Ten signs you work in a fear-based workplace
 

Ten signs you work in a fear-based workplace - Jul 2010
Tyrannical, brown-nosers rising again ? and it could hurt your company

1. Appearances are everything. When employees are preoccupied with staying in the office later in the evening than the boss does, fear is king. When people worry less about the quality of their work than about how they're perceived by managers higher up the chain, you've got fear.

2. Everyone is talking about who's rising and who's falling. When a daily focus of office conversation is the discussion of whose stock is rising and whose is falling in the company's internal stock index, you've got a fear infestation. A preoccupation with status and political capital is a sure sign that stakeholders' best interests have taken a back seat to me-first, fear-based behaviors.

3. Distrust reigns. Would this be your knife in my back? When your employees have to stop and ask themselves, "Is it safe to tell Marybeth my idea?" you have a fear problem in your organization. Workplaces where people steal one another's intellectual capital are places where trust is subordinate to fear (if trust exists at all). If your business is one where backstabbers thrive, ditto. In a healthier shop, people would be comfortable rising up in protest against a backstabbing colleague, and the paradigm "I win when you lose" would be quickly nipped in the bud.

4. Numbers rule. Sensible performance goals help people understand what's important. An obsession with metrics, daily, weekly, and hourly, and a world view that says an employee is the sum of his numeric goals, are signs of a fear-based culture. Why? A healthy organization builds performance goals into its leadership framework, but the metrics don't equal the framework. When management views people as complex, creative, multifaceted value producers and considers metrics as just one element of a well-rounded leadership program, you can beat the fear back to a tolerable level.

5. And rules number in the thousands. Maybe the most stereotypical yet valid sign of a fear-based workplace is an overdependence on policies in place of smart hiring and common sense. These organizations fear their own employees' instinctive reactions to everyday circumstances (the need to book a business trip, order a stapler, or schedule a vacation day), so they install lengthy, tedious policies to keep employees from thinking independently. A need to tout the trust and openness in the organization constantly can be another red flag. As my friend Marla says, "The more an employer drones on and on in the handbook and other employee materials about trust, the less trusting they are."

6. Management considers lateral communication suspect. My brother worked for a major electronics manufacturer. One day, stopping in the office just before taking off to visit a remote location, he ran into some guys who had just returned from the same facility. "Let's compare notes," said my brother, and five or six team members went into a conference room to confer. Within seconds, a manager burst into the room and demanded, "Who authorized this meeting? None of you guys is at a level to authorize a meeting." Evidently sharing ideas that could benefit the company is only a good thing in this organization if you carry a certain title and salary grade. How idiotic is that? Organizations that don't allow employees to brainstorm with one another are places where fear has made inroads.

7. Information is hoarded. Closely related to the question "Can employees in my company chat freely?" is the question "How do people find out how things work around here?" If the sole answer is, "Ask your manager," you've got some creepy-crawly fear bugs on your hands. Cultures that allow people to hoard what they know to consolidate their power are cultures where fear has smashed trust under its heel. Likewise, if employees learn about a company layoff through the grapevine or in the newspaper vs. a frank sitdown with their managers and their teams, something is rotten in Denmark, and fear is a silent partner in your management roster.

8. Brown-nosers rule. When the people who get rewarded and promoted are the least-knowledgeable but most-fawning ones in the org chart, fear has come to town. Fear-based senior leaders surround themselves with yes-men and yes-women because it's more pleasant to hear the "right" answer than the truth.

9. 'The Office' evokes sad chuckles, rather than laughs. My friend Amelia writes, "As hard as the writers for 'The Office' try to make Steve Carell's character look like the world's most bumbling, officious egotist, my actual boss is worse." When cartoonish fiction looks more appealing than everyday existence to your employees, fear may play a major part. Fear shuts down our ability to think creatively, collaborate, and bring passion to the job. When getting through the day requires a focus on keeping one's head down, taking no risks, and sucking up to anyone in management, your organization's soul has left the picture.

10. Management leads by fear. When senior leaders make virtually all decisions in secret, dole out information in unhelpful drips, and base hiring on sheeplike compliance rather than energy and talent, and the PA system all but blares "Be glad to have a job, stop whining, and get back to work," your company's fear problem is off the charts. I saw an example of this myself the other day when I stopped at a national retailer to look at earrings. A sales associate mentioned to his co-worker, "Crazy thing, I broke something in my car's engine, and my mechanic says it'll be $1,400 to get it fixed." In a flash, the supervisor of the department swooped into the conversation with the message, "Lucky you've got a job, aren't you then! A lot of people are unemployed, and we've got a list of people who'd love to have your job. That's your thought for the afternoon: Lucky Me!" and off she went. When leadership is based on keeping people in the dark and keeping them off-balance, no one benefits except the tier of managers near the top who justify their existence by devising ways to solidify their stature.

