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0:00:08.2 Junior: If any human emotion is as old as our species, it must surely be fear, and the end of its hold on us is not in sight. That's anthropologist, David Scruton. Welcome back, everyone to The Leader Factor. I'm Junior, here with my co-host, Dr. Tim Clark, and today we're gonna be talking about that quote a little bit of what's in there, fear. Tim, fear is part of our everyday lives. Isn't it?

0:00:33.5 Timothy Clark: It is. You can't escape it.

0:00:34.0 Junior: Inescapable.

0:00:36.6 Timothy Clark: Right. So we gotta figure out what to do with it? How to deal with? How to overcome it?

0:00:40.1 Junior: Not an easy thing. Everyday we're bombarded with news and politics and personal issues, it could be geographic issues, it could be health issues, it could be any number of things, maybe your water heater went out this morning, there are a whole lot of things. They could be a part of that.

0:01:00.0 Timothy Clark: So do you know what my strategy is? I've just been waiting for it to kind of settle down. [laughter]

0:01:02.9 Junior: Oh, good luck. Yeah, you can wait along time.

0:01:06.4 Timothy Clark: Is that a good strategy?

0:01:07.9 Junior: No. Terrible.

0:01:08.6 Timothy Clark: That things are gonna just settle down and we'll go back to normal?

0:01:15.9 Junior: No. It really is part of our lives, and fear is part of our organizational lives as well. And part of what's fascinating about the research in preparation for this episode, realizing that so much of that fear is normal and natural. Almost the difference between distress and you stress, we need some stress to move forward in pursuit of something or to move away from something. The fear that is man-made, that's unnecessary, is the fear that we're talking about, that we need to get rid of. Some of the other fears, natural and normal, it's never going to go away. But there's a huge percentage of organizational fear, they shouldn't be there at all. That's destructive. That's hurtful to the organization, competitively, to the people in the organization personally. So that's our topic today.

0:02:06.8 Timothy Clark: That's true, Junior. We manufacture a certain amount of that fear and we have the ability to eliminate that at least that portion of fear. It reminds me of in the post-war era, we had the father of the quality movement, W. Edwards Deming, and you'll remember that he came up with these 14 points and he said, "Okay, organizations, this is what you need to do." And point number eight was drive out fear. In fact, he said, "Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company." That's what he said back in the post-war era. Why? Because he knew that fear, thrust us into a defensive position. We're playing not to lose instead of playing to win, and the destructive consequences as you alluded to already, are pretty profound.

0:03:02.4 Junior: Well, fears behind a whole bunch of organizational dysfunction. If you look at the symptoms of dysfunction inside any institution and you peel back just one or two layers, fear is often what you will find. And there are different ways that that fear is created. We'll talk about some of those and how we root it out, but fear really is at the heart of the majority of the dysfunction, and so getting at the heart of the dysfunction and rooting out the fear has to be high on the priority list if you're attacking dysfunction.

0:03:32.2 Timothy Clark: I think so.

0:03:34.6 Junior: So let's talk about some of the context and share some data. Here's some eNPS data, employee Net Promoter Score, 59% of employees wouldn't recommend their company as a great place to work.

0:03:46.6 Timothy Clark: Just stop there.

0:03:49.1 Junior: It's not a small one.

0:03:52.7 Timothy Clark: That's like 60%. That's nearly 2/3 saying, "No, we don't recommend where we work." That's most people.

0:03:58.9 Junior: Well, what lies behind the lack of a recommendation? Fear, there are many instances. A Harvard Business Review study found that 58% of people trust strangers more than their own boss.

0:04:14.0 Timothy Clark: How do you break that one down?

0:04:16.1 Junior: Well, there's probably some fear in there.

0:04:17.6 Timothy Clark: You know what? I think they don't know their bosses because intimacy or familiarity create affection, creates strong bonds. And that's what I would say to me is that people are not getting to know each other, so there's a remedy right there.

0:04:37.6 Junior: Well, and why don't people get to know each other? Fear.

0:04:41.3 Timothy Clark: Yes.

0:04:42.1 Junior: Fear is at the heart of a lot of that.

0:04:43.9 Timothy Clark: That's very true.

0:04:45.5 Junior: Fear of rejection. We'll talk about it. Forbes says that 61% of employees state that a toxic work culture is the main reason for leaving their job. What is an ingredient in toxic or culture? Fear.

