Ruling with Fear, Guiding with Trust

Camille considers herself to be a good leader: technical, charismatic, capable of making decisions and getting things done. She’s also sometimes short-tempered, and when people don’t live up to her expectations or things go wrong, she can be visibly annoyed and openly angry. She doesn’t realize that this hard edge and short temper are making people afraid of her. They don’t want to risk getting blamed for failure or openly criticized for making a mistake, so they take fewer risks and hide their mistakes. Camille has accidentally created a culture of fear.

Michael is also a good leader: technical, charismatic, capable of making decisions and getting things done. He’s also good at keeping his cool. Instead of getting tense and angry, he gets curious when things don’t seem to be going well. His first instinct is to ask questions, and these questions often cause the team to come to their own realizations about what’s going wrong.

You might be surprised to learn that the story you just read is true: it’s my own experience accidentally creating a culture of fear when I became a senior leader. Here’s an excerpt from my very first review as a senior leader:

Even those who love you on your team admit being fearful of you and your potential criticism. People are afraid to take risks or fail in front of you because they are scared of being publicly reprimanded in front of their peers. What your attacks have done is create a culture where members of the team are afraid to engage with you, to ask you questions, or to ask you for feedback — which then leads to a vicious cycle of you not trusting them and them making mistakes.

As you can imagine, this was a shocking and uncomfortable thing to hear. And while I can make dozens of excuses for it — people take criticism more harshly from women, I came from the finance industry where this was a normal culture, everyone just needs to toughen up — it was clearly a problem. People were afraid to take risks, and if you want to have an independent team capable of setting their own direction and pushing themselves, you need them to take risks.

How do you know if you’re creating a culture of fear? It can come from placing a high value on being correct and following the rules, and having a strong affinity for hierarchy-based leadership. I also believe that coming from places where conflict was openly tolerated, if not actively encouraged, made me even more likely to create this culture. Engineering culture has a high tolerance for open debate to resolve conflict, so leaders who come from heavily engineering-focused backgrounds may feel particularly comfortable aggressively sparring with others over issues. Unfortunately, when you’re the leader, the dynamic changes, and those who may have fought back when you were an individual contributor will feel threatened by you as a leader.