The Fear Economy: How Fear Is Quietly Changing Your Workplace Culture

Hey, welcome back everybody.

I was recently reading a Forbes article discussing what many are calling a hidden crisis in today's workplace.

The article, it, it was, it was, it was talking about the rising employee anxiety that is in the workplace.

It talked about emotional exhaustion, burnout, economic uncertainty, and fear that is coming, and we are, have all heard about surrounding artificial intell- intelligence and i- is job stability going to be there in the future? I mean, we're all reading the headlines of mass layoffs happening in tech and, you know, all of these things that are going on.

And st- and, and then all of a sudden, a level of fear starts to set in.

What struck me about the article was this: the article wasn't just talking about productivity problems.

It was talking about emotional problems.

People are showing up to work carrying a level of fear in some cases, fear of being replaced, fear of becoming irrelevant, fear of instability, fear of not keeping up.

And honestly, as I'm reading this article, I felt like this needed to be talked about a little bit more.

Whether this applies to your organization, uh, this very minute today or not, I think it's something that we need to be aware of.

Because leaders can become so focused on performance, we can put all of our attention on output and organizational changes that need to be made, that we might completely miss the emotional climate that, that people are operating in every single day.

And, and again, I get it.

There- there's probably still some leaders listening that are saying, "Why is the emotional climate my responsibility, Jeff? Don't you see that we're over here trying to run a company?" But I can tell you this, if there is a fear emotion that's creating a climate, that's creating a culture, so much so that national publications are writing about it, then we might at least wanna pay attention to it, because fear changes behavior.

When, when, when there's a fear-based culture, people are going to become a whole lot quieter.

They're gonna become more defensive.

You're gonna find that they become less collaborative.

They're gonna be less creative, less honest.

And, and fear, it creates this shrinking down of people.

And, and leaders will often misread this because I, I don't think what...

You know, you think about all those things I just listed, I doubt that, um, uh, when a, when a leader is experiencing this in their culture and with their team, they're not saying, "You know what? This might be a fear issue." They're probably thinking everything but that.

And, and, and look, maybe you've caught yourself saying things like this, "Hey, my team lacks initiative." Maybe you, maybe you say things, uh, like, "Hey, nobody wants accountability," or, or, "My people are disengaged." But sometimes people are not disengaged.

Sometimes they're scared, and scared people don't innovate.

Scared people don't challenge ideas.

Scared people don't communicate honestly.

Fear creates survival mode, and survival mode will kill the excellence in your organization.