Understanding fear can govern decision making and make you a more empathetic leader

Fear is a natural human response. Fear is healthy. It harbours you and guides you. Encapsulating this emotion can enable you to become an effective leader and highly emotive.

It’s understandable to assume that fear is always negative. Fear can be an enabler as well as a blocker. It can protect and also restrict. Fear is not one dimensional, it’s a complex emotion, which when recognised can be a powerful tool in decision making and unlocking a teams potential.

Fear is a natural human response. This is very important to understand.

Fear can and should genuinely protect you. For example, throughout the Covid pandemic, a lot of people have been scared to encounter previously ‘normal’ aspects of their lives through the fear of transmission and everything that comes along with that such as ill-health and protecting the NHS.

Fear can block opportunity and overrule rationality. When I was a Junior Software Engineer, I had an interview booked for a well-known Stockbroker. When I first landed the interview, I was overjoyed, it would mean I got to work in London, had great pay, benefits, and came with some great training opportunities. As the interview grew closer, I was becoming less excited every day and looking for a way out. I would crawl the job spec, the career website and glassdoor every 30 minutes looking for anything that would put me off the role and make me cancel the interview. Just as I was about to cancel and give the recruiter an awful excuse they had likely heard ten times that week, I recognised that it was fear holding me back. It wasn’t me making that phone call, it was fear. When I looked deeper, I learnt it was anxiety over not being good enough and feared being rejected based on the result of a technical test. I used this fear to guide my decision to focus on increased learning and revision. I got the job and it turned out to be one of the greatest opportunities of my career.

During my small time in leadership, I have come to learn that being worried you don’t measure up technically is more common amongst Software Engineers than I realised. This is only one example of a lesson learned through understanding fear.

When you are opposed to an idea or feeling uncertain about a decision/opportunity, look at the data available and gauge if it’s fear leading this response, or a rational outlook. Is it a fear of the unknown and an unrelenting tie to the present holding you and your team back? Once you have established that fear is at play, it’s important to understand that fear can be healthy, it can and should protect you. If the fear is not protecting you and it’s standing in the way of an opportunity to learn, grow, or adapt; that thought pattern and energy can be used to drive the response to that fear and propel you into that opportunity.

Once you have learnt fear governs a certain path, you will never forget how to unlock that gate. Every time you need to walk a similar path in the future you will be guided by the knowledge you gained in your previous encounter, you will have wisdom.

As technology leaders, we must guide our team to embrace fear and with that the unknown. Our role is to provide them with the mechanisms and guide rails to steer them to safety.