1. Appearances are everything. When employees are preoccupied with staying in the office later in the evening than the boss does, fear is king. When people worry less about the quality of their work than about how they’re perceived by managers higher up the chain, you’ve got fear.
2. Everyone one is talking about who’s rising and who’s falling. When a daily focus of office conversation is the discussion of whose stock is rising and whose is falling in the company’s internal stock index, you’ve got a fear infestation. A preoccupation with status and political capital is a sure sign that stakeholders’ best interests have taken a back seat to me-first, fear-based behaviors.
3. Distrust reigns. Would this be your knife in my back? When your employees have to stop and ask themselves, “Is it safe to tell Marybeth my idea?” you have a fear problem in your organization. Workplaces where people steal one another’s intellectual capital are places where trust is subordinate to fear (if trust exists at all). If your business is one where backstabbers thrive, ditto. In a healthier shop, people would be comfortable rising up in protest against a backstabbing colleague, and the paradigm “I win when you lose” would be quickly nipped in the bud.
Filed under: Climate
