A little bit of fear is good in the workplace

Get out there and win

Today, we are in the 4th day of the war with Hamas.

Israelis at the Gaza border are going through a massive moment of fear -  the fight or flight response.

The story of Inbal Lieberman

The first day of the Hamas attack, many Israelis under attack fled for their lives.  They had no choice.

Many others fought. 

Inbal Lieberman fought.

Inbal Lieberman was the security lead at Kibbutz Nir Am.   

The morning of October 7, Inbal assessed the threat and quickly distributed weapons to a rapid response team on the kibbutz.

She ran from house to house and had the kibbutz members lock themselves in. She deployed the response team in ambushes along the kibbutz security fence..

All the Hamas terrorists  who tried to break into the kibbutz were killed. Twenty-five terrorist bodies were later counted at the fence.

In the workplace, fear can destroy an organization or motivate it to survival and phenomenal success like Inbal and her rapid response  team.

Intel - Only the paranoid survive

One spring afternoon in 1968, Gordon Moore dropped by Bob Noyce’s house, where Bob was mowing the lawn. In the course of their conversation that day, Moore suggested that semiconductor memory, an emerging technology, might form the basis of a new company.

Shortly thereafter, on July 18, 1968, the two men incorporated a venture that would later be called Intel. Almost immediately, Andy Grove joined them, and the three men together formed the leadership of the company that has produced technological innovations that have created new industries and forever altered the way we live.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his book “ Only the paranoid survive”,  that a particular kind of fear can play a productive role in organizational life--the fear of losing:

The quality guru W. Edwards Deming advocated stamping out fear in corporations. I have trouble with the simplemindedness of this dictum. The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. 

Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.

How do we cultivate fear of losing in our employees? We can only do that if we feel it ourselves. If we fear that someday, any day, some development somewhere in our environment will change the rules of the game, our associates will sense and share that dread. They will be on the lookout...

Simply put, fear can be the opposite of complacency. Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been most successful. It is often found in companies that have honed the sort of skills that are perfect for their environment. But when their environment changes, these companies may be the slowest to respond properly. A good dose of fear of losing may help sharpen their survival instincts. [1]

Leadership and ownership

Hundreds of books and articles have been written about ownership and business leadership.

Most of this popular business literature has turned into a kind of lip service to a culture in America, where managers get bonuses and employees get fired.

In reaction to this strange double-valued culture, Willink and Babin’s book Extreme Ownership [2] has turned into a best-selling book and a sort of popular movement.  

I hope that the thousands of people who read the book and took the courses use EO well in their daily lives.  Maybe the EO movement will help us reduce the amount of marketing gobbledy we need to deal with.

In EO (Extreme Ownership), the leader owns the results of the team mission.  He needs to make sure that the team knows what the mission is, and why the mission is being executed.  He needs to assure proper training and tools and high performance.  Under-performers will not be part of the team.  If the mission fails - it’s the failure of the team leader, not the situation, not the weather, not the lack of accurate intelligence.

In fact, Grove, Noyce and Moore engraved leadership and ownership as a central tenet of Intel culture - long before Babin was in the US Navy Seals.

The story of American Airlines and Southwest

Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer examined the role of ownership in business units in his book Hidden value - how great companies achieve extraordinary results with ordinary people.[3]

Pfeffer compared the performance of American Airlines and Southwest in the mid 90s.

At the time, American Airlines CEO, Robert Crandall, insisted that delays come to his attention and that the delays get assigned to individuals and departments, so they would be accountable for their results.

At Southwest Airlines, the view was that delays were everyone's problem and when they occurred, teams needed to work together to learn and improve performance.

American Airlines created a culture of fear and infighting as managers and employees spent their time finger-pointing and avoiding ownership. Fear of bad reviews resulted in poor performance for the entire company.

Southwest created a culture of leadership, ownership and continuous performance improvement.

The supply chain of customers and suppliers in workplace teams

Let’s take the discussion of fear a bit deeper and  into the individual team member.

I worked at Intel for 7 years. Another key piece of Intel culture is the notion that there is an internal supply chain of customers and suppliers.   I was the Israel site telecom manager.  The IDC (Israel Design Center) was my customer for WAN and LAN; hardware, software and network capacity.

In sales and customer service (whether an internal or external customer), there are times where you are afraid.  Afraid of an aggressive customer, a passive-aggressive customer or a customer who just happens to be a jerk and make you want to shoot him.

What - you’ve never been afraid of a customer?

Over the years, I’ve been blessed with many very fine customers and far fewer jerks.

How do we deal with red-flagged customers who set off your fear-fight-flight response?

Fundamental Attribution Error is our (erroneous) tendency to assume that a customer’s actions are primarily influenced by their character or personality traits. Their behavior, on the other hand, is driven by the situation.

In fact, a person's actions are created by their problem and their behavior is created by their personal wiring.

Some customers have analytical personalities and are results-oriented. (Just like you).

They will roll up their sleeves and work with you to solve their problems.  Then they will fire you.

Other customers are wired to call their lawyers and threaten you.   They don’t really want to be accountable - they want someone else (you and their lawyers) to solve their problems.

You need to cleanly separate the problem (actions) from the person (behaviors).

Your customer has their internal drama, personal life, pressures, goals and interactions which have absolutely nothing to do with the problem in your software.

You don’t need to be afraid or judge customers. You need to solve their problem.

Your customers’ personal drama is their own. Not yours. It has nothing to do with you.

With this understanding, you can go up to 20,000’, observe the tactical situation and make a decision based on the data, not on your amygdala’s chemical response.

This holds true for team leaders and team operators.  It holds true in particular when you are a solo team of CEO, leader, and operator all rolled into one.

A requires awareness and practice. Once you get it, it feels great not to be afraid of customers.

Awareness and rapid response teams

We started with the story of Inbal Lieberman (no relation to me btw).  

Fear is the opposite of complacency for people like Inbal. It motivates them to be finely aware of change.  It enables us to sense when the environment has changed (Hamas attacking) and respond properly and rapidly.

I am convinced that this ability of leaders and team operators to sense change in the environment is the key to surviving in this amazing time of political turmoil and technology revolution with AI.

Once we are aware of change, we can move quickly to survive.

As Andy Grove wrote 24 years ago - Only the paranoid survive.

[1] Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, pages 117-118 (Andy Grove, 1999)

[2] Extreme Ownership, How US Navy Seals lead and win, Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

[3] Hidden value - how great companies achieve extraordinary results with ordinary people. Pfeffer