“The relationship between energy, life and work is a part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skillfulness, and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very stirrings of life on earth.”
James Suzman, WORK
The problem
We often view work through the lens of solving an economic problem—paying expenses. A narrow economics perspective, however, ignores how work can meet our other fundamental needs: a sense of community, belonging and an opportunity for “harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness and creativity to shaping our destiny.”
When fear-inducing behaviors cascade down from the top and are amplified through layers of the organizational hierarchy, people’s purposefulness and skillfulness can wither. In this article, cascading fear in the workplace refers to chronic stress caused by persistent fear of a boss, colleagues, or both. Indeed, this fear can be a silent killer—of performance, and of the people doing the work—when an employee’s fight-or-flight response is persistent and without sufficient recovery.
Sara Stegemoller’s research indicates that one in three employees consider their workplace psychologically unsafe (independent of physical safety). The percentage varies by role and is negatively correlated with hierarchy: Executives report 13% negative perceptions of psychological safety, while individual contributors lag at just 31% and hourly workers at 34%. When a situation feels unsafe, a stress response—fight-or-flight—can be triggered.
When stress is your friend and your canary
Neuroscientists make important distinctions between how people respond to fear. The acute stress reaction—e.g. important presentation, a meeting with the CEO—is exactly what the body needs when an individual senses an immediate threat. When chronic stress is maintained over time, “there are a large number of neural and hormonal changes in the body” including actions by the autonomic nervous system that releases cortisol. Both of these increase the heart rate and blood pressure and cause metabolic changes that increase the risk of heart disease and other health issues as blood is diverted to the bodily changes triggered by the chronic stress response.
When you feel dread logging onto Zoom for your first Monday morning meeting, the instinct is to push it aside and get on with the meeting.
This article explains why that’s exactly the wrong move and offers ideas for how to creatively adapt to workplaces that make you feel unsafe (assuming you choose to remain). More specifically, I introduce you to Tom, a composite of real clients and walk you through the four steps that diluted his fears and empowered him to taking seriously the need to strengthen his ability to manage up, and to some degree down to create a safer environment for all of those around him.
Learning how to deal with cascading fear in an organization is an invaluable skill that can be applied throughout your career for managing both up and down.
Let’s reframe the issue
In my executive coaching, I witness the damage wrought by threatening workplace norms and behaviors nearly every day. Unfortunately, I have a very limited ability to change the environment in which my clients operate. As a result, my entire focus is on helping individuals experiment with ways to adapt to these often-toxic environments, including cognitive reframing and emotional regulation.
In a recent conversation with a senior executive, I mirrored back what I thought I was hearing: “it sounds like you are trying to deal with cascading fear.” He responded: “Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly what’s going on.”
Psychological threats in the workplace typically start at the top and are reinforced at team levels. When cultural norms are understood to include punishment, bullying, and exclusionary behaviors, employees can show up with heightened stress responses. If employee stress responses become chronic—which is the case when employees perceive a work environment as unsafe—everybody loses. Employees are less healthy and contribute less; businesses underperform; and all stakeholders lose out.
Meet Tom: into the fear cascade
Last week I met with Tom, a director who works for a global pharmaceutical company. I started the meeting by asking Tom what he wanted to focus on. Visually, I sensed he was particularly stressed. Tom had been away for a few days with his daughter touring colleges and he returned to unusually high chaos in the office caused by his boss’s actions. He wondered if it had been a mistake to expose his team to the impulses of his boss.
Despite Tom’s best efforts to dismiss his feelings, his anger and contempt for his boss “took a seat” in the Zoom conference call. Tom said he felt anxiety and was worried about how the chaos would affect his team and his team’s perceptions of him. He expressed worry about his employment security and growth, wondering if one day the dreaded email from human resources would enter his inbox, leading to his termination. Rolling layoffs in his company had become the status quo. He admitted that he felt high levels of stress every day at work and had trouble sleeping on Sunday nights.
This film was playing in Tom’s head. This was the meaning he was taking from what he was sensing in the moment based on his remembered past. He mentioned failures that led to his feelings of insecurity, and he connected what he was sensing in the present moment to the feelings he had experienced in his remembered past.