0:04:57.5 Timothy Clark: Fear.

0:05:00.7 Junior: So fear may not be the root 100% of each of these, but it certainly plays a part, and that part is likely significant.

0:05:09.2 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:05:09.3 Junior: So what's going on? The employees in these environments are looking around, they're scanning the environment, they're doing threat detection, and they're seeing something that warrants some degree of fear. And they're saying, "Well, because of that, I'm not going engage the way that I otherwise would if I didn't feel fearful. I'm not engaging not just in my work, but with the people around me." And then institutionally, if the organization is not providing the type of support or rooting out the fear that it should be, certainly we're not gonna be recommending the places we work as great places to work, we're not gonna be recommending our bosses, we're not gonna be engaged in the culture itself outside of the work we're doing. So what do you think about those statistics?

0:05:58.7 Timothy Clark: I think that they're chilling in a lot of ways, Junior. So for example, just think about the future. The future by definition is uncertain. The future is ambiguous. The future is unknown. Should we attach fear to the unknown or should we attach hope and confidence and optimism to the unknown. So uncertainty alone does not imply fear, it could imply optimism. I find that very interesting. And so it does come back to the way that we are interacting as members of an organization, I think we are primarily responsible for manufacturing most of that fear. I think it's an organizational phenomenon.

0:06:52.7 Junior: It's probably worth calling out too, that the knee-jerk reaction to uncertainty for most people is going to be fear, the knee-jerk reaction is not going to be optimism for a bunch of biological programming reasons that we're going to talk about. But what is interesting about that is that it's a choice. So you said it could be.

0:07:11.3 Timothy Clark: It could be.

0:07:12.3 Junior: We could respond to that uncertainty with optimism and hope, but that's a deliberate choice that requires a bunch of practice and a lot of awareness.

0:07:20.6 Timothy Clark: And a lot of preparation.

0:07:24.9 Junior: Yeah.

0:07:25.0 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:07:24.9 Junior: So what is fear? Let's start there. It seems existential, but may be worth doing. Fear is a biological response. It's something that we have adapted to, is something that we have evolved to have over a very, very long time.

0:07:39.0 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:07:39.9 Junior: Most basically, to stay alive. Fear helps us avoid things that could kill us, and what's interesting about the evolution is that at the very beginning, we start to adapt to the environment, and we evolve to have this trait. It's purely physical. It's purely physical. You have to stay alive in order to perpetuate the species. If you wanna stick around, you should probably be scared of a few things that could kill you, right?

0:08:07.4 Timothy Clark: I think the first, I just kinda recollect on childhood and learning about fear. It always conjures up the image of a saber-tooth tiger.

0:08:17.0 Junior: Why?

0:08:21.1 Timothy Clark: Because...

0:08:21.2 Junior: This scary...

0:08:22.0 Timothy Clark: Yeah, well, yes. I know, but it was, that was survival. And so there's this image from this book of a saber-tooth tiger, we don't run from those anymore, so the nature of fear, the nature of the primary sources of fear has changed.

0:08:42.0 Junior: Yeah. So if you look at the neural circuits, the first thing we have involved the amygdala, we receive sensory information and we evaluate potential threats that potentially trigger the fear response. We look around, we see the snake, we identify it as a snake, a snake is something that could hurt us so we're going to avoid that. Then we get the hypothalamus, activates the sympathetic nervous system leading to the release adrenaline that's gonna help us get away from that snake. And then here's an interesting one, the hippocampus forms memories of fearful events, why? It helps us contextualize the fear response and remember the things that we ought to be afraid of, so one prior your experience so that we can do it again. Maybe we identify the thing from farther away this next time, maybe we treat it with a little bit more respect than we did previously, but that one was really interesting to me. So when we have a fearful event that gets tucked away so that we remember it next time and that's gonna be relevant for what we're talking about, because this is not just when you see a snake or a saber-tooth tiger, it's when you see a toxic manager, that same circuitry may as well be a saber-tooth tiger.

0:10:01.9 Timothy Clark: Well, that's the difference between being street smart and not being street smart. You are able to perceive the environment, recognize threats and then know how to interpret and respond to those.

