Fear-Based Leadership Doesn’t Work: Why Not, and What To Do About It

Last week started with two very similar conversations with two different Leadership Coaching clients. Both showed up seeking support navigating fear-based leadership - which was having a significantly destructive effect on (both their own and their teams’) morale, productivity, and overall performance.

Fear-based leadership and motivation techniques are extremely prevalent across the corporate world, particularly following the twin stressors of a global pandemic and a struggling economy. In fact:

“a large portion of American workers—56 percent—claim their boss is mildly or highly toxic, while 75 percent say dealing with their manager is the most stressful part of their workday.” (McKinsey & Company, 2022)

Because this issue has been coming up more and more across my client roster (and within my corporate programs), I decided to write something to help folks understand and address it.

This article includes:

• the two real-world scenarios that inspired this piece,

• what fear-based motivation looks like,

• why it doesn’t work,

• and practical, brain-based strategies to combat it.

Real-world examples:

Client 1: A Client Solutions Manager at a global media and advertising company

In the first situation, organizational leadership is preparing for a annual shareholders meeting, and - in their efforts to “trim the fat” prior to finalizing the earnings report - doing a very messy, non-transparent job of communicating both the purpose and process of ongoing employee assessments. 

Employees are being put in the position of defending their jobs monthly, without a clear understanding of why these constant performance assessments are being required, how to use the frequently-changed assessment platforms, or what criteria is being used to measure their performance - all while still being expected to accomplish their regular, daily work.  
Unsurprisingly, this has cultivated an environment in which everyone is anxious or pissed off, and both performance and productivity are suffering. It’s hard to simultaneously perform at a high level AND continuously defend your job against unknown future threats. 

My client explained:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about how I don’t want to live like this. It would be one thing if these assessments were consistent and measured your actual performance. But the criteria changes every time, so it’s unclear how to demonstrate your progress and performance. How can you do your best if you don't know how “best” is being evaluated, or how the decisions about layoffs or promotions are actually being made?”

Client 2: A Senior Product Manager at a global tech company

In the second situation, a new senior director has been brute-forcing organizational progress through a spectacularly ineffective combination of “emotion is a weakness” and “your motivation is getting to keep your job.” This shame and fear-based approach to leadership is having a tangibly negative effect on everyone under his purview.

According to my client, intra-organization communication has become difficult - if not impossible - since the new senior director arrived. 

In his words:

“We’ve always approached risk from a sooner-flagged, sooner-solved perspective, and before [the new SM arrived], our product developers were great at bringing potential risks to management attention the minute they noticed an issue. They understood that the earlier we were aware of a potential risk, the more we were able to plan for, solve for, or avoid them entirely. Now, developers aren’t flagging risks until they absolutely have to, because they’re afraid of getting blamed. Fear has become pervasive throughout the whole organization.”

In choosing to drive progress by threatening professional shame and employees’ literal livelihoods, the new SD has created an environment in which everyone is afraid to make mistakes. This is deadly anywhere, but particularly in product development and management, where “mistakes” look an awful lot like “iterations”.  

Good outcomes always come from iteration, in nearly every personal and professional area: inventions aren’t perfected the first day someone tinkers with the idea in their parents’ garage; top 40 hits aren’t composed in one go, by one person; we aren’t born with amazing communication or leadership skills.  

As a result of this fear-based approach, folks in my client’s organization have begun expecting themselves to do everything “perfectly” the first time - and stopped sharing ideas and challenges along the way. Not only is it impossible for a product to be perfect before it hits the market and is experienced by real users - really good products come from open, transparent, growthful collaboration - not from self-protective silos. 

What “fear-based leadership” looks like:

A critical aspect of leadership is a leader’s ability to effectively motivate their people, so this article is going to focus on fear-based motivation.

Fear-based motivation occurs when someone leverages negative incentives to drive action in others. Negative incentives are a fear-based technique supervisors use to motivate their employees to perform productively in order to avoid a negative repercussion. In other words, they’re using fear to get you to do something. 