I softly asked him how certain he was that the present moment was equivalent to past experiences and what assumption he was making.
I asked him how his boss and his boss’s boss might be feeling about things in the company. With tremendous energy he said, “they’re both living in fear.”
Ironically, this aha moment helped him understand that the fear he’s feeling travels up the hierarchy and cascades back down, potentially poisoning every level of the organization. This reframing changed his view on how he can best manage up and down. He began exploring how he could make changes to reduce people’s fear and enhance his and his team’s satisfaction at work.
His recognition that his boss and skip-boss were also living in fear changed how he thought about his fear and added a degree of compassion to his mindset. Instead of feeling contempt and anger, he could feel some compassion for what they were dealing with themselves. He could now transcend his anger more easily and explore better ways to work with both, including acknowledging their fear and taking steps to build more trust, such as proactively getting them the information needed to reduce their worries about being blindsided. In the past, he had resented providing this information—he interpreted this as meaning they didn’t trust him.
Tom had another realization as we were discussing the nature of “managing up:” this was a less developed skills that was a part of his job. Tom didn’t just resent managing up; he also didn’t enjoy it. In the end, he realized that despite his more than two years in his current role, he had not yet made the transition to his new role. This realization empowered him to strengthen his managing-up toolkit—even if he found this part of his role less fun.
How brain predictions and bodily energy relate to fear
Neuroscience can help us understand the dynamics of how fear is produced and how it can cause such destructive outcomes.
When thinking about fear, it’s helpful to understand that your brain is a prediction machine. In fact, according to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, you respond to events before they ever happen based on predictions made by your brain. Feelings of fear, therefore, occur when you sense something dangerous, based on everything you have experienced up to that point in your life. When you sense something, you make meaning of it by using concepts created by your brain based on your experiences in the past. What Tom was sensing triggered fear because the moment connected to a negative incident he had experienced in the past.
Here’s another example: your boss reacts strongly to information from a third-party that relates to a project you’re spearheading. Without asking you, he organizes a meeting to resolve the problem. You know there is no problem and if your boss had asked you, he would also know. But he didn’t. Your conclusion: my boss doesn’t trust me and my job is at risk. The truth: your boss himself is worried about the problem making its way to his boss. Neither your prediction nor your boss’s are accurate. There is no problem, and your boss thinks highly of you.
To understand the cost of persistent fear, Feldman Barrett offers a compelling concept: the Body Budget. As you can imagine, your body needs energy to function. Every demand on your attention, every threat response, every sleepless night makes a withdrawal; recovery, connection, and safety make deposits. Your liver, your kidneys, your brain and your heart all require energy. Your body budget is relatively fixed and when you make more withdrawals than deposits, you fall out of healthy balance. When this bodily state persists for too long, you burn out.
When you experience chronic stress—a withdrawal—that energy is unavailable to essential parts of your body, most notably your cognitive abilities, including decision making. Cascading fear, therefore, when it fuels chronic stress, consumes scarce energy and dampens performance. When entire organizations experience chronic stress from fear, performance suffers.
Healthy and unhealthy stressors abound
Stressors are present in every workplace. Businesses operate in markets, and success in these markets depends on competitor activities, evolving consumer demands, financial management, and even geopolitical disruptions. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in Anti-fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, stressors are information that can be used for gain. When this information is framed as opportunities for learning and growth, improvement can follow.
There are moments when employees feel everything is in good order. Everything feels positive, predictable, and optimism is abundant. Jobs feel secure and personal growth feels possible. Inevitably, periods of chaos follow, as stressors emerge. Things begin to feel less certain and each employee has a distinct ability to process and regulate the effects of the stressors. When those responses go unaddressed, stress compounds into something more corrosive.
This distinction is important to understand. As Taleb explains, “humans tend to do better with acute stress than with chronic stress, particularly when the former is followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their job as messengers.”
If you put this idea into practice, it means turning your momentary feeling of stress and anxiety into action versus letting it shut you down. It means learning from the event and creatively adapting. If fear blocks this growth response, you may end up accepting and living with your fragility and the persistent stress triggers in your body. In certain situations, no matter how you change, the environment triggers your stress response and it never shuts off. In these situations, when you have been experimenting with changes, it may be time for you to find a new, more comfortable environment where you can thrive. In this case, when you feel nothing has worked, it’s time to plan on networking, to learn more about other workplaces that are less fear-based. While this step requires considerable effort, it may be the only path to finding relief.