0:10:13.6 Junior: Yeah. And the interpretation in response translates into a few different things. We could have freezing, we could have fighting, but more often than not, we have escape and avoidance. And so we see the toxic manager or someone who triggers the fear response based on what we've heard about this person, based on what we've experienced ourselves, we're going to escape and avoid.

0:10:35.2 Timothy Clark: Yes.

0:10:35.9 Junior: We're gonna leave.

0:10:37.1 Timothy Clark: And then what happens to your growth and development and performance as an individual in the organization, and then what happens in terms of business performance and impact overall?

0:10:51.9 Junior: That all around.

0:10:53.3 Timothy Clark: Of all around.

0:10:55.1 Junior: All around. So the point here that I wanna make is that we have evolved to have this fear response for really good reason, and it's moved, what elicits that fear response has moved from physical now to emotional and social and mental in a way that it was not 500 years ago. A 1000 years ago, 50,000 years ago. It's different, why? Because we don't have to worry about a lot of those physical threats to the same degree, we're now very tuned into what's going on socially, because we work in these organizations and the organizational context is where we spend most of our time. That's a point you made earlier.

0:11:34.8 Timothy Clark: Well, Junior, it's ironic because you go back a few years or a few centuries, and the primary source of fear was outside the social collective, outside. Today, the primary source of fear is inside the social collective. How different is that?

0:11:54.7 Junior: No, that's a really great way to it put it.

0:11:55.9 Timothy Clark: Because we're not worried so much about outside, as you say, those threats have gone away, so now all of the primary sources of fear, the potential sources of, I guess you could say predation, they're inside the organization. Inside our team. Inside our department. Inside the organization. That's what we're dealing with.

0:12:18.2 Junior: Well, it makes me think we recorded episode a little while back, and we were talking about the pain centers of the brain that are activated the same way through social rejection as they are with physical pain.

0:12:31.9 Timothy Clark: Exactly.

0:12:32.7 Junior: Makes me think about the same thing. So that circuitry has not changed, the context has, but it evokes that circuitry the same way.

0:12:41.3 Timothy Clark: Same neural response. Yeah, used to be physical pain, not social or psychological or emotional, right?

0:12:49.1 Junior: So let's talk about some of the organizational fear that we might experience in that interpersonal context, so let's go to the slides. Here are a few types. Now, this is certainly not an exhaustive list. Types of organizational fear, fear of failure, fear of rejection or criticism. Let's talk about those two to start, fear of failure and fear of rejection, how do you see these playing out in organizations? Where do these pop up?

0:13:16.2 Timothy Clark: Well, fear of failure is always a possibility because you have a job, you have a role, you have tasks, you have things that you have to perform, and there are expectations, there are metrics that you need to meet, and so that's always a possibility. And typically, you are being evaluated and measured formally on some kind of a regular basis. So there's never a time that you're not being evaluated, your performance.

0:13:47.8 Junior: So fear of failure is ever present.

0:13:50.9 Timothy Clark: Ever present.

0:13:53.8 Junior: And there's probably a healthy dose of that.

0:13:53.9 Timothy Clark: Sure.

0:13:54.0 Junior: Right?

0:13:54.5 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:13:55.0 Junior: Then we have fear of rejection...

0:13:55.9 Timothy Clark: By the way, Junior, let me just have one more point.

0:13:58.1 Junior: Sure.

0:14:00.6 Timothy Clark: High performers love to be measured. Isn't that interesting? Low performers don't love to be measured, so there's an interesting distinction. So the low performer is filled with more fear, but where is the fear coming from? Is it coming from the organization? No, it's self-inflicted. So this is another distinction that we need to make. If you're performing well, you are not generating fear based on your own non-performance or poor performance. If you are not performing well, you are the source of most of that fear, your self generating that fear based on your poor performance. What's even more interesting and ironic is the poor performers who generate their own fear through their own non-performance often will blame the organization and blame the boss or blame outside sources and say, "You're the source of my fear." So they refuse to take accountability and they wanna shift the burden to the boss or the team or the organization when they are generating the fear themselves. That's pretty ironic.

0:15:19.6 Junior: That's a gold nugget. That would probably make a 20% difference. And in a lot of organizations, if you see someone who's scared of being measured, who also blames the institution, don't promote him.

0:15:31.9 Timothy Clark: No.

0:15:34.3 Junior: Don't do it.

0:15:34.4 Timothy Clark: No.

