Regardless of what we might tell ourselves, our businesses, jobs and teams are not immune to self-induced fear. Our fears and anxieties affect both our individual well-being as well as the businesses we are a part of, often resulting in poor decisions and strategies.

In leadership, figuring out how to drive growth isn’t only about MBA-school topics such as go-to-market strategies or pipeline management. It’s about managing fear too—fear and anxieties in your own mind and the minds of your friends and colleagues.

Strategic Thinking Derailed by Fear

Many organizations continue to treat marketing as if it’s a tactical, short-term solution to generating immediate leads for their sales teams. A study performed by Accenture found that 37% of the 535 global-company CEOs who responded to the survey said that their CMOs would be the first fired if corporate growth targets weren’t met.

This type of short-term thinking kills the creativity required for marketing to deliver results.

“I blame it more on a business culture,” says Peter Field, author of an IPA report that analyzes marketing campaign effectiveness. “Marketers often [understand the need for long-term thinking] but their problem is they cannot convince the CFO, who is saying ‘I don’t give a damn about the long term, I just want a good quarter’. It is unreasonable to expect marketers to address the long term when their jobs and livelihoods are on the line.”

Instead, business leaders need to understand that marketing is more a marathon than a sprint. It takes strategic thinking and long-term planning. It doesn’t always produce overnight success, especially for startups who do not have brand recognition or more than a handful of customers. Getting people to hear your message and talk about your brand takes time.

Understanding Fear as an Inhibitor to Growth

Nurturing a culture where long term strategic thinking is encouraged and employees feel empowered, are essential traits of a healthy organization. But leaders can’t do that if they haven’t mastered their own negative, fear-driven thoughts.

In our age of rationality, many of us believe that reason is the only viable method of making decisions. Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist and author of Descartes’ Error, disagrees. Through a series of tests, Damasio has shown that using reason alone is inadequate. He works with patients who had damaged the part of their brain where emotions are generated. It made them unable to make simple decisions—should I have turkey or chicken for dinner?

Emotions play a huge role in our everyday lives. One day we might get into an argument with a colleague and tomorrow feel ashamed for the way we spoke. Psychologists have found that much of our thinking happens outside the realm of conscious reason and it’s beyond its control.

“Sometimes when we’re afraid of something,” Christopher Bader, a Chapman sociology professor told the New York Times, “even if our fears are irrational, that can lead us to make choices that will actually cause the thing that we are avoiding.” The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy—how your perception of reality can make the very thing you dread become true—isn’t new. Emotions such as fear trigger negative thoughts that affect our brains.

Anxiety can become a habit—your comfort zone. If that’s where you are, you can’t lead effectively.

Self-Awareness is Key to Confident Leadership

Psychologists, Dan Joseph and Daniel Newman, recently did a comprehensive study that examined the link between emotional intelligence and job performance. They discovered that in jobs that required extensive attention to emotions, higher emotional intelligence translated into better performance. Marketing and sales fall into these categories.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ or EI) is a term popularized by Dan Goleman in his book, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half. Goleman shares that although the qualities commonly associated with leadership are intelligence, decisiveness, determination and vision, they are not enough. The most effective leaders have a solid degree of emotional intelligence. In fact, he reveals direct links between a leader’s emotional intelligence and measurable business results