Avoiding a Culture of Fear

Are your employees afraid to make mistakes?

A student once talked to me about feeling overwhelmed by a project I had assigned them. He told me he was unable to sleep the night after getting it, and he used the word “fear” four times in the conversation. There is absolutely no reason at all that a student should feel “fear” about an assignment; school, I reminded him, is the place where, if you make a mistake, the only penalty involves a letter grade. You do not lose your job, or miss out on a promotion, or lose your bonus, or suffer any one of the myriad penalties you might suffer for failing on the job. You are supposed to try new things in school, and you need to realize not everything you do is going to be perfect…and that is how you learn.

But fear really should not have any place in your organization, either. In a creative workplace, where your employees are innovating and trying new things, not everything is going to work out great. If employees are afraid of being punished when something is not successful, they will hesitate to try new things and take risks…and there goes any hope of innovation.

We are not talking here about negligence, or being unprepared, or laziness, or boorish behavior that leads a client to cancel an account and walk away. No, we are talking about trying out new ideas and realizing that not all of them are going to work. Your culture should encourage taking risks and having failures as long as your employees learn from them.

That last part is key. The advantage to error is that you can learn from it, but it only works if you make the effort to do so. Your employees should realize they can try things that do not work out, so long as they learn from the experience and put that newly gained knowledge to use. If they have more failures than successes, that is probably pretty normal. If they have a lot of failures but NO successes, then you need to take a second look at how they are going about their innovation, and see if they are really learning from their failures.

Some people will fail because they are just not right for this job. Others will fail because they are taking calculated risks that simply do not work. Your job as a leader is to decide which kind of worker they are, and encourage those who really do have the skills and are trying out new ideas with some idea of what they are doing. It is important that you communicate this philosophy and make it part of your culture, so your employees do not avoid opportunities for success because of an overabundance of worry over failing.

Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia (and, incidentally, was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States) once said “This institution will be based upon the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it” That is a pretty good guiding philosophy. It worked for him, and there is a good chance it will work for you, too.