0:15:34.3 Junior: Okay. Fear of rejection or criticism, now we have fear of change, that's fairly natural. Again, we could have an entire discussion, an entire episode on some of these points, but those who lean into the change versus being afraid of the change, a different conversation. Fear of job loss, fear of inadequacy, fear of conflict, fear of speaking up. Now, you can see there's a blend...

0:15:55.7 Timothy Clark: That's a pretty good start.

0:15:57.3 Junior: But there's a blend of stuff in here though, because fear of speaking up, that's probably the product of institutional dysfunction.

0:16:06.4 Timothy Clark: I think so. It's legitimate, usually.

0:16:08.3 Junior: Whereas fear of change might be macro-level, might be above the organization, fear of job loss, same thing, maybe there's some acute local issue going on that's institutional, or maybe there's a macro-level issue going on that's affecting all the organizations. But you can see the degree of fear is probably dependent mostly on the quality of leadership that's happening inside that organization, whether or not people are feeling fear that's man-made, or whether it's just the nature of the environment. And fear that's a product of the normal natural environment can be buffered and mitigated and insulated by good leadership.

0:16:54.3 Timothy Clark: I'll make one other comment on fear of change Junior, because change is constant, we know that. When people develop an unhealthy kind of unusual degree of fear about change, it usually reflects the fact that they have grown complacent, that they have allowed their skills to become obsolete, that they are not managing their own personal level of competitive advantage, and so as a result, the ground is shifting underneath their feet, and they are feeling more and more apprehensive, more and more fearful because they're not keeping up, they are not engaged in learning agility, they're not competitive. They've become fossilized calcified in what they're doing. So again, that's self-imposed.

0:17:56.1 Junior: Yeah. I've seen this acutely with AI in the last six months.

0:18:00.9 Timothy Clark: Yeah.

0:18:02.0 Junior: Those who are embracing are not feeling the same type of fear as those who are pushing it to the side...

0:18:06.9 Timothy Clark: That's true.

0:18:08.0 Junior: Attempting to dismiss. And I'm seeing those who have done that over the last six months, say, "Oh boy, I'm out of the loop." Not that you have to be on the bleeding edge, but you need to have some basic understanding of what's going on. And if you don't, the ground will shift beneath your feet and you will become obsolete faster.

0:18:26.0 Timothy Clark: It's very true.

0:18:27.9 Junior: So there are a couple of articles that I want to call out. One of them is called Silenced by Fear. This it was published in 2009 in research and Organizational Behavior. And then another one, Milliken Et Al in 2003, found that interviewees they had interviewed a whole host of people were afraid to speak up about a variety of day-to-day concerns because of the risks they perceived of negative labeling, retaliation, or loss of social capital. Others have likewise found that employee silence may be rooted in fears of basic existence or relatedness losses such as job loss, loss, promotion opportunities, or reputational harm. So when we go out and we list these types of organizational fear, this is not a hunch, it's not anecdotal. It's not subjective. This is real. And it's actually more well researched than I originally even knew. So Tim, what kind of fear have you seen or experienced in organizations? We went through the list. Do you have any memories or examples where you've seen fear really hurt an organization?

0:19:36.7 Timothy Clark: Sure, Well as you say junior from this list, some are existential. I worked for a company that went through a bankruptcy. I have seen a plant shuttered closed down. But what was interesting is that fear sometimes fear often mixes with denial, and that makes it even worse. Does that make sense? So you gotta think about this. I remember when when I worked in manufacturing and our organization, went into chapter 11. Now that's reorganization bankruptcy. So we're gonna reorganize, we're gonna get some temporary relief from our creditors, and we're gonna come back out and we're gonna be strong. Okay? But that should also be getting your attention. And you should be thinking, what can we do to perform better? So let's increase productivity, let's reduce costs, let's increase quality, things like that. Right? But often the fear was compounded with denial. A you know, a refusal to acknowledge real conditions, the real situation, and it just makes things worse. And so that's something that I've, I have seen over and over again. Yeah. When the fear mixes with denial.