Chief executives know in their hearts that smart people, set loose to solve big problems, are responsible for every success and innovation industry has ever seen. Fear-trampled employees don't do a thing for your business. Still, management by fear is a hard habit to break, because fear-whipped underlings don't squawk. Meanwhile, your competitors may be hiring your best talent away and stealing market share while you make it easy for them to do so. Those meek, submissive, broken-down employees might blossom in your rival's trust-based culture. Do you really want to find out?

Copyright © 2010 Bloomberg L.P.All rights reserved.
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:2 cents: Any of this sound familiar to anyone?

Not in a way applicable to me but for other people I know. The main thing always seems to be a lack of trust but i've only ever worked at places that didn't really give a shit as long as the work was done.

I know one person who works somewhere with loads of petty rules and they also recently introduced a really strict internet policy with a filter that is blocking sites she needs to use to do her job properly as well as standard shit like facebook. Bit stupid when the engineers need plane tickets but you can't connect to anywhere to buy them for example. It has just made her start to be a bit stupid about what she will and won't actually bother to do.

I know someone else who was offered his same job with better money at a competitors business and took it partly for the salary and partly as it was nearer his house and would take less travelling time. He was only there a week as he found the whole place to be run like a prison camp and luckily was able to fuck off back to the job he had left.

Yeah, I've heard about a lot of companies that do the Internet blocking thing... crazy for jobs that require Internet use.

Some of them don't seem as truly "fear based" as others, but there's definitely some good info there. The "you're lucky to have a job, yay!" stuff is spot on, as is the bit about over-reliance on the handbook and focus on silly corporate culture "values."

Heh.... when I worked in the mainstream, about 1/2 of those applied for sure at one of my jobs.

I did a bit of office work in my early twenties. I actually enjoyed it, but you know what? I don't think I could ever go back. I look back on what I was doing fondly, but everyone else who worked there* was a huge flaming dipshit. Lies, deceit, telling on each other, talking behind everyone's back, ignoring deadlines, begging for extension deadlines... And oh god, the "cool people" clique.

Yes, a cool people clique in a modern office enviornment. They were the attractive people who had nice hair, sharp jaw lines, and wouldn't hold the door for you, or hold the "open door" button in the elevator so that you could have enough time to get there, even while running. They also spend a lot of time talking shit, not getting anything done, and hitting on everyone who isn't interested in going out with such a shallow cunt.

I like working in an office. But I hate the kind of people who work office jobs. It was 100% worse than highschool the way people functioned in that place. Cliques? Cool people? Drama? Theft? It was like someone was secretely making one of those really unrealistic drama's that you'd see on Fox about "THE HARD PARTYING BIG SPENDING OFFICE WORKER".

The best people, however, where the ones who would try to be really intimidating to you. They were always guys, and always looked like they spent a little bit too much time getting ready in the morning. They'd get real close to you when they talked, and would walk around doing a constant lat spread all day long trying to look bigger. sexual harrasment was the norm in that place.

* Not everyone was a douche, just 90% of the people I encountered. One of them even openly admitted that he didn't get the job because of qualifications, he got it because the owner was his girlfriend's father :upsidedow




Fuck office jobs.

I always thought this is exactly how it would be. I've never had an office job in my life, but I've always figured the reality of the office environment was probably worse than high school. My "job" progression went like this: (seriously, I couldn't make this up)

Newspaper delivery
Grocery bagger
Fast food slave (Wendy's)
Warehouse stock boy (K-Mart)
Pizza Driver (Dominos)
7-Eleven Clerk
Commercial Radio Tower Installer (some were 180' ft in the air!)
Door-To-Door Light Bulb Salesman (yes, really)
Steel Mill Worker
Day Laborer (construction cleanup)
Forklift driver
Construction (Framing)
Construction (Drywall)
Mechanic
United States Military (Army)
Private Security
Bouncer (country bar)
Long Haul Trucker
AT&T Network Installer
Radio Announcer
Present Day: Adult Oriented Graphics Overlord



now I really feel fucking old.


:rasta