘this is what desirable looks like’ – that fill our minds.
Slow down, listen to your own voice.
Meditation, journaling, simply removing oneself from the stimulus of the world for a few hours, these are all ways to listen to yourself.
As you begin to hear your voice who knows what innovations you may bring to your life?
/ SOUL
As I wrote today’s letter, I was reminded of this pain-filled passage from Yaa Gyasi’s most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom;
“But walking around with my father, she’d seen how America changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months.”
In Ghana he could be. In America he needed to shrink, to deny his physical presence to survive. The environment quite literally diminished him.
Pause this week to think about how you contribute to environments which cause people to shrink or silence themselves.
How do you contribute contexts in which you yourself shrink? What could you do differently? Do it.
Be conscious of how systemic oppression silences those around you. Work intentionally to create space for others to be.
Please share this mail with the people who help you be fearless.
If you were forwarded this mail you can subscribe here and learn more about me on LinkedIn.
Best wishes
Karl
(This letter was first published on 22 November 2020)