Psychological safety: in the eyes of the beholder
Learning how to deal with a boss or skip-boss who triggers your feelings of fear is important. Developing your ability to stop the cascade—and protect your team— is also important; this means learning how to foster feelings of safety in each teammate even when systemic fear-inducing behavior is present. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach: what is threatening is in the eyes of the beholder.
The ability to process perceived threats vary by individual. For example, teammates with secure attachment styles appreciate more direct communications and generally find it easier to take on stretch challenges. Leading this cohort requires less hand-holding and fewer confidence-building activities. Those with anxious attachment styles, however, even with the same capabilities, will put greater value in sensing your confidence in them and appreciate more visible support from you.
This distinction is important for managers responsible for people. Understanding a teammate’s attachment style provides insights on how to reinforce motivation and confidence and create a psychologically safe place for people to thrive. For individuals, self-awareness can inform job choices and increase the probability of finding satisfaction.
What you can control to find more psychological safety
When you find yourself in a workplace environment with cascading fear, consider these four steps to make things better. All four are relevant for managing up and down.
Step 1: Start with self-awareness: where are stressors you feel personally coming from? For example, are they often coming from your boss, or your skip-boss? In what situations do you feel stressed and anxious? To what degree is your boss’s knee-jerk reaction to what you consider innocuous “noise” a response to your skip-boss’s fears cascading downward?
As a team leader, you’ll also want to build more understanding of the sources of your teammates’ fears. For example, how well do you know each teammate’s comfort with doing novel tasks that stretch their skills and knowledge? Many people feel vulnerable about sharing their fears, so you will need to read between the lines of what they say and how they behave.
Step 2: Be more aware of the perspective of others. Reflect on how much you know about what your boss or your skip-boss are experiencing. Consider the fear they may be feeling; if you don’t know, what questions could you ask so you can better understand? If you feel it, engage with your contempt for what you consider your boss’s counter-productive responses and frame these moments as opportunities to build more trust. Ask yourself: what can I do to make them feel more in control and out of harm’s way? What are the types of activities and projects that may make them feel vulnerable? When you do, you may find they micro-manage you less.
As a self-aware manager (hopefully), how clearly have you expressed to your team the situations that fuel your fear? If you know what these triggers are, communicate them to your team so they understand what you value.
Step 3: If you believe their fears are cascading down to you and constantly triggering your feeling of stress, ask yourself: “What can I do to reduce their fear? How can I make them feel more confident that they won’t be blindsided?” Consider making more frequent updates, particularly when you see risks they need to be aware of because the stakes are particularly high. While you may not want to alarm them to avoid a reaction that makes you feel vulnerable, holding back such information can break trust.
This is also something you can suggest, with specificity, to your teammates as it relates to you.
Step 4: Experiment with potentially better responses to moments when things may be going awry from your boss’s or skip-boss’s point of view. What actions can you take to reduce their fear? Which work best to reduce the risk of triggering their fear and creating disruptions for you and your team?
In the case of the team you lead, pay attention to how your teammates feel about the tasks you assign to them. Try to get a sense of how comfortable they feel and if they think they are being set up for success. Consider using a coaching mode unless you feel switching to an advisory mode is unavoidable.
Putting it all together
After spending a few months experimenting, you return to that conference room for your Monday morning meeting with your boss and skip-boss. This time, you reframe what you are sensing and feeling from your boss differently: you interpret your anxiety as information and you consider that the prediction of a threat is a false positive—there is no threat. You know your boss is worried, perhaps even threatened by the subject he’s asking you about, and that responding in a way that makes him feel more secure and in control—versus reacting defensively—can disarm the fear.
In any situation, you always have a choice on how you respond. By experimenting with ways to break the cycle of cascading fear, with your higher-ups and your team, you can quickly improve performance, in the short and the long term.
About me
I’m an executive and leadership coach, advisor, confidant and a principal of Mach10 Career & Leadership Coaching. You can reach me at dehrenthal@mach10career.com or 617-529-8795.