I frequently refer to the SCARF Model to help clients identify fear-based motivation and support them in reducing their / company’s use of negative incentives. 

SCARF is “a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others” developed by Dr. David Rock, of the Neuroleadership Institute, and it describes five distinct reward/threat domains that influence how psychologically safe we feel around others.   

Fear-based motivation leverages negative incentives by threatening loss of:

STATUS:

Our sense of personal worth—where we are in relation to other people.

Example: “Anyone who wants to be considered for the next round of promotions needs to be doing overtime, no complaints.”

CERTAINTY:

How certain we are about what the future holds for us.

Example: “[Company Name] will be laying off 6% of its workforce over the next three months, so I recommend putting your nose to the grindstone if you don’t want to lose your job.”

AUTONOMY 

How much control we feel like we have over our personal and professional lives.

Example: “We don’t generally publish the annual evaluation criteria until review week; we want our employees to strive for excellence in every area.”

RELATEDNESS 

How safe and connected we feel with others.

Example: “Listen, I know you have a lot going on in your personal life. I feel for you. I just don’t want you to end up like [employee who was recently terminated as a result of similar issues].” 

FAIRNESS

Our sense of what is impartial and just.

Example: “I don’t care if you got those vacation days approved months ago. This is for an important client, so I’m going to need you to shut up, show up, and STEP up.”

Why fear-based motivation doesn’t work:

When you use negative incentives, you activate temporary bursts of heightened productivity or compliance by putting people in a threat state. From the brain-based perspective, this fear-based motivation provokes a negative emotional response, causing your body to produce cortisol (the “stress hormone”), adrenaline (to give you a burst of energy, so you can escape a threat), and other threat-response hormones.

All “negative” emotions - such as shame, guilt, jealousy, anger, sadness, insecurity, frustration, etc. - are forms of fear, and fear’s biological role is to bring perceived threats to our conscious attention. 

Forms of fear likely to trigger a threat state include:

• Shame: a fear that you aren’t good enough to be worthy of belonging, love, or success. This is the most pervasive type of fear, and the emotion most commonly leveraged in fear-based leadership and motivation techniques. 

• Insecurity: closely related to shame, a fear that you are not “enough” (physically, intellectually, or emotionally) to be secure in your social and/or professional placement. 

• Jealousy/Envy: a fear that you aren’t enough (again - noticing a pattern?), specifically in comparison to someone else; a fear that you will never have what you perceive others to have.

• Explore more examples following the main article, below.

This is a problem for several reasons:

1. It limits your ability to access your Prefrontal Cortex, and therefore to all executive functions. 

Executive functions include: social-relational ability (your ability to read people and get along), decision-making and future projection (your ability to weigh variables, project potential rewards/risks, and plan accordingly), impulse control, and much more. 

So fear-based motivation might prompt people to work faster, or more, but they are certainly not working smarter or more effectively. High performance can result from certain types of constructive pressure (such as healthy competition), but sustainably high performance is unlikely to result from anything that’s making people genuinely afraid or anxious. 

2. Shame shuts us down.

We’re social creatures at cellular level (to the extent that isolation is as physically damaging as 15 cigarettes/day), and are therefore most afraid of isolation - of not belonging. In other words, they boil down to shame. 

Of all forms of fear, shame is the emotion most likely to result in self-isolation. It’s also the biggest cognitive time-suck. 

Why? Think of it like this: the more cognitive energy we spend on being afraid of not being good enough, the less cognitive energy (ability to think) we have to dedicate to anything else. Shame makes it biologically harder to think.

And it turns out that thinking and being connected are pretty essential to running a successful business.

How to combat this destructive approach: 

Here are some practical tips and approaches that will help you limit the negative impact fear-based motivation has on you and your team.

Get Connected

Focus on connecting and building trust with your team. If your team feels a sense of “we’re in it together”, and “my manager knows and trusts me”, that will significantly increase psychological safety by (1) reducing feelings of shame, (2) amplifying feelings of relatedness, and (3) freeing up cognitive resources.  

