The Fear Side of Leadership

The air is turning and the nights are closing in. As I drive around New England, the sights of cobwebs, ghouls, and pumpkins prompt me to go to the dark side of leadership—fear.

From the skeletons in our closet to the ghosts of past mistakes, all of us are haunted from time to time by the perils and pitfalls of leadership. And that fear is one of the biggest causes of us as humans not fulfilling our dreams or finding happiness.

So today, we’re diving into the fear. Welcome back to The Leader’s Playground Fear Side of Leadership.

What I'm curious about this week...

It is well known that the best scary movies have a pattern to them that makes them successful. Ironically, fear is predictable.

Smart but cautious filmmakers repeat that tried and true pattern—from archetypally naive characters, to not-so-subtle hints at who the villain might be—to ensure that their movie hits box office success.

Unfortunately, we often do the same as leaders (in our work and personal lives): We fear risk, so we stick to patterns that are safe and successful. But if we want to do truly amazing things, we’ve got to be willing to change things up.

This doesn’t have to mean big, sweeping changes. Changing small things over time can create a huge impact. James Clear documents this beautifully in his book Atomic Habits, via the unlikely-hero story of Sir David Brailsford and the British Cycling team.

Brailsford was hired in 2003 as British Cycling’s new performance director—a Hail Mary to revive Britain’s national cycling team from the dead. Okay, maybe the team wasn’t dead, but from 1908 to 2003, Britain had won just one single Olympic gold medal for cycling…. It may as well have been dead.

Brailsford implemented what he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” and just five years later, the British Cycling team dominated at the 2008 Olympics, winning 60% of the gold medals available.

And these changes were marginal—things like each team member having a unique washing machine so as not to cross-contaminate clothing; painting the team van white so dust, which could impede their finely tuned bikes, would be more readily visible for cleaning; teaching proper handwashing so the team caught fewer colds, etc.

While such changes may seem insignificant, Brailsford believed in the collective power of many, many small improvements. And he was right.

So I ask: What are the small steps that you need to experiment with to make incremental gains? How are you turning your role into a playground?—An environment that shifts behavior from fear-avoidance to risking and learning fast together?

From the Lab at P2

If you’ve been following along, you know our aim right now in the P2 Lab is to explore the corners of coaching relationship dynamics. One of the most critical concepts we highlight when we train coaches is, again, the value of trust.

Building trust can be really scary. Especially if we’re used to finding security in control. But we have to trust our team to make good choices, and giving them space to do that (with the appropriate support, of course) invites them to trust us, too.

This goes hand in hand with growth-oriented coaching over results-oriented coaching.

If we go into a coaching or mentor relationship with the main goal of improving sales, or “fixing” team morale, or creating the next COO—our own desires and goals—we’ll shortchange ourselves from the start. (And, worse, we might lose some good people.)

But if we focus on the growth and wellness of our client or team member, with one small thing after another, we create a blossoming relationship built on trust, vulnerability, and possibility.

While obvious, it bears repeating: good coaching is about growing the client, not the coach.

When we put in strong work and experiment with different habits, creating better systems, the results will follow. They always do.

The Leadership Tales Podcast

Going into a conversation with someone who holds fundamentally different views than we do—especially in this polarized day and age, and especially when it’s our own parents!—can feel like stepping into a nightmare.

How do we find common ground with those whose votes, actions or values look differently from ours, especially when they’re close to us?

As a child of Mexican immigrants with Republican political leanings, Mónica Guzmán learned first hand that her Democratic political stance could not be successfully communicated by arguing with her parents.

Over the course of her successful career as a journalist and author, Mónica has cultivated a means of successfully broaching even the most polarizing topics with a view to create more understanding and less division in today’s world. She teaches us how to find similarities with those you may otherwise find yourself at odds with, as well as how great teams are the product of diverse thinking.

Of all the things we may fear in life—well beyond the month of October—finding common ground to have meaningful conversations shouldn’t be one of them.

Give it a listen! And if you feel like leaving a review (or tips for me on how to become a better host), I invite you with gratitude.

It’s a pleasure to have you with me for this fear and movie analogy based issue. And I hope it got your creative juices flowing. Remember we are the ones who write our own script!

If you have questions or thoughts to share, please don’t hesitate to respond to this email. I’d love to chat with you. And if you like what I’m doing and have someone who might enjoy it too, please forward them this email or invite them to subscribe below.

See you in two weeks, and stay safe out there.

“Cut! That’s a wrap!”

Colin

To learn more about my book, Be More Wrong: How Failure Makes You an Outstanding Leader, click here. I’d be so grateful for a review on Amazon if you’ve read it and have feedback.