Fear is one of the most effective ways of demotivating employees, yet many managers use it either deliberately or unintentionally, and this can lead to many performance-driven cultures to have widespread fear within them.
As a manager a simple phrase such as “Can we meet to have a catch-up tomorrow?” could inadvertently create uncertainty within your employee.
The field of Neuroscience (the study of the nervous system including the brain) is providing new insights to how to help people thrive, innovate, collaborate and perform at their best. It’s helping us to understand some of the fear and uncertainty employees have is not just psychology but biology.
Work has changed hugely, and it will continue to do so. Work has changed but our brains have not, and this is the challenge we have in organisations. Our brains were not designed for 21st-century corporate life: they still think they are out on the savannah. For our brains, the goal is survival, and they are very good at this, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here today. To survive, our brain needs to do two key things:
· Avoid threats – such as the sabre tooth tiger.
· Seek rewards – such as food and shelter.
Both matter to our brains, but threat is far more important: we can go without shelter, food and even water for a while, but if the tiger gets us, that’s the end of us. So, of the two, the threat response in our brains is far stronger than the reward response.
Our brains are helpless prediction machines. They are constantly, subconsciously, trying to guess what is going to happen to us. They want to be able to predict and make sense of the world. Again, this stems from the brain’s drive to protect us. If the brain can predict what is about to occur, then it is in a better place to guard us and keep us out of harm’s way.
To show how good your brain is at predicting and making sense, take a look at the following paragraph:
“I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae.”
Our brains have learned to predict because, on the whole, prediction is useful to us. Out on the savannah, it was useful to be able to predict that a rustle under some bushes might mean that there is a snake there. Prediction helps us to make decisions, and to make decisions faster, subconsciously. It saves us from having to think long and hard about every issue we are confronted with.
Our brains are prediction machines – they want to predict and make meaning. If they can predict, they are better able to keep us out of harm’s way. Once we have certainty, we can begin to know what the story is, we can make meaning, we can begin to plan.
The ability to predict is not the only reason why our brains like certainty. Being certain removes psychological discomfort. When we are in a familiar and comfortable situation, we are using the neural pathways that have been used many times before – we are on autopilot.
However, when we are uncertain, several areas in a brain become active, in particular those parts of the brain that are part of our fear network. A gap occurs and something that needs to be dealt with before you can feel comfortable again.
As blood flows away from our Pre-Frontal Cortex we cannot think as well or as clearly. The aroused Amygdala means that we become anxious and start to see threats where they don’t even exist. Uncertainty distorts our view of threats and can make them seem even worse. When we are in the midst of uncertainty, we are more likely to expect the worse and this makes uncertainty even more stressful.
The threat response means that we begin to worry, and we begin to think about the adverse possibilities. We speculate and we speculate negatively.
There are longer-term implications of stress too. For our ancestors in the wild, sudden bursts of cortisol (stress hormone) were beneficial because the hormone helped them to survive. Once the predator was no longer a threat, cortisol levels would drop. In the 21st-century we have created work environments where people are frequently under stress and cortisol is constantly in the system. In the long term, cortisol is damaging physically and mentally. It is particularly detrimental to the hippocampus which plays an important part in memory.
So, what can we do to reduce fear and uncertainty in the workplace? As managers we need to consider how we communicate, are we inadvertently putting our employees into a threat state? Using the example, I shared earlier “Can we meet to have a catch-up tomorrow?” can simply be changed to something like “Can we meet tomorrow, as I would like an update on the project you are working on?”
As employees, we can help reduce uncertainty too. The next time we get a request to meet, simply ask “To help me prepare, what will we be discussing?”
It should lead to a more productive workplace and effective meeting!
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