Leading Boldly

Irrational fears can keep high-potential people from moving up the management ranks. Simple coping strategies can help them break through.

Many managers can relate to Joe, a middle manager who consistently receives great performance reviews. He’s motivated and hard-working, and also a quick study. He’s primed to move up to the next level, yet he’s always passed over for promotions.

That’s because along with his many fine attributes, Joe has subpar interpersonal skills. He doesn’t collaborate well with fellow employees, often cuts off colleagues when they’re speaking, and gets angry and emotional in periods of high stress.

So what should management do with Joe? He’s too valuable to jettison, yet too volatile to promote. Rather than squander his talent or lose his knowledge and skills to another employer, Bruce E. Roselle suggests an alternate route: Help Joe confront the underlying fears that keep sabotaging his potential as a leader.

As founder and owner of Roselle Leadership Strategies Inc. in Minneapolis, Minn., Roselle has met and coached a lot of Joes in the past 25 years.

Three fears

“In most cases, the behavior boils down to three underlying, irrational fears,” says Roselle, author of Fearless Leadership: Conquering Your Fears and the Lies That Drive Them. “When employees connect with those fears, it results in behavior that undermines their effectiveness.”

For example, Joe may feel uncertain whether people like him, and that puts him into an over-protective, lash-out mode. He may also fear being perceived as a B player — undervalued. The third fear is that he will get hurt, or hurt someone else — emotionally, financially or physically.

The first step in coaching these talented-yet-troublesome employees is getting them to understand what pushes their buttons. “That’s where we start, by examining why they get agitated, tense or angry,” Roselle says. “We draw from cognitive behavioral psychology, which says what you think determines how you behave. You don’t react randomly. It’s driven by thought process and emotions.”

People like Joe typically receive physiological cues — a tight throat, a racing pulse or sweaty palms — that tell them when things are headed south. “Your body tells you you’re nervous, but it doesn’t tell you what to do,” Roselle says. “That’s when your beliefs set in and tell you what to do in that situation.

“Maybe you feel like you can’t make a mistake, so you get very cautious. Or you need to prove that you’re right, so you go out of your way to rationalize and explain, or you get defensive because you feel you must prove your worth and validity.” Other reactions may include indecision, unrealistic perfectionism, resistance to other peoples’ ideas, pessimism, and lack of motivation.

Time for a reboot

After Joe recognizes and accepts his irrational fears, it’s time to teach him how to handle them when they arise. “Overcoming this is very similar to rebooting a computer when it’s frozen,” Roselle says. “In that moment, the reason the computer freezes is not because you just lost your motherboard, it’s just overwhelmed.

“The brain is very much like this computer when it feels irrational fear. The cortex — or the problem-solving part of the brain — becomes less involved, and the lower part, which controls the fight-or-flight syndrome, takes over.”

The first step is to recognize the situations that trigger the fears. Maybe it’s public speaking, a big meeting with a boss and peers, or the person’s belief that a colleague is trying to undermine him, Roselle says. Once someone like Joe is aware of the catalysts that provoke the fears, he can be prepared to deal with them.

To do so, Joe needs to practice responding with a healthy counter-belief. For example, if the common fear is looking incompetent, Joe can react by teaching himself to keep things in perspective.

“You can do this by introducing a conscious, rational question about this irrational fear,” Roselle says. “For example, ask yourself, how big a deal is this really? Or what is the worst thing that could happen? In most cases, it’s not a life-or-death situation. You can bring yourself back down to reality by asking yourself those questions.

“Over the years, I’ve seen that when people pop an issue to the top of their brain, they become more effective. They can even share their fear with a group to loosen things up. You need to give yourself some perspective. What happens when people begin to make this shift is very powerful. People literally change their perception of you.

“The trick is that fears never go away, but they can become less and less powerful. Recognizing your faulty beliefs is a powerful revelation.”

Introspection is critical

How quickly people master their fears varies from case to case. Mostly, it depends on how much insight people like Joe have about themselves and how much they work on it. “Most people can make dramatic changes in three months,” Roselle says. A typical problem is that Joe’s colleagues don’t believe the changes in his newfound behavior are real. Instead, they just figure it’s something he’s “trying on.”

But they become more and more convinced when they consistently see Joe reacting differently in situations that used to trigger negative reactions. Overall, they’ll see Joe assume the attributes of a high-performing manager: someone who’s decisive, optimistic, focused, collaborative, thoughtful and a good listener. In short, someone who’s ready to lead at the next level.



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.