Fear of Termination: Effects on Leadership Style and Decisions

Summary

Fear of termination affects leadership style and decisions. Fear affects our perceptions--of ourselves and others.  Fear affects our interpretations of past and prevent events. Fear affects and drives other emotions.  Fear distorts our thinking and decision-making.  Fear makes us someone other than our normal selves.  In all our relationships at work or at home, fear is to be feared for its harmful effects.  Fear, prolonged and chronic, harms our physical health.   With all this said, fear also can be our ally.

The Economy:
Fact-Based Fear

Fear of termination grows directly in proportion to the U.S. economy's decline, in many industries.  Some organizations thrive in bad times.  For most organizations, our bad economic times mean the quest for survival, trimming expenses, including staffs.  When the economy was strong, leaders usually were last to be cut, if ever.  They were the decision makers.  Now, however, organizational survival itself becomes the guillotine to chop off entire departments and their heads.  Anyone who believes he or she is indispensable needs a mental examination.  Termination is a real possibility for all.

Fear:
HR's Bludgeon in Bad Times

Many owners and HR managers see bad times as their friend. Fear of termination makes for a very quiet, cooperative workplace with higher outputs. Everyone knows the score.  "Break a rule and you're gone, for 1,000 are ready to take your place."  This now also applies to people in leadership positions.  As a result, fear of termination escalates office politics, cutthroat betrayal, and career assassination.  "I'll take out any who might threaten my place."

Fear of termination in a bad economy often becomes an unethical tool for both management and labor.  Bad managers use fear of unemployment to crush legitimate health and safety concerns, and silence complaints about real conditions.  Bad employees are driven by fear of unemployment to misrepresent work output information to favor themselves.  Bad salaried and hourly workers spent hours "creatively" finding ways to make themselves secure, at any cost.

Fear:
Organizational Cancer

Fear creates in us the "fight or flight" response.  In organizational context, fear creates in everyone a dysfunctional and destructive mix.  Emotions surge.  Thinking becomes polluted and distracted.  Speech becomes needlessly aggressive, or artificially sweet.  Behaviors go all over the map.

Reports of all kinds become pawns in a chess game anticipating future disciplinary appeals, or lawsuits.  Misrepresentation, lies, become more common than truth.  This is the "flight" aspect of the fear response.  Unfair or bad treatment, subtle or overt career assassination, alliance-building, become expressions of the "fight" aspect of the fear response.

Nazi concentration camp life showed how fear of termination--death--drove some good Jews to collaborate with Nazi captors; to become cruel overseers; and, to do things to both Jews and Gentiles their Jewish faith forbade.  Fear can make people into monsters, hidden right in any organization.

Leadership Ethics Forum:

Harness and Control Fear

Fear exists.  You know that.  You probably have fear within you.  The wise owner and manager, who values both organization and people, fears uncontrolled fear and harnesses and controls it.
 
The Leadership Ethics Forum is a tool designed and controlled by management to enable:

• confidential, anonymous, safe, non-retaliatory communications
• all employees to share their personal fears--reducing them
• employees with special information on dangerous situations to share that
• research data to reduce fear, increase efficiency and trust in each other

The Leadership Ethics Forum is a third party service.  We keep confidential the identities of all participants. People can share fears and fear-producing situations in safety. The LEF produces relief, gratitude, trust, collaboration, teamwork--and can reveal dangerous conditions for litigation.

Contact us at info@leadershipethicsonline.com.  Send us an email including the following information:  (1) "Leadership Ethics Forum" in the subject line; (2) your name and official responsibilities; (3) context or situation prompting contact; and (4), all contact information.  We will respond promptly to such inquiries.

Parental Influences on Leadership and Subordinate Capacities

Summary

Whatever age we are, we are adults. We think of ourselves as adults. We have been making adult decisions for a long time. There are thousands of signs in our lives we are adults. Our parents may be alive, or one is deceased, or both are gone. Yet there is a real sense in which we forever will be our parents' children. That is, our parents had enormous impacts on how we see ourselves, others, the world--and how we are to relate to ourselves, others, and the world. This also applies to our adult roles as leaders.

Your Childhood "Leader Models":
Mom and Dad

As a dependent child, you first learned how to become a follower. Your first leaders were your parents. By "parents" I mean the adults who invested their love and years of support to get you "raised up." We really need to reflect on those first, central people in our lives as children. Let's assume one of these parents had a more dominant influence.

Some were gentle, nudging and guiding. Some were harsh, pushing and forcing. Some were listeners, asked us to speak, reflected, then responded to what we said. Some were constant talkers, uninterested in our view, told us to shut up and do what we were told.

Make a list of what you remember--good, not so good, and just plain bad--from the first leaders you ever had in your life. Take your time. This exercise may be more meaningful to you than you imagine now.  Some things your parents taught you will need to be kept.  Other things need to be discarded, as soon as possible.

Your Childhood "Follower Skills":
Mom and Dad's Rules and Laws

If your parental leaders encouraged you to take initiative and explore, to "trust yourself," you became a creative follower. If your parental leaders treated you with respect, even as a child, you became a follower with a respectful nature. If your parental leaders bullied you with their sheer size and power, you learned to be a follower who never expresses yourself, who internalizes your thoughts, fears, and resentments.

Even as a leader, you must report to your supervisor as a subordinate follower. Many of your earliest skills learned as a child will reappear in your follower-style, for good or ill.

Parental Influences:
Powerful at Any Age

We may have leadership libraries with hundreds of books. We may have degrees and certificates on our walls as proofs of our intellectual education and training. We may hold high positions in the organization where we are now, and be highly compensated for it.

Nevertheless, our first adult leaders were our first role models--we lived with every day and night for years--of "what to do or not to do when in charge." For most of us, we have mixed memories, and a mixed assessment of their leadership. They also were the first ones to mold our behaviors to their expectations, and for their approval or disapproval.

Never underestimate, when you look at all your adult achievements on the wall, your parents' lifelong influence on you as a leader and follower. Whether they are living or dead now, you "graduated" from their school of leadership. The really adult, reflective leader (and follower):

• grasps this fundamental truth
• uses this truth to discover the positive and negative "leader-follower" principles deep within
• works to develop the good principles, and to be aware when the bad principles emerge "from nowhere" (within)
• accepts that to be an adult leader also means growing and developing beyond our parental examples, for the sake of our families, friends, and coworkers

Leadership Ethics Forum:

Speaking Your Inner Thoughts 

Would it not be a wonderful exercise for you to have the privilege of a private and confidential, guided and non-judgmental reflection on:

• your parents' examples as leaders (and as followers of others)?
• your parents' effects on you as leader and follower?
• your challenges today as a leader and follower in the light of these things?

You can do this through your own Leadership Ethics Forum.  Yet, if you have the authority to recommend or make it happen, your entire organization also can benefit from this, the very same way.

• private and confidential
• guided and non-judgmental 

Contact us at info@leadershipethicsonline.com, and put "Leadership Ethics Forum" in the subject line.  Inquiries including (1) name, (2) official title/responsibilities, (3) factual basis for interest, and (4) contact information--email and direct phone access--will receive prompt attention.