The Roots of Real Leadership Series: Drive Out Fear (Why "Boss Watching" is a Fatal Failure)

Of Deming’s famous 14 Points for Management, perhaps none is more critical today than Point #8: "Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company."

In Take Your Lead, we examine how fear permeates the modern workplace. It is often a silent, insidious rot, though it occasionally flares into outright terror. Regardless of its intensity, fear inevitably breeds a phenomenon Dr. Gary Fellers termed "Boss Watching." This behavior, sometimes referred to as learned helplessness, is a lethal toxin to individual, group, and organizational performance alike. By shifting focus from the mission to the manager, it effectively grinds the gears of productivity—and your company’s economic engine—into dust.

The Cost of Fear

When a culture is defined by inspection, pop quizzes, blame-gaming, and/or holding people accountable for things they can't control, the workforce learns that safety lies in compliance and conformance, not competence. They stop looking at the customer and start staring at the boss to see if they are safe.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming argued that where there is fear, there is wrong figures. People will hide the truth to survive. Dr. J. Clayton Lafferty futher suggested their studies at Human Synergistics International have shown that where this fear is pervasive:

"...upwards of 25% of [senior leaders] are so up to their ears in self-blaming characteristics that they are just terrific on an executive team. In fact, they save the company a heck of a lot of time. When a mistake happens and the senior executive walks into the room and wants to know who screwed up, about 25% of the managers feel so guilty that they will volunteer even though they had nothing to do with it."

The Fix: Remove the Barriers and the Demotivators

Real Leadership is about removing the barriers that rob people of their right to pride of workmanship (Deming’s Point #12). You cannot demand innovation from a team that is terrified of making a mistake.

To Take Your Lead is to create a zone of psychological safety where the truth can be told, people can self-report, risks can be taken, metrics on dashboards can be red in the stop-light chart (if that's where performance actually is), and people can be empowered to "go to green", fixing the system when it's not working for them.

Interested in learning more? Head to our Shop and get your copy of Take Your Lead: The Motivational Leadership Book for Motivated Leaders.

And stay tuned for the 4th installment in The Roots of Real Leadership mini-series: Passion for Excellence vs. The Trap of Perfection.