When Fear Became a Performance Conversation

Last week, I delivered “Leading in the Presence of Fear” to a group of senior business leaders. I wanted to share an interesting observation.

The organisation is in the middle of a significant push towards AI implementation, and they’ve been, by their own admission, a historically stuffy workplace where day-to-day work hasn’t changed much for a long time. The introduction of AI experimentation across the business has unsettled people at every level, and the leadership team wanted to explore how they could lead more effectively through the uncertainty that comes with such an organisational shift.

The room, which included HR, Operations, and IT leaders, landed straight on a question of moral, ethical, and legal obligation; whether the organisation had a duty to actively combat fear in the workplace. It was a rich conversation, with good points made about intent versus reality, and about whether effort spent reducing fear is wasted if fear can never be fully eradicated or whether that resource might be better deployed elsewhere. The whole premise of the workshop is that fear will always exist, and that banishing it entirely is a fairy tale, so the question had real teeth to it.

What nobody was talking about, though, was performance. The entire discussion had been framed around wellbeing and how people felt about work-life balance, around doing right by people. All of which matters, of course, but none of which was getting the leadership team any closer to action.

When I pivoted the conversation back towards fear as a performance factor, suddenly, every function in the room could get its hands around the problem. Fear wasn’t just an HR issue anymore; it was something every function could see affecting its own domain, and the whole leadership team could see impacting the organisation’s ability to get what it needed from its people. We were careful to stress that framing fear as a performance factor doesn’t come at the expense of people’s wellbeing; anything taken to an extreme is dangerous, and caring about performance and caring about people are not in competition with one another. But the performance lens gave the team a shared language and a reason to act together rather than in silos.

By the end of the session, the leadership team had defined several initial experiments they plan to conduct to explore how they can better lead in the presence of fear. They didn’t leave as magically better leaders, because that isn’t how development works, regardless of how often we pretend otherwise. They left with ideas they’d shaped themselves, things they will now test and shape over time.

I keep noticing this pattern: fear in the workplace gets relegated to wellbeing conversations when it should be discussed as a performance conversation. Once we make that shift, it stops being one function’s problem and becomes a cross-functional priority that the whole leadership team can own.