0:21:10.7 Junior: So let's talk about how to spot stuff like that, where we have fear, we have some denial. There are some obvious signs of fear in organization. You could talk about turnover especially turnover of your best talent. That's a huge indicator of fear. You have disengagement. That's something that organizations will often bring us. Is their employee engagement data. And they'll say, I think we have a problem. Like, yeah, you do. And then we peel it back and we start to see, okay, there's some fear lurking here, but then there are some non-obvious signs of fear that I think are worth talking about. But before we do that, we want to talk about why fear is bad for an organization, it may seem obvious, but we wanna put it in a, to a finer point that fear breaks the feedback loop. I like this slide. Fear breaks the feedback loop. That feedback loop in our minds is the crux of the issue. Why is the feedback loop so important?

0:22:18.4 Timothy Clark: The feedback loop, junior in an organization? Let's think about the nature of an organization. An organization is built as a hierarchy, right? So it's like a pyramid, and we have a division of labor, we have roles and responsibilities, and this is the way that we organize. So the hierarchy is not inherently bad, but with the hierarchy, the decision makers for the entire organization are at the top and they make decisions, and then they communicate those decisions down as far as who we are, what's our strategy, what are our priorities, how do we allocate scarce resources, things like that. And moving that information down is not so difficult to be honest. That's the top down cascade. Here's the challenge in organizations across the world, the challenge is how do you move information back up? How do you do bottom up transfer of information? And so what we need from the bottom is we need to circulate back up what they have, the knowledge assets that they have at the bottom of the organization, we refer to as local knowledge.

0:23:44.2 Timothy Clark: And so the organizations that become most adaptable, that develop the agility to be able to sustain their competitive advantage, they circulate local knowledge from the or bottom of the organization. Right? And that's essential, as I said, top down cascade, that's not very hard. But moving that information back up through the organization is very difficult. What does fear do? Where does fear play in this entire equation? If fear breaks the feedback loop, we lose the ability to circulate local knowledge from the bottom of the organization and also from side to side. So the lateral movement, the of of local knowledge, the bottom up movement of local knowledge, the entire, the, the way that we move around information and knowledge assets is repressed. That's what we're talking about. Think about the magnitude of that challenge organizationally.

0:24:52.9 Junior: Well, part of what fascinates me about this idea is that it doesn't negate the existence of that local knowledge. The information isn't going anywhere and then literally not going anywhere. But it's there. People have the understanding, they have the information, they're just choosing not to pass it along. And so organizations are often in search of answers that they already have. They just don't know that they have them. And the transfer of the local knowledge is discretionary. That's also what's interesting about this is people just choose whether or not to relay the information. Here's another point that is a complicating point. We're not just talking about information in facts. It's not that someone just says, oh, I know this thing and I'm just not going to pass it along. It could be an idea. And that's where it gets really interesting. Yeah. Why might they not pass it along? Fear.

0:25:48.9 Junior: Fear has broken the feedback loop. Where does that fear come from? Maybe they had a prior experience where they had an idea or a piece of local knowledge and attempted to pass it on and they were punished for it. And the person receiving the information said, oh, that's unimportant. Why did you even bother me with this? Okay. Well, that's unimportant. Then I guess the next time I come across something I think you might find interesting, I'll just keep it to myself. Why? Because we're fearful of job loss. We're fearful of relatedness loss, we're fearful of all of the things that we already talked about. But that's where the rubber meets the road. So if the fear is present and it breaks the feedback loop, then the person will self-censor. They act defensively out of protection. They want to keep their job. And so they will say, we're just going to go on the compliance track and you're not gonna get any of my discretionary effort or my discretionary ideation, which is where a lot of innovation comes.

0:26:47.8 Timothy Clark: Here's another distinction, Junior, that's important to understand. So we talked about the top down cascade of information, and then we talked about the bottom up circulation of local knowledge. The top down cascade of information is almost always part of the formal communications structure.

0:27:08.7 Junior: Send a big email.

0:27:10.3 Timothy Clark: Yeah. It could be an email, it could be a town hall meeting. Right. It's the formal side of communication, the bottom up circulation of local knowledge and also the side to side. Right. The lateral circulation of feedback. Local knowledge is almost always what? Informal. It's informal. So when fear breaks the feedback loop, we are cutting that off both bottom up and usually side to side. Yeah. That's what's happening.