Trust-Building Tips:

• Make time to connect with your colleagues as individuals. The most imperative time to cultivate connection is when you’re stressed or have an intense workload. Connection helps us regulate our nervous systems, retain access to our prefrontal cortex (PFC), and collaborate more effectively. 

• Normalize making mistakes as part of the process. Remember - innovation is iterative. “Learning what doesn’t work” is not the same as “F***ing up”. 

• Practice what author Kim Scott calls “Radical Candor”, or the art of “being a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity.” Radical candor starts with genuinely caring about your team - a practice which includes (not is not limited to) being honest with them about their growth areas. 

• Communication is not conflict. Practice being honest with each other when things are hard, and you’ll notice an immediate boost in relatedness.

• When communicating about change, make sure your messaging is clear, transparent, frequent, and open to feedback. 
  

Reduce Fear:

IN YOURSELF:

• Make sure your body is resourced. Our ability to regulate our emotional responses is highly dependent on whether our ‘car’ (brain-body machine) has any ‘gas’ (glucose, oxygen, etc).

  • Examples: Eat regularly, stay hydrated, try to get more sleep.

• Schedule the work you’re being negatively incentivized to do when you’re most energized.

  • Example: If you’re a morning person, work on the project your boss has been threatening to give to someone else right when you get to work, to make the most of your natural biorhythms.

• Focus on physical comfort, so that you don’t lose additional cognitive resources to pain or discomfort.

  • Example: Finally order the goofy butt pillow you just know will reduce your back pain. 

ON YOUR TEAM:

• Leverage familiarity, habit, and comfort to increase psychological safety.

  • Examples: Holding a meeting on “their turf”, having a difficult conversation during a regularly-scheduled one-on-one rather than pulling them aside at an atypical time.

• Facilitate a “mistakes are part of the process and all ideas are welcome” environment that encourages team members to show up with reduced fear of consequences, judgment, or unhealthy competition.

  • Example: Schedule a weekly “Spaghetti Meeting” that serves as a safe brainstorming capsule in which team members can throw spaghetti at the wall before collectively deciding “what sticks” - resulting in smarter, faster iteration. 

• Use positive incentives (and reinforcement) to give your team something more constructive to grow towards.

  • Example: Schedule a 30-minute Team Touchbase every morning, and add both “daily wins” and “who needs help” to the agenda, giving you an opportunity to showcase daily effort and excellence (increasing status and certainty), and normalizing outreach (increasing relatedness and fairness). 

Shift your Mindset:

Approach emotionally-demanding tasks, projects or interactions with a Growth Mindset. Focus on what’s possible, and how to cultivate the better-case scenarios, rather than putting the worst-case scenarios on mental repeat.

Example 1:

Negative Incentive: “We don’t generally publish the annual evaluation criteria until review week; we want our employees to strive for excellence in every area.”

Growth Mindset Reframe: “Instead of worrying about the evaluation criteria, let’s focus on amplifying your current strengths, and developing your growth areas. That gives us a concrete starting point for strategic goal-setting, and is the best way to position yourself for a positive annual review.” 

Example 2:

Negative Incentive: “Anyone who wants to be considered for the next round of promotions needs to be doing overtime, no complaints.”

Growth Mindset Reframe: “I recognize that we’re asking a lot from you right now. What support do you need in order to show up for this challenge?” 

If you or your team is struggling as a result of fear-based leadership, just remember:

Fear-based motivation doesn’t work:

Negative incentives foster an environment of fear and shame. 

Shame corrodes connection and decreases psychological safety.

Fear limits our PFC access and makes it harder to think. 

Effective leaders trade threatening for thriving:

Effective motivation techniques promote connection and safety. 

Relatedness increases our psychological safety. 

Psychological safety increases our ability to think. 

Growth Mindset allows us to notice what’s possible. 

PFC access supports us to bring the best possibilities to life.