August 23, 2011
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FedEx Global Brand Management Director Monica Skipper shares a cost-effective way to build a bigger brand for your small business.
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The recent media hype around the possible "double dip recession" isn't exactly helping anyone feel less anxious about the future. In some businesses, the fear is palpable. In fact, Gallup found that 50 percent (50 percent!) of American workers feel like prisoners in their own company. Regardless of industry, company size, job level or function, a vast number of business people feel caught in a tide and powerless to do anything about it. The resulting cost to organizations—in productivity, profits and customer engagement—is exorbitant.
In his new book Breaking the Fear Barrier: How Fear Destroys Companies From The Inside Out and What To Do About It, Gallup's Tom Rieger draws on deep research to show how and why fear destroys companies and explains how to transform a fear-plagued organization into one that is courageous and unstoppable.
Rieger led the Gallup effort to examine numerous companies (across a dozen countries and six continents) that had, in their own words, “become stuck.” In these companies, the story was the same. Strategically, they were doing everything right, but something—a “barrier”—was getting in the way. No matter what these companies tried, no matter what they did, they just couldn't stop a slow downward slide. “It was like watching the same movie over and over again,” writes Rieger.
Given the uncanny similarities, Rieger began documenting and studying the barriers in each company. His team dug into policies and procedures and interviewed people at various levels in the organizations. Their research spanned different industries, functions and job types in both the public and private sectors and uncovered one overarching factor: “What we found was that ultimately, fear leads companies to self-destruct,” says Rieger.
With fear identified as the culprit, Rieger turned to the psychology of loss for the insight on which Breaking the Fear Barrier rests: a company's worst enemy is not always the competition, sometime's it's the fear that lives within its own walls.
Big idea:
Fear, specifically fear of loss, leads people to protect their entitlements, even if it clearly harms the overall organization. The best way to protect what’s yours—whether it’s a position of power, budget or headcount—is to put barriers around it. It’s human nature. And while those walls may shelter one person or group, they leave others in the organization out in the cold.
Key takeaways:
Rieger identifies a three-tier pyramid of responses to fear, each level of which creates bureacracy, which in turn limits success, crushes employee engagement and infuses a sense of futility across an organization:
Parochialism
Parochialism is the tendency to force others to view the world from only one perspective or through a narrow filter, when local needs and goals are viewed as more important than broader objectives and outcomes. In a company, people create functional silos by instituting protective policies and rules. They define success locally rather than organizationally.
Territorialism
Territorialism is hoarding or micromanaging internal headcount, resources or decision authority. Driven by fear of losing control over resources to other departments, territorial workers seek to maintain absolute control over the people and resources in their department.
Empire building
Empire building manifests itself as attempts to assert control over people, functions or resources in an effort to regain or enhance self-sufficiency. Often a defensive response to the territorialism of another department, people attempt to regain or enhance their self-sufficiency by increasing their span of control and building an empire.
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These may seem like insurmountable obstacles, but Rieger maintains that because these barriers were built internally, they can be destroyed internally. He offers solid tactics for how anyone can root out fear in their organizations and establish a culture of confidence, engagement, and long-term success.
Take the bureaucracy of territorialism, for example. Rieger advises that because territorialism is about maintaining control over people and resources inside a silo, overcoming it involves determining what people within that silo are—or more importantly are not—empowered to do and how they are held accountable. Territorial managers use control to limit employees’ empowerment, including taking away or restricting freedom to make decisions, time, training, access to information, employee participation and innovation, or managerial support. If the issue is time, make sure that the most important work takes priority over simply urgent or administrative tasks. If someone is hoarding information or resources, bring in a third party to determine information rights by need. The goal is to allow people to succeed and to hold them accountable for the overall success of the organization.
Best for...
Those who find themselves scratching their heads over why company performance has stalled when all the trappings of a successful business appear to be correct and aligned can use Breaking the Fear Barrier to dig below the surface, diagnose and cure the crippling yet often invisible emotional element of fear in the workplace.
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