0:27:49.2 Junior: Now that we've spent some time laying the groundwork, setting the stage, talking about the context and the fact that fear breaks the feedback loop. Let's talk about how we can maintain the feedback loop, root out the fear and some of the practical behaviors that we can start doing or continue doing if we're doing them already, that will help us. So starting institutionally, we need to root out the fear that already exists. So if we're talking macro level institution, we need to actively go after those who are actively toxic. And we talked about this in a, in a recent episode. Oh, the difference between actively toxic and passively complicit. The, I guess success rate of fixing an actively toxic leader, we've said is less than 5%. And so if that's the root cause of a lot of the fear in the organization, that's the first thing you have to do. And the reason I wanted to call that out is I think a lot of organizations will attempt to solve that problem other ways that are much less effective or completely ineffective that take forever. And so the reality of the situation is, if you wanna solve this problem, that is the first thing that you should go and do that is the best bang for your buck. Identify the actively toxic leaders who have shown no signs of remediation and get them out of the organization. What do you think about that?

0:29:18.7 Timothy Clark: No, I agree.

0:29:19.4 Junior: As a first step.

0:29:20.8 Timothy Clark: It is the first step because there's no workaround for that.

0:29:23.9 Junior: You can't avoid it.

0:29:26.1 Timothy Clark: You can try to do everything else, but if you leave the toxic leaders in place, they will continue to be the source of fear, which will repress the information and lead to all of these other adverse consequences. Right.

0:29:43.1 Junior: Well, the leadership population is the most influential when it comes to this because their modeling behavior and their coaching are going to dictate the culture for the rest of the institution. Yeah. And the leader has to go first. So if we actively manage out those who are being toxic and creating fear in the organization, we're left with leaders who then need to go and model and coach according to the behaviors that we want. So if you are a leader, we want to talk about three things that you can do to decrease the fear in your team and organization. And this is true for any employee in the organization, and it is true as much personally as it is professionally. Here's the first one, how to overcome organizational fear. Monitor your emotional response to dissent and bad news. This is a good one. And this is attributable to you. I, when I first heard this, I'm like, yeah, you're right. That's a big lever.

0:30:38.5 Timothy Clark: It's huge.

0:30:39.3 Junior: So tell us about this one.

0:30:43.2 Timothy Clark: Well, your emotional response is the valve that regulates the fear. Really. So if you can, if you can handle the constructive descent, if you can handle the bad news and you, you can reward that vulnerable behavior, you can reward that constructive dissent, then you're, you're, you're giving people permission to engage in that kind of behavior. And you're telling them not only are we rewarding that, but there's an expectation of dissent. We need that. See, that's the thing that people don't understand. Well, how else do you get better? If you have a mistake, if you have a problem, if something's gone poorly, that's your critical clinical information to help you get better. So why would you repress that? That makes no sense at all. I know you're not happy about it. No one's happy about it. No, no one's happy about poor performance or bad news or mistakes, but that is your clinical material to get better. So you need a productive response to that. If you shut that down, then again, people retreat, they withdraw, they recoil. Now we're playing defense instead of actively trying to figure out how do we solve this problem? How do we get better? How do we improve? Everything turns on that. So this is a linchpin in the entire organization. How do you respond? How do you emotionally respond to mistakes, bad news, poor performance?

0:32:32.1 Junior: I wanna talk about bad news for a second. The dissent makes sense. Fairly on the nose. It's straightforward. I get it. The bad news one. That's something that I've seen pay huge dividends personally. It's something that I've tried to get better at. It requires a lot of equanimity. A lot of restraint, especially depending on the news you get. So let's say someone comes into your office, maybe you get this through some channel, a project deadline is missed, or we're over budget, or there's a restructuring, there's a layoff, there's a lawsuit or a legal issue, there's a technical problem or an outage.

0:33:18.6 Timothy Clark: Maybe a product launch. Just failed.

0:33:22.2 Junior: Failed product launch. Yeah. Bug got shipped.

0:33:27.5 Timothy Clark: That's right.

0:33:29.8 Junior: A leadership change. Negative media coverage. I've had the opportunity to have a lot of this bad news shared with me. Right.

0:33:34.9 Timothy Clark: Probably something in every category.

0:33:38.2 Junior: Probably, yeah. And what I have learned is that that is a massive lever. And how do I know that? Because I've been on the observation side of other people getting bad news and I've seen what effect that has. Right. On other people and me personally. So think about the difference. And each of us has probably had an example where you see someone who just got some really bad news and some people fly off the handle, does that help? No. And if they respond with fear. That leaks everywhere.

