As Sporty has noted in the post above, Fear comes in many forms and from many sources. Fear retards the ability to create Flow in an organization, reduces internal motivation, and creates distrust amongst many other unwanted outcomes. When reading energy’s post, I can’t help but make a very similar connection in the organization I work for. I suppose many of you can do the same.
As Dr. Deming points out in his books, in most organizations you can’t bring the boss anything but good news in fear of some form of reprisal. Reprisal may not be immediate either. It may come much later in the ill-fated concept of “performance review”. Not only can it come later, it often is repeated, the indelible stink of a bad outcome one can’t shed. The only lessoned learned: don’t do that again!! If we are not allowed to learn from our failures, how will we avoid such pitfalls in the future?
When fear is rampant in an organization, it is my belief that cooperation, challenge, and choice are abandoned. When we look at the ritual of performance review, fear of a bad grade interferes with the work necessary to bring excellence to the workplace. To get a good grade, we ‘choose’ projects and tasks that have low risk and a high probability of success. ‘Challenge’ is replaced by work of less meaning, or no meaning, so that we can reign supreme. Supreme over what! Each other? How will we ‘cooperate’ with one another if we are competing against one another?
When we use rating systems for people, we invariably create competition in our organizations. Fear of lost promotions, lower raises, and in general, lower status interpersonally stifle: communication, creativity, cooperation, challenge, and choice (lots of Cs there). Fear of retribution will instill an attitude of “playing it safe.” Who could blame a person? The game becomes one of survival.
When reading energy’s post and relating it to my own experience, I wonder if the same feelings are felt (energy, your back up in a minute). Here, we had a VP of Operations, very sharp and energetic. It is hard not to admire this quality. However, his people skills were also limited. Short with folks when they didn’t think his way and always second-guessed. It wasn’t uncommon to give direction only to see the opposite done because the person who asked you for it, asked him later. Make a mistake: here about it and often with folks present. Later, the nice apology but the damage was done. Who wants to make a decision if it will be second-guessed as ‘public record’ or overturned without your consultation? I term this: Learned Helplessness. What an ugly condition to be reduced to a puppet. Motivation: vanquished! Sadly, an unmotivated employee is as likely to be fired as one who continually makes ‘mistakes’ (or so they are called as folks ignore the fact that the System is mostly responsible for the problems). Fear grows from many directions: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Well, I should turn this back to the group before I run on for a while.
Regards,
Kevin
p.s. I found the sole picture I had of myself on my computer here and used it as the Avitar. Thanks for getting me my first one though!!