Fear, the Other “F” Word
Work with your fear as a leader so it doesn’t derail you and your team
Everyone experiences fear. It’s essential, in fact—you wouldn’t be alive today if your ancestors didn’t have a healthy fear of heights and wild animals. Fear spurs us to action and keeps us inventing. However, when fear runs rampant, it can debilitate us, causing increased anxiety and stress. Even at moderate levels, fear can impair our productivity, decision-making, and morale, which takes a toll on our ability to collaborate and innovate.
In our work with countless executives, we’ve seen fear present itself in three main archetypes. By understanding how these archetypes operate and which ones we fall into, we can learn to manage our fears and to harness them in order to lead our teams more effectively.
The 3 fear archetypes
When you experience fear—you see a scary dog or a bus speeding toward you—the amygdala, the most primitive part of your brain responsible for core survival functions, takes over. It immediately sends signals to your autonomic nervous system that stimulate physical responses—our vision narrows, our breath gets shallow, most commonly, fight, flight, or freeze. These fear responses can be triggered not only by clear dangers to our physical well-being, but also by psychological patterns—a fear of failure, for example.
There are three typical fear archetypes leaders fall into:the perfectionist, the people pleaser, and the imposter. Each archetype has a core fear and a typical “tell” behavior coinciding with their main physical fear response.
To further understand each archetype, let’s meet CEOs we’ve worked with and learn how their fears manifested in their work and lives.
The Perfectionist
Chris graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy League school, was immediately recruited by Google, and became known for her “process-oriented” leadership and approach to products—implementing the correct procedures and considering every detail. After 12 years at Google, she joined her former classmate Phil, an engineer, to lead his new software security company.
One year in as CEO, Chris was struggling. Feedback from the board and team described a leader stuck in freeze mode, unable to make key decisions: There’s too much process in the organization. No one takes responsibility for getting things done. Chris wants to get every detail on our product right, and we never ship on time.
Chris initially claimed that incompetent and poor performers on her team were the problem. But when asked what she was afraid of, she explained how she’d built her career on getting things right, admitting, “I’m afraid that if I don’t hold the line to make sure our products are high-quality, no one else will.”
Still, Chris acknowledged that the consistently late launches, last-minute changes, and slow decision-making weren’t good. She knew needed to change her behavior, but she wasn’t sure how—her need to be thorough and scrutinize everything had always been a strength.
Chris clearly fits the perfectionist archetype:
The perfectionist leader’s primary fear is getting things wrong.
As a result, they freeze in indecision and never get anything across the finish line on time.
Perfectionists hide their fear and insecurity behind a veil of process-reliance, nitpicking, scrutiny, and criticism, which often paralyzes the organization. These leaders fail to take responsibility for decisions and avoid making the tough calls.
The People Pleaser
Andre leads a successful, venture-backed online learning company, which he founded after grad school. As a first-time CEO, he was having challenges with his team. To Andre, the biggest problem was that team members weren’t working collaboratively: “I try to give them space to step up and make decisions together, and instead they just debate endlessly.”
The team’s feedback, however, pointed to Andre’s leadership style as the root of the problem. While they liked him and respected his technical expertise, they said Andre ran meetings like discussions with friends, with no clear agenda or outcomes, and he wanted total consensus on key decisions. If there was no agreement, he’d table issues to avoid conflict. They also bemoaned his excessive loyalty to early hires: These people are no longer effective, but Andre doesn’t have the backbone to fire them.
Devastated by the feedback, Andre said, “Maybe I should just step down. If they don’t think I’m the right person for this, I can go do something else.” When asked what he was really afraid of, Andre talked about wanting to be respected, but he also admitted he finds conflict uncomfortable and works hard to get people to reach a common ground. This ingrained anxiety around disagreement and peace-keeping went back to his childhood. With an alcoholic father who fought with his mother constantly, Andre was often caught in the middle.
Andre fell into the classic people-pleaser archetype:
People pleasers have a baseline fear of rejection.
As a result, at any hint of discord, they flee—entirely avoiding conflict or giving negative feedback. They strive to keep everyone happy, driving consensus at the cost of progress.
Ironically, efforts to avoid open conflict only cause more of it behind the scenes. Because decisions are not made, team members engage in political maneuvering to advance their positions, often with mounting resentment.
The Imposter
Luis, a Harvard-educated doctor and entrepreneur, is the founder of a healthcare company promoting patient-centered analytics. Having completed a $60-million Series A funding round, the company was doing well, but investors worried that Luis was stressed and struggling as a CEO. During coaching, Luis said he found it hard to be calm while balancing the demands of family—he had newborn twins at home—and work. He even described having panic attacks. The team’s feedback depicted a defensive leader who was quick to snap at employees: He always has to be right. He dismisses the ideas of others.
In coaching sessions, Luis kept repeating that he didn’t want to disappoint anyone—especially his parents. He grew up in a poor, immigrant family in New Mexico, and his parents had stressed how much they wanted something different for their children. He and his siblings all worked hard to get into Ivy League schools. But being one of very few “Brown kids” at Harvard and Latino entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, he worried that comments he heard about him being a diversity case were true. “I’m not tall and white. I’m small and Brown, and I have an accent,” he said. “So I compensate by using big words and being loud.” When asked what he was afraid of, Luis said “that people will find out I’m not the smart person they think I am.”
Luis fell prey to the impostor archetype:
Imposter leaders’ biggest fear is being “found out”.
Most imposters respond to fear by fighting, trying to hide their fear of incompetency with antagonistic and controlling behavior. The idea is, if they can point out the failures in others, their own failures will be less obvious.
Such leadership causes teams to diminish; they stop contributing, stop innovating, and start operating by their own stress-based fear responses. The impostor archetype is extremely common among entrepreneurs, especially first-time CEOs, no matter their background, but particularly among BIPOC founders we’ve worked with.
Why identifying your fears is important
What’s the use in naming these archetypes? How can it help you as leaders?
For starters, as you can see in the stories above, when leaders operate out of fear without awareness, it negatively impacts their teams. That can create unhealthy dynamics at work, driving tension, poor decision-making, and decreased collaboration and innovation. Not only do companies’ results worsen, but so too do individuals’ health, relationships, and job satisfaction. It’s a lose-lose for everyone involved.
When you can identify and engage in conversations about your fears, however—embracing them and even sharing them with others—you can actually learn to use them as sources of energy rather than being held captive by them. You can also unlock deeper levels of empathy, connection, and trust with colleagues plagued by similar fears.
We create coping mechanisms for our fears to keep them hidden from others, so we’re often blind to them ourselves. The perfectionist, people pleaser, and imposter archetypes are common among leaders. Identifying your type can help you develop strategies for managing your own fear and that of your teams, which will result in better long-term success and fulfillment at your organization. (Check out our book, Leading with Heart: Five Conversations That Unlock Creativity, Purpose, and Results, to read more about those strategies.)
What’s your fear archetype?
So, which leader do you relate to most—Chris, Andre, or Luis? Are you more of a perfectionist or an imposter? Do you try hard to make everyone like you, or to make them think you’re super smart?
Take our quiz to find out.