What are you afraid of?

Fear is a powerful emotion.It can paralyze you in times of crisis, cause you to cower in the face of an adversary,or lash out in an inappropriate direction.Fear will keep you silent when you should speak. Fear will open your mouth when it ’s better left shut.And,worst of all for a leader,fear will convince you to back off and hide just when you need to be most visible.


You don ’t,however,need to eliminate fear in order to be a leader.If that were the case,only idiots could become leaders.Fear,in addition to being a powerful emotion,is a necessary one.Rational fears cause us to think carefully and research diligently before we investlarge sums of money in a project.Intelligent fears propel us to have a tough conversation before promoting a marginal job candidate.

Gut-level fears remind us to forgo a walk on a dark street in an unfa-miliar neighborhood.Eliminating any of these fears would be justplain stupid.Think about fear this way—you just need to make sureyou control fear rather than letting fear control you.

If you approach leadership with a great deal of fear,your behavior will be influenced.If you ’re afraid that you ’ve been promoted beyond your competency,you ’ll be hesitant to ask questions that might show your ignorance.If you ’re afraid that people think you don ’t deserve to be a leader,you ’ll avoid necessary confrontations.If you ’re afraid to make a wrong decision,you ’ll second-guess yourself into a really bad decision or,even worse,make no decision at all.

A leader ’s fears must be self-diagnosed.You need to spend time thinking about what you fear.Your task isn ’t to search out your fears in order to eliminate them.Your job is to think through how those fears might influence your leadership behaviors.You might want to discuss your conclusions with a trusted advisor in order to get a fresh perspective on how fear might be influencing your actions.

Don ’t let fear get in the way of your development as a leader. What am I afraid of?is an important question to ask yourself and an even more important question to answer honestly.Don ’t let fear keep you from doing just that.