Fear in Job

Introducing Fear

I remember my childhood, when I used to creep down the bed when I saw my father holding a stick as a reward for my mischief. I sometimes skipped my class when I had not completed the homework. I remember how I hesitated to go on stage to collect my award. And as I grew up to job, I was hesitant to talk to my manager. I avoided asking questions in meetings and conferences. There are so many instances in our life when we go across such situations where there is hesitation and fear. Breaking through them is always the greatest experience we add to our life. These experiences add huge confidence in our attitude. The task that we fear to take may be wrong or right, but breaking through that fear is always a positive value addition to our behavior. Nearly every task has more than one consequences and our decision remains to achieve the positive part of it. The correctness of the task is a standpoint upon our values and has a different aspect than fear in the denial to do it. Question remains – Why do we fear? Do we fear to loose in the run to do a thing? Or do we fear ourselves due to lack of confidence to do a thing? I think it is more important to understand – “How do we fear?” before we answer the ‘Why’ part of it.

Fear is often considered to be a negative attitude in society and profession. The correctness of this consideration is itself debatable, because fear has survival reasons. And survival aspects allow not only humans but all creatures to exist. Humans have socio-survival reasons as well. Human survival derives shelter, food and clothes mostly out of earnings and not always directly from nature. And hence, fear in humans takes many shapes and just not a threat to life. Fear of loosing a game and fear of loosing a job have different meanings but both exist among us. Fear does exist in each one of us and admission of this would be the truthfulness towards ourselves. But how does it exist in us? Is fear simply a mental state? In fact, if fear is not completely a mental state, it surely has more than 90% involvement of mind. Fear starts with interpretation of a threatening circumstance towards distortion of our existing condition. And the mental state that pre-estimates the distorting results is what we call fear. Thus the feel to loose a game even before we play the game puts us into post-game condition of shamefulness and we achieve a mental state of related fear. What if my manager is no one else than my own elder brother? I can very easily communicate to him all my ideas and suggestions and I do not enter into the pre-meditative process of analyzing what my manager would interpret about me. Pre-analysis of a post-action is how fear develops. And the negative result of post-action is why fear exists. The question expands from ‘why’ and ‘how’ to ask “Should fear exist at all”. The question further breaks up to ‘Why we should’ and ‘Why we should not’ fear, and addresses nearly all aspects of our life. In this article, we will keep our focus to those aspects of fear that are related to our professional life.

We fear to loose job, we fear negative performance, we fear our managers, and we fear leading a team and so on. Fear here doesn’t mean that we are not bold in life. It simply means that we hesitate due to pre-analysis of post-action results. Fear does not necessarily means deadening fear. Fear itself has many level of realization. Fear has many types of existence. A professional in ideal sense, must fathom the legitimacy of his fear.

Causes of fear in professionalism include lack of ownership of job, non-proactive attitude, manager – employee cultural gap, chaotic expectations, and unfamiliar environment. Many people work out of the fear to loose the job and these people often are engaged in just delivering responsibilities assigned to them. They fear to interactively engage into extra work loads. The ownership of job lies with them but proactive-ness is not seen. Often manager – employee cultural gap is the reason behind this. The lack of leadership quality of a manager often keeps their people away from reasoning out anything for them. A manager must understand – if in a meeting or an interactive session, people are simply nodding their head, it simply means that they do not like the way they are lead – they fear to cross the professional boundary and prefer to remain safe. This might be an illegitimate fear, not a necessary condition but is forced due to the previous practices and is often because of inadequate information. Ignorance breeds this type of fear and information is the answer to reduce it.

Many times our fear is pervasive low-level as that of a child from his father. Employees fear to be pro-active when they aren’t backed up by management and feel inadequate and just want to hide away. Some supporting incidences add up to this fear and counseling can prove to be a simple healing factor.

The two phase job fear

In the world of IT, where human resources are susceptible to attrition, organizations are working hard to build retention strategies. While employees fear loosing a job, organizations have to fear loosing the same job. While an employee works hard to attain expertise on the assigned job to be safe, organizations also works hard to train and facilitate the resource to make him an expert. Human resources are fulfillment of a particular job and their gained expertise over it is an asset for the organization. A replacement to the expert by a novice costs the organization in terms of time and customer satisfaction. Hence, fear should exist on both side of a job position – fulfillment and attrition. This helps managers to design and implement a win – win model.

Fear and Creativity

Creativity is the need of the hour and it cannot exist with boundaries of separation in place. Creativity in profession is result of dedicated thoughts over extending knowledge base. There sits the desire to achieve distinctive recognition which inspires creativity. And desire exists in relation to emotion. Conditions bearing fear creates a gap between the thought and desire of an individual, thereby impacting negatively on his emotions which in turn results in de-motivation and rising stress.

Fear and Chaos

Following diagram shows my simplistic model of Chaotic Situation. See that fear in its own shape and of its own level, lies as one of the important factor that segregates management from its team.



Overcoming Fear

Fear in profession has top-down existence too. Managers nearly always fear loosing their controls over the subordinates go away. But in doing so, they fail to recognize that control and authority has two phase commitment. Authority to control is a responsibility gained over the acceptance by the subordinates and acceptance is an internal attitude, not an external behavior. Managers somehow starts feeling that this authority has put them in a higher position of gravity and this attitude create the fear of loosing the authority which is dangerous for the organization’s growth. Fear is required at managerial position also, but it should be rather for loosing the regarding behavior of the subordinates.

A culturally rich organization has the capacity to orchestrate win – win situation, handle difficult people and tense situation effectively, spot potential conflict, bring disagreements into the open, and practice de-escalate down model and not arose fear through escalate model. This is achievable only through encouraging debate and open discussion, articulating and arousing enthusiasm for a shared vision and mission and stepping forward to lead as needed. Without fearing to loose gravity and position, people forming the organization must proactively create an interactive environment with a treatment of equality. Regardless of position, a familiar culture to guide performance of others should erupt.

More importantly, a breakthrough culture can be achieved by keeping the two – phase fear lively in positive sense, as told above. This is achievable through incorporating an environment of collaboration and cooperation. Here are few behavioral qualities to be held by each one of us, in order to build the high creative culture.

• Balance a focus on task with attention to relationships
• Promote a friendly, cooperative climate
• Spot and nurture opportunities for collaboration
• Model team qualities like respect, helpfulness and cooperation
• Protect the group and its reputation, share credit

Conclusion

Coming out of the professional fear environment, I would like to close this article by reiterating the ‘how’ concept of fear and a work around its elimination. Though fear in our life has varying meanings, but even in the case of deadening fear, it is simply a state of mind that takes us into future that is probable to harm us. There are various methodologies to kill this weakness within us. Meditation proves to strengthen our control on mind and can help us hold our mind from going into the negative part of future prediction, thereby diminishing the feel of fear to a greater extent. Yoga is a methodology to practice repeatedly and dedicatedly over a particular skill. By keeping ourselves alert in all situations and practicing to hold our mind, senses and breathes in case of dilemma, hesitation, nervousness, anger, stress and other agitating factors, we can surely develop fearless attitude, which can guide us to achieve new heights at individual, social and organizational level.