Unfear: Transform Your Organization to Create Breakthrough Performance and Employee Well-Being

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Eight Fear Archetypes in the Workplace

Think of the patterns of behaviors that you usually see in an organization: teamwork, coaching, initiative taking, innovation, bureaucracy, power plays, gossiping, scapegoating, backstabbing, and so on. The confluence of all the behaviors in an organization leads to high performance or to dysfunction—or, more often than not, some combination or interplay of the two.

What most people don’t realize is that to an extent, all these behaviors are external manifestations of how we relate to fear. When we aren’t aware of this, we remain stuck in biologically hardwired reactions. Organizations and the people within them blindly live at the mercy of their fears, and when they do, they are more likely to display ...