The Soulless Organisation: Overcoming Fear-Based Management

Stephen Long, PhD

Values such as teamwork and mutual support fly out the window when people are preoccupied with survival. Workers today are anxious about the economy. Fear permeates the organisation, touching every department and person.

It’s natural to become disengaged and mechanical - to focus solely on survival - when faced with an unstable economy. As a result, a generation of Fear-Based Managers is being developed and currently shaping the culture of business for the foreseeable future. Fear-Based Management embeds itself between the tissues of convenient fictions. Fear-Based Managers lack humanising qualities and unfortunately are too often the social architects of the 21^st century company - The Soulless Organisation.

Who Is the Fear-Based Manager?

These new managers exhibit no passion in their work. Driven by fear of making mistakes, they can only follow the blueprint set forth by a rigid strategic plan. Unwilling to adapt the plan, they overlook opportunities along the way. They depend on hierarchy for power, which further entrenches survival instincts. They’re callous, lacking empathy and purpose, and likely to cut corners through corruption and fraud.

Fear-Based Managers squander resources for short-term survival at the expense of long-term growth. They create resistance and apprehension within the workforce, gaining compliance but not commitment.

What’s the Soulless Organisation Like?

Soulless organisations are filled with people who are satisfied in their professions - just not their jobs. As one manager stated, “I love my field and enjoy going to professional conferences, but the information I get from those meetings never seems to be applied in our workplace.”

Workers in soulless organisations care more about their personal agendas rather than organisational goals. A compelling vision and breakthrough strategy are wasted on them. Detached from one another and resistant toward organisational initiatives, they do whatever they can to secure their own position, even if it risks the organisation’s stability. They fail to embrace the responsibilities they claim to want, while managers fail to delegate the authority they promise to share.

What’s the Alternative?

Luckily, there’s a way to put soul back into your organisation, and the key is the High-Performance Leader. You need only one such leader, filled with passion and caring, to create a ripple effect through the organisation.

As opposed to position-based executives who preside over an organisation, High-Performance Leaders are fully integrated into the organisation. They prosper during recessionary periods by leading with transparency, empathy, and selflessness. They know that leadership isn’t a list of mechanical tasks, but a system of human interactions.

High-Performance Leaders use transformational leadership strategies to resurrect the organisational soul. These strategies include the following:

• They develop their staffs individually and collectively, personally and professionally, helping them find meaning in their work
• They eradicate cynicism by developing a sense of teamwork
• They help workers become more autonomous
• They free people from fear and help them reclaim their humanity

Leading the soulless organisation back to its true self requires leaders to follow three vital principles:

Lead from the Inside Out

High-Performance Leaders begin with themselves. They act as role models for the rest of the organisation rather than dictating ways of being. Here are a few ways they do so:

• They transform themselves before they attempt to transform the organisation
• They examine their own beliefs about themselves, others, and the working environment before questioning their employees’ assumptions
• They flush out beliefs that cause conflict
• They’re dedicated to the truth - leading from personal integrity, they admit mistakes as soon as possible and accept the consequences of the organisation’s act

Enhance Communication

High-Performance Leaders are high-calibre communicators who do the following:

• Build teams in which people can express creativity and build camaraderie.
• Promote honest dialogue in every conversation, meeting, and exchange.
• Ask for and give plenty of feedback.
• Study the art of coaching others and drawing out their best talents.
• Spread a “can-do” attitude by inspiring enthusiasm toward organisational initiatives.
• Reach out using these crucial communication methods:
  • Listening is the authentic acceptance of other people’s ideas and suggestions. In a listening culture, people’s conversations generate innovative ideas. High-Performance Leaders ask open-ended questions using words such as “How...?”, “What...?”, and “Why...?”, letting people clarify their responses, rather than closed-ended questions that leave people feeling manipulated rather than empowered.
  • Empathy helps leaders recognise what people need so they can fulfill those needs for the good of the organisation. Empathetic leaders are also able to look at every situation from others’ viewpoints. That ability helps them develop a perspective that will satisfy the whole organisation.

Develop a Sense of Stewardship 

A culture of stewardship is one defined by selflessness and interdependence, in which employees do everything in their power to help the organisation grow. You can create such a culture in ways like these:

• Empower people to make sound decisions. Teach them steps to good decision-making, which are: 
  1. Understand your purpose - what you want to accomplish.
  2. Develop possible options.
  3. Recognise probable outcomes of each alternative.
  4. Select the option that best fits the original purpose.

• Engage employees by thinking boldly and imaginatively about fulfilling your organisation’s mission to improve the world.
  
• Create excitement and motivation by engaging people’s hearts, stimulating their minds, and stirring their souls.

Conclusion

Fear-Based Managers create Soulless Organisations:

• risk-averse
• cling tightly to social and cultural norms
• static and unchanging
• hoards information and slow to communicate
• unable to use abstract concepts to solve concrete problems
• intolerant, impatient, and controlling of others
• quick to shift blame and slow to take responsibility
• hierarchical, with people relying on their positions of authority to control others

High Performance Leaders create Soulful Organisations:

• interested in learning and growing and helping everyone in the organisation do the same
• accustomed to taking and encouraging appropriate risks
• eager to embrace change
• likely to group people into teams and collaborate with other organisations
• empathetic, compassionate, visionary, and future-minded
• open, clear, and candid
• willing to question conventional wisdom
• inspirational and empowering rather than forcing change through the power of hierarchical position

Stephen Long, PhD The Institute for Level Six Leadership www.LevelSixLeadership.com The Institute for Level Six Leadership is a management consulting firm specialising in leadership development committed to strengthening your most important resource, Human Capital, by enhancing individual and organisational performance. L6L provides one-on-one coaching, team coaching and customised organisation learning projects.