Don't Let Your Inner Fears Limit Your Career

When leaders are controlled by fear – or when they pretend it’s not there – they can be crippled by it and become powerless.

- Matt Brubaker, Foster Mobley

Fear is a natural and universal human phenomenon, affecting top executives as much as anyone else. The majority of management literature is focused on helping leaders conquer their fears. The problem is that stifling fear doesn’t make it go away. Infact, failing to address it can lead to highly unproductive and dysfunctional behaviours.

Through our firm’s work with thousands of executives over 30 years, we have come to believe that unrecognised or unacknowledged core fears are almost always a root cause of professional distress and unattained potential. Yet those fears are not necessarily bad. We have met many leaders who have chosen to understand and learn from their fears, turning them into fuel for performance. If you are willing to take a hard look at your fears and where they’re coming from, you can channel them productively. If, for example, deep down you’re afraid that you don’t measure up (a common executive fear), you can find ways to engage that desire to be your best without driving your team into the ground.

It may be that outside help is in order – an executive coach, a good therapist, supportive family and friends. But there is a lot of work leaders can, and should, do on their own. From our work, we’ve created a four-step process of rigorous self-reflection that countless executives have used to understand their fears and become better leaders.

FEARS

We’ll explain the process and how one leader used it to turn around her career. But before we do, here are the fears we’ve found that most commonly plague executives. These fears are generally tied to personality types as defined by the Enneagram personality model. They are:

- Fear of being wrong