Middle Way Management and Fear

In my last post, I considered how boundaries create respectful fences that help us develop healthy self-compassion and reduce overcommitment and other behaviors that can lead us into stressful situations. In this post, I discuss how fear as conscious and unconscious process acts as an inhibitor of creativity and innovation in the workplace.

The Only Thing to Fear is...
Fear is an emotion we must all deal with on a daily basis. While this may strike you as a bold statement, it is true: we experience fear and engage in fear reactions many times throughout our busy days. In fact, fear and the fear response are fundamental parts of what it means to be human. Without fear, we would rush into situations that compromise our integrity, our relationships, and, at worst, our physical well-being; on the other hand, it can lead to debilitating emotion and reactive behaviors that stop our progress dead in its tracks.

Fear is our greatest gift, and our greatest curse.

Fear is created in several ways. The first and most obvious is the result of an overt physical threat that sends the heart racing and the brain looking for a way out or a way to fight back. This is the classic "fight or flight" response that pulses adrenaline throughout the body, changing our physiology in significant ways. As a manager, you can experience this in the workplace as a reaction to a non-physical business situation involving a boss, a peer, a customer, a team member - just about anyone with whom you interact can push you into a fear reaction.

The second way fear is created is through our own thoughts. We can run "what-ifs" and "coulda-woulda-shoulda" scenarios on the movie screens of our minds, creating fear that is as real as any created by external sources. This can occur in the workplace as a manager considers the potential ramifications of a tough decision that might affect his own position within the organization. This sort of scenario often results in "analysis paralysis" or ends up prompting either hasty or overly cautious decisions that do not reflect the manager's true decision-making skill or personal ethics; a poor outcome, indeed.

Finally, a leader-manager has many opportunities throughout the day to create fear. Attending to one's language and understanding how one's words can land on another are crucial parts of an effective Middle Way Management™ practice. Along with this, subtle body language cues can create the type of fear that results in damage to team morale or the destruction of a business relationship (explained in greater detail below). The true Middle Way Managemer™ neither creates nor promotes fear in any form.

Regardless of how the emotion of fear is created in one's mind, it is real and we are geared as a species to react to it in very specific ways based upon brain function and neurochemistry that are the results of millennia of natural selection and evolutionary refinement of homo sapiens.

This is Your Brain on Fear
In the classical systems theory sense, the brain really is more than the sum of its parts. Pull out one component and others will surely fail, as well. We see evidence of this in people who suffer serious brain trauma. Along these lines, specific parts of the brain are implicated in the creation of and reaction to fear. When those parts are damaged or in some way incapacitated, fear can be emphasized or displaced depending on the injury. Likewise, a malfunctioning part of the brain that works with another to encode memories important for self-preservation based upon the fear response can inhibit such activity, compromising a person's personal safety.

Fortunately, most of us never experience such injuries and our fear functions remain fully intact and operational for the duration of our lives. Implicated in the creation of the fear emotion and responses are several key parts of the brain; specifically, the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex, thalamus, hippocampus and other structures (don't worry - no more brain terms will be forthcoming). The point here is that the human brain is wired to detect and react to fearful situations, even when they are created within our own minds based upon nothing more than thoughts (which are, by the way, things).

A recognition of the role of the nearly autonomic response to fear by the human brain is necessary because serious implications exist for how you deliver your daily Middle Way Management practice in light of fear's impact upon human behaviors. Two example illustrate this point nicely. First, we have evidence from neuroscientific studies that body language can induce the fear response (via the amygdala's ability to catch such signals). Based upon this, the Middle Way Manager must not only attend to language, every subtlety of every interaction must become a matter for utmost concern.

Second, we have evidence, also from neuroscientific studies, that communication between the two hemispheres of the brain via the corpus callosum (the thick, fibrous material that connects them) is inhibited as part of the fear response. This means the necessary functional components of creativity and logic are seriously hampered, thereby stifling the processes so necessary for people to provide the innovation that is a critical part of any vibrant organizational culture.

Interventions or Remedies?
In psychological terms, a solution designed to remedy fear is called an "intervention". I will not make suggestions for interventions in the post, saving them for my next submission. My point here is that there are interventions that a Middle Way Manager can include in her practice to mitigate the perceptions of and reactions to fear in the workplace. It is not always possible to avoid fear incidents, yet it most certainly is possible to practice the sort of mindfulness that allows us to recognize potential fear-inducing situations and to react to them with equanimity, patience, kindness, and compassion, all hallmarks of the true Middle Way Manager.  More to come on this topic in my next post.

Go now, and manage with compassion!

Onward! Darin

Copyright © 2009-2012, Darin R. Molnar, PhD. All rights reserved.