Managing the disguises of Fear: the secret of building high performance teams

Building a high-performance team has its similarities with building a house. But it is much more a process of continuous change, learning, development and natural selection.

All people perform better with a coach. So if all the people on your team are using coaching skill as a primary means of interacting, communicating, delegating and leadership, imagine how utterly unstoppable you and your business could become.

How are your team-building skills now?

What does this mean? Ask yourself, on a 1-10 scale, how skilled you are at:

Recognising how ‘Mr. Fear’, in all his subtle, perfectly reasoned guises, will enter your business as a guest and leave as a thief having stolen all your best ideas and talent?
Inspiring a vision in yourself and your teams that defies the obvious solutions, challenges self-imposed glass ceilings and invisible boundaries?
Giving non-judgmental, empowering feedback that enhances performance and changes unwanted behaviours?
Asking intelligent questions that evoke creative solutions, responsibility, self-motivated action and personally-satisfying achievement?
Encouraging a learning environment that is not afraid to risk and make mistakes so it can learn, grow and continuously expand your possibilities?

If you score under 50, then finding a good coach and learning these core leadership skills must surely be a business imperative.

Building sustainable teams

To be sustainable, the foundations of your high-performance team must be built on a solid base of self-awareness and responsibility: a willingness to be open, honest and authentic. Clear communication and creativity need an environment of trust, respect and understanding to flourish. The keystone always is: how to manage fear.

Fear and all its disguises is the swampland that will continuously undermine you, unless you understand its nature and process.

Making friends with fear

The best starting point for understanding F.E.A.R is to use it as an acronym for: Fantasy Expectations Appearing Real. In other words, as we look into he future at our goals and visions, we habitually do a strange thing, we imagine all the worst possible outcomes, get a disturbing feeling about them, then modify our goals until the feeling goes away.

Usually the experience of fear ‘just happens’. Often it’s not even a feeling, more a need to rationalise and find perfectly reasoned excuses for why something didn’t happen or should not be done. It is an inner reaction that doesn’t appear to be a choice. But, in reality, it is a choice. It is a process, just like any other. But most often the choices are made automatically and unconsciously.

If you want your life and the future of your business to be driven by an agenda set when you and your team were five year old kids, then that’s just fine. But today’s management development solutions are about taking charge of these old habit patterns and making friends with fear by replacing it with conscious, adult, empowering choices.

Energy follows thought

We usually first meet ‘Mr. Fear’ as the (hidden) Chief Executive of most boards of directors. He pays people to be experts in predicting the future based on what? The past. And guess what? That strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Energy follows thought. If we think about how to feel comfortable and certain about the future, we will put our creative energy into goals, targets and visions that ‘make sense’, can be justified by research, statistics, market forecasts, focus groups, etc. I’m not saying these don’t have value, but they only predict a future that is essentially limited and ‘safe’.

Creating a bold future

You can create a bold future you really want if you have a personal commitment to being the best you can be and a culture in your team that understands (a) how fear can hold you all back (b) knows how to recognise and challenge it when it shows up and (c) how to turn fear into a positive forward-moving force.

The best way to develop this positive culture is to instil ‘coaching skills’ into yourself and all your key players. No sports team serious about winning - from a school league to the Olympics - would dream of not having a coach. More and more businesses are seeing the light: coaching is not a luxury cost item, it is as essential a business tool as the telephone.

Getting started

We’ve found it’s not necessary, as conventional wisdom decrees, to start at the very top nor include all the key players from the start. A team is, in reality, individuals making choices on a moment to moment basis. Pass the ball or shoot for a goal? Three committed people starting an action-learning set can organically lead to team and organisational transformation.

No none can enforce integrity, awareness and responsibility on another. Find those that sincerely want to live and work from this more solid, authentic base and the circle of influence thus generated will attract those who are ready and repel those who are not. It’s a whole new slant on natural selection.

About the Author: Paul Hunting is a Director of the Natural Leadership Centre and a leading business development coach. He has worked with many of the UK’s top companies helping their executives develop transformational strategies and sustainable cultural change programmes. www.horsejoy.com

Paul is the author of Why talk to a Guru? When you can whisper to a horse, a best selling book on Natural Leadership.

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