Regaining Focus: Counteracting Fear In The Workplace Part 2

To counter the defocusing impact of this fear, organizations need to concentrate on strategies, tactics, and human capital deployment aimed toward regaining focus on these Key Performance Indicators.

We have identified eight of the most critical signs of diminished focus, as well as interventions geared to minimize their negative impact. This column will address the last four of those signs.

5th Sign Of Diminished Focus
“Excessive Ventilating” – When this is occurring one or more individuals is engaged in what feels like an endless, mind-numbing repetitive recitation of the presumed evil, incompetence, or stupidity of company leaders and/or colleagues. Unlike “Overreactions to legitimate problems,” the emotional tenor here is not exaggerated or escalated; it is torturously repetitive, irritating, and draining.

5th Strategy For Regaining Focus


“Don’t Try To Change The Subject” – The goal of excessive ventilating is to create interpersonal distance and protection so that the person’s secret joy in being stuck with and seemingly controlled by irrational people is not discovered. People who engage in this behavior have a familiar (i.e. early life feeling pattern) of fighting futile battles with overpowering authority figures, and they take a kind of strange comfort in feeling
victimized. Changing the subject is totally counterproductive because it shifts the focus of attention away from their true feelings and ends up reinforcing their sense of victimization. Instead, ask them some pointed questions, like – “What payoff do you get by beating this issue (or this person’s misdemeanors) to death?” Or, “What could you be doing to make your situation better, or take better care of yourself?” In other words, ask them to identify different choices they could make.

6th Sign Of Diminished Focus
“Single-Source, Magic Bullet Solutions” – When this is occurring, people in the organization begin lobbying for an oversimplified, pain-free, cure-all for the ills of their company. This is the corporate version of snake oil or miracle diet pills. Statements start surfacing like – “Everything would be fine around here if the company only paid people more;” or, “If there wasn’t so much pressure to make more money, we wouldn’t have these morale problems.”

6th Strategy For Regaining Focus
“Help People Identify The Scariest Changes” – Magic bullet solutions help people avoid looking at both individual and organizational changes that are scary because they demand behaviors, attitudes, and interactions that will stretch people beyond their current sense of self. Very often, what people are facing here is a significant shift from working in insulated silos to having to work in interdependent, cross-functional teams, which may involve high levels of conflict and challenge. When people offer single-source solutions, ask them to list all the individuals who could be helpful in resolving the problem. Also, ask them how they feel about conflict.

7th Sign Of Diminished Focus
“Reversion To The Superman Syndrome” – When this is occurring, we see a significant number of overachievers and high performers beginning to override, ignore, or run roughshod over established organizational processes and procedures designed to bring order and structure to the company. This results in wasteful duplication of efforts and resource allocation, missed deadlines, and counterproductive conflict.

7th Strategy For Regaining Focus
“Help People Replace Martyrdom With Trust” – Falling short of meeting Key Performance Indicators gives certain individuals just the permission they need to mobilize all their controlling behaviors and fully exhibit their fundamentally low trust view of people. “Taking charge” and doing everything by oneself is a very costly strategy for maintaining control in shaky and uncertain times. It disables others, caps their growth, and insures that the “Superperson” ends up feeling isolated, overworked, and ultimately resented. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of never being good enough. Ask “Superpeople” why they have lower expectations for everyone other than themselves. Then ask them if they can take the risk of asking someone else to help them.

8th Sign Of Diminished Focus
“Regression To Familiar Responses” – When this is occurring, people revert to survival behaviors that worked early in life to help them deal with high pressure situations when they had limited choices. For example, they withdraw from interactions and emotionally disappear; they begin to have a sense of frenetic urgency about everything; or they start to bully and intimidate people, believing that this will produce results. The commonality here is a reaction to a circumstance (i.e. an environment of fear) that is disproportionately intense, either actively or passively.

8th Strategy For Regaining Focus
“Bring People Back To The Present” – Scary times in our lives shoot us back to our earliest and most primitive coping mechanisms. A good principle to keep in mind is that feelings are always accurate but their intensity, at any given time, can be way off. People never have the wrong feelings; they often have inappropriate or strange articulations of these feelings. So, don’t ever argue with people over their feelings or tell them that they shouldn’t feel a certain way. Validate the feeling (i.e. “You have every right to be angry about that situation”) and don’t react to the intensity of its expression. Then ask the person when they’ve felt the same way before in their life, and what choices they felt that they had then. Ask them, then, to compare those choices with the choices they have in the current situation.

The strategies discussed in these last two columns can be very useful in de-escalating the reactions to an increasingly fear-driven workplace. Their effectiveness, though, is directly tied to the professional’s self-knowledge in relation to their own reactions. Self-information ultimately determines how helpful you can be in your human resource role.