0:34:18.2 Timothy Clark: It does.

0:34:19.6 Junior: It goes everywhere. It's a big splash and everyone else around you is in the splash zone and they get covered by the fear too.

0:34:27.6 Timothy Clark: Yeah. I'd say blast zone, Junior.

0:34:28.9 Junior: Blast zone. And so if you're inside that blast radius, like it's not good.

0:34:32.1 Timothy Clark: It's not good.

0:34:32.1 Junior: Conversely, if you've ever seen someone respond to bad news with calm and with reason and with time and space, it's completely different. And so that's an aspiration that I think all of us should have is in the darkest day you get the worst news. How do you take that and help everyone around you say, it's okay. It's okay. This is bad news. And we're not pretending we're not in denial. We are going to be realistic about the situation, but also optimistic about our ability to solve it. I think that's big. Okay, next one. Give people updates when there are no updates.

0:35:20.0 Timothy Clark: Oh, I love this one.

0:35:22.3 Junior: I've been historically bad at this one. I'm trying to get better at this one. Talk to me about this.

0:35:28.7 Timothy Clark: Sure. Okay. So did everybody hear what Junior just said? Give people updates when there are no updates. What we're trying to say. So if you give people updates when there are no updates, what are you doing? You're making the human connection. But you may not have any additional material information to share. Like nothing's changed. There's no, there's no update that I can give you. Okay. But you're making the human connection and you're cutting off the possibility that that vacuum of information will be filled with negative rumors with all kinds of misinformation that could crater morale.

0:36:23.4 Junior: And the probability of that is like a hundred percent.

0:36:27.6 Timothy Clark: It t really will. That that information vacuum will be filled. And if you're not there to guide that process, it won't be filled by you. Yeah. And it will most likely be filled with negative and false and distorted information. That's what happens in an organization.

0:36:46.4 Junior: Well, I think about the times where I've been on that end, where there's something going on or at least you may even think there's something going on and there's not, but you don't have any information. What I've come to realize about myself and other people is that that propensity to fill the vacuum with a negative story is intrinsic. Of course it is. Yeah. We are built to hedge against downside risk way more than we are built to go and try and take advantage of a possibility or an opportunity. We're trying to like, take what's ours and defend it and not lose what's in front of us. And so that's a natural thing. It's not a, I won't call it a bad thing. Obviously there's some liability with it, but it's not, people aren't trying to be bad or mean or hurt anything. It's just human nature. We create stories because we need explanations. That's why. So if we're not getting an explanation, we create the story.

0:37:44.1 Timothy Clark: Junior, let me give an example. It's helpful. So a little while ago we were doing a big project with a client, large scale organizational change. And we're taking the leaders through training in large scale organizational change and transformation. And we're talking about this very principle, provide people updates when there is no update. And we had come in midstream and these leaders said, well, we don't do updates. We're supposed to be giving updates once a week, once every couple of weeks. This is a massive change that's going on. It's actually a merger. Okay. Two tech companies are merging. And I still remember this one leader saying, well, I haven't given any updates for like six weeks, eight weeks. And I said, well, why is that? He said, "Because there's nothing to share." And I said, "You're not getting it, are you?" Yeah. You're, yeah. There's nothing to share, so I'm not talking to anybody. Completely the opposite of what you need to do.

0:39:00.1 Junior: Completely The opposite of what you need to do yet. So reasonable.

0:39:02.8 Timothy Clark: Yeah. So reasonable, so logical. Yeah.

0:39:05.8 Junior: Well, and that's where I've fallen into the trap I think in the past of, well, like there actually is nothing to share. And I don't wanna waste your time 'cause I don't have anything to say. Right. So when there is something to say, I'll let you know. Yes. But I've found that that's not, that's not the best way.

0:39:23.2 Timothy Clark: So what I tried to remind this gentleman of is that you're not a machine. You are a human leading other humans and they have certain social, psychological, emotional needs. And what happens is if there's no update and you don't provide an update, the fear goes up. So the fear is going up. And meanwhile, what are you doing? Nothing. Because you say you don't have any material information to share. Are you not understanding how this works? Yeah. The humans don't do well with that.

