Want to know what might be holding back your leadership?
Fear.
Most leaders I talk to struggle with fear in one measure or another.
Fear can be so difficult to wrestle down until you realize how fatal fear is to leadership.
What’s so problematic with the fear that lives inside leaders? It’s simple.
You can’t follow fear.
Fear will try to kill your courage, your leadership and any progress you’re making because it knows if it wins it can disable your mission and it can disable you.
Here’s why unchecked fear will disarm effective leadership every time. Leadership is about taking people places.
Fear doesn’t know where it’s going.
Fear only knows where it’s not going.
As a result, no one can follow fear. You can’t. And definitely the people you lead can’t. Because fear doesn’t go anywhere except backward or sideways.
And yet (be honest), fear is a constant companion for many leaders.
So how do you know whether fear is getting the best of you as a leader?
Here are five signs that show that fear is undermining your leadership:
1. You avoid doing the right thing because you fear a backlash.
Fear makes you sell your soul. Not all at once, but in little pieces over time.
You stop being a person of principle and start being a pragmatist, not in the best sense of pragmatism, but calculated pragmatism at its worst.
And in the process, you even lose respect for yourself.
2. You imagine reactions to change more than you imagine the benefits of change.
If this is true, you’ve stopped running offense. You only run defense.
You stop leading out of conviction. You only now worry about how people will react.
When you won’t lead because of any anticipated reactions, fear has won.
