Fear — The Biggest Threat To Leadership
If you haven’t been fearful — frightened even — you haven’t lived. Fear is part of the fabric of human experience.
But when it raises its ugly head to you as a leader with a team or organisation to run, the implications can be both far-reaching and devastating.
In this article we’ll explore why this happens, why it provides you with huge opportunities and how to work with it and through it.
Originally meaning “calamity, danger or sudden attack”, uncertainty is a cornerstone of fear. If you know, with certainty, that you’re going to prison for a crime, it’s the uncertainty of what will happen inside that creates the fear. If you fear public-speaking, it’s the uncertainty of how you’ll get through it that creates the fear and nothing else.
Our minds do not cope well with uncertainty and yet, paradoxically, if we were to remove all uncertainty from life, it would become sterile, lifeless and the closest thing to death imaginable.
But before we get into the strategies for mitigating and even exploiting fear to our benefit, let’s examine the causes.
Like many psychological phenomena, the roots can often be found in childhood. The screams when granny found a spider in her bed, the bully waiting for you at the school gates, the threat of punishment when your father came home,
Philip Larkin summed it up nicely in This Be The Verse:
They f*** you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
There’s no doubt that as hapless kids, we’re all wide open to the adult world with everything good and bad making impressions which can stick around our whole lives and emerge just when we’re not expecting them.
But that’s a reason, not an excuse. As adults, we have to take responsibility and not blame our fears — rational and irrational — on anyone or anything else. To do so is to become a hopeless, impotent victim, unable and unwilling to overcome the fear that haunts us.
We have to be able to work with fear, otherwise we consign ourselves to a life of stagnation and atrophy, fearful and paralysed.
It has been said that there are only 2 emotions: love and fear. They are mutually exclusive. The difference is in the actions they provoke. Love unites, integrates, welcomes, expands and embraces. Fear separates, divides, ostracises, contracts and even goes on to annihilate. Even anger and hatred are manifestations of fear.
Let’s examine the part that our minds play in creating the fear that can engulf us and render us useless: When faced with uncertainty the compulsive reaction is to create potential scenarios — usually negative. We might call this planning for the future, but when we repeat it, ad nauseam, with the worst-case scenarios it goes beyond planning. It actually becomes self-abuse. Consider this:
Our imaginations are our most powerful mental faculty, responsible for man’s greatest achievements. In fact all mankind’s achievements. Nothing is created by us without having passed through the imagination. Everything around you is a product of it with the exception of the natural world.
Yet we take what is uncertain and imagine everything that could possibly arise from it that we don’t want. We use our most potent ability to create the worst possible outcomes and then we go on to call it anxiety or stress or depression as if it is afflicted upon us by some malevolent external influence. The truth being that through ignorance and compulsion we inflict it on ourselves — this is self-harm, insanity even.
Perhaps the worst legacy we get from our parents is the complete acceptance of this pathological thinking as routine and unremarkable. Our challenge as responsible adults — having the ability to respond — is to actively and tirelessly work to free ourselves from the habit.
Before we get into the mechanics of how to approach this test, we need to lay down some uncommon but critical principles.
Firstly, we do not think our thoughts, we observe them.
Secondly we have full discretion over those thoughts we pay attention to.
Thirdly, all thoughts that we decide to entertain will generate attendant feelings — emotions.
Armed with these 3 principles, we can choose the thoughts we pay attention to and so we can influence the way we feel as a result. We are no longer at the mercy of emotion.
So what does this look like when fear is active — not theoretical, but sitting in your chest before a high-stakes board meeting, or at 3am when the business is under pressure?
The first move is always awareness. The act of naming what is happening without immediately trying to resolve it. “I am experiencing fear.” Not “I am afraid” — the first is an observation, the second is an identity. When you name the fear, you are observing it, rather than being it, you create distance. Distance is where choice becomes available.
Next identify the thought behind the fear. I will not perform well; they are looking for me to trip up; we’re going to be insolvent; what’s my sales manager going to say when I challenge her? Don’t judge them, just see them.
Locate the uncertainty. Because fear is almost always uncertainty in disguise, the useful question is: what specifically do I not know here? Not the sweeping, unanswerable question — but the precise gap. What decision am I avoiding because I cannot guarantee the outcome? What conversation am I postponing because I cannot control how it lands? Making the uncertainty specific makes it smaller and easier to manage.
Then redirect your imagination. This is where the three principles become operational. If the imagination is generating scenarios you don’t want, the question becomes: what if you directed it deliberately instead? Not false reassurance, insisting that everything will be fine. But asking genuinely: what is the most realistic version of how this could go well? What would handling this with composure actually look like? The imagination can move toward catastrophe or toward resourcefulness. It runs on the same fuel either way. The direction is yours to set.
Act before the feeling lifts. This is perhaps the most important step — and the one most leaders resist. We tend to wait until we feel confident before we act. But confidence is frequently the result of action, not the precondition for it. The leader who waits to feel unafraid before speaking will often wait a very long time.
The insight at the heart of Inside-Out leadership is this: you do not need to resolve the fear before you lead. You need to act — from clarity about what matters — and allow the fear to update itself in response to the evidence of what you actually do. This is the Inside-Out Shift in practice. This is not managing your external performance while fear runs unexamined underneath. Rather it’s going inside first — naming it, locating the uncertainty, redirecting the imagination — and leading from that place of greater awareness.
This process gets considerably easier with practice. At first, it may seem futile and ineffective — keep at it and I guarantee you’ll see results. Why, because it’s based on the truth of who you are, not the fear of uncertainty.
The enemy of leadership is not fear, but unexamined fear.
The leader who understands their own fear — who can name it, locate the uncertainty beneath it, and act with clarity regardless — is not simply more effective. They are more trustworthy. The people around them can sense the difference between a leader who is suppressing something and one who is genuinely at ease with not knowing.
That ease does not come from the absence of fear. It comes from a different relationship with it. And that relationship is something you can build — deliberately, over time — once you know where to look.
If you want to understand how your own internal patterns are shaping the way you lead — including the fears that may be operating just below the surface — the Inner Leadership Mastery Profile is a useful place to start.
It is a short diagnostic that gives you a clear picture of where you are leading from the inside out, and where the Inside-Out Shift still needs to happen. The link is here.
And if this raised something for you — about your own experience of fear in leadership, or about how it shows up in the people around you — I would genuinely like to hear it. Leave a comment below.