0:40:01.3 Junior: Yep. Okay. Update when there is no update, let's go to the last one. Provide air cover in exchange for candor, another effective way to overcome organizational fear. So when, if you look at the incentive structure, if people give you candor and they're punished for it, what are they going to do? It's a disincentive. I'm not gonna give you candor anymore. That's it. Very basically. Alternatively, if I give you candor and I'm praised for it, I'm defended in the giving of that feedback, I will likely give more. So help us understand.

0:40:39.0 Timothy Clark: Even, even if we don't do what you recommended. Oh yeah.

0:40:45.2 Junior: Help me understand air cover.

0:40:48.5 Timothy Clark: Air cover means protection. Air cover means that you're being rewarded as you challenge the status quo. Think about the nature of vulnerability when you are contemplating giving some candid feedback, advice, registering a contrary point of view, that's not easy. You're thinking about all of the potential adverse consequences. So it is a very high stake situation. You need to provide the members of your team the reassurance that they can take on the status quo and be rewarded for doing that. Yeah. If they don't feel that way, right, if they're, the evidence is not there, that they can do that, then they're not going to take on the status quo. And again, you are deprived of the feedback, the input, the advice, the analysis, whatever it was they're going to hold on, not release the discretionary effort and manage personal risk. Yeah.

0:41:53.5 Junior: One note that I wanna make on the air cover, it can't just be local. It can't just be in the context of your own team. That air cover needs to go cross border. So it could be cross-functional air cover, it could be providing air cover up the hierarchy or laterally across a peer group. If you can follow the giver of that feedback and provide the air cover and the reassurance, that also goes a really long way. It's not that, oh yeah, here in this room, you can tell me whatever you want. But if they need to go make a presentation or give a point of view or do something going along and providing some of that reassurance and some of that defense can be really useful as well.

0:42:38.0 Timothy Clark: One other example, Junior, if you encounter any kind of an organization where they say, we are highly siloed here, what is it that leads to the siloing behavior? And do you know what most people's initial response will be? Well, it's just simply the fact that we're a highly structured organization. Look at our organizational chart. We have these, all of these departments, all of these functional areas, all of these teams, and everyone has to do their thing. And so over time we become naturally siloed. That's not true. You become siloed because you're telling each other to stay in your lanes. That's why you're becoming siloed.

0:43:20.6 Timothy Clark: If you did the opposite and you invited people to give you feedback and input in your area of responsibility, you would not become siloed. It is the, it is the pattern of interpersonal behavior that creates siloing. It's not the organizational structure. The structure may not help it, but ultimately it is that mentality of you stay in your lane and I'll stay in my lane. That is not going to fly. As we move further into this century, this, this actually this decade of the 2020s, we cannot afford to do that. Right? We need cross-functional, multidisciplinary, divergent, non-linear thinking, which is preceded by people saying, Hey, come on over into my area. Take a look. What do you think? It's that behavior. It's the invitation, right? It's the invitation to be candid across borders.

0:44:29.2 Junior: So that's number three. Provide air cover in exchange for candor. So let's go all the way back up and summarize. What are we talking about? We're talking about organizational fear. Why is organizational fear so pernicious? Because fear breaks the feedback loop. That is what we're trying to fight against. And if you don't actively fight against it, that's what you're going to get. That feedback loop is going to be broken. The local knowledge is going to stay local and the organization will slowly deteriorate. So in order to fight against that, we have to do three things. Monitor your emotional response to dissent and bad news. Give people updates when there are no updates. And provide air cover in exchange for candor. Those are three things. There are many other things that we could go into. It could be a laundry list of behaviors, and not least we need to manage out those who are being actively toxic. If you do all of those things, you integrate those behaviors into the modeling behavior of your leadership population and you weed the garden, you're gonna be set up for success and things are gonna be a lot better. So as we wrap up, Tim, any final thoughts?

0:45:35.7 Timothy Clark: Invite people into your area of responsibility. Invite candor, reward, candor. Don't break the feedback loop. Love that.

0:45:44.2 Junior: So with that, we'll close up for the day. If you like today's episode, please subscribe. Please leave us a like and comment your favorite part of the episode. We'll see you next time. Bye-Bye.

0:46:02.7 Jillian: Hey, LeaderFactor listeners, it's Jillian. If you liked the content in today's episode, we've compiled all of the concepts and slides into a downloadable resource for you. Click the link in the description or visit leaderfactor.com to explore our full content library. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch you in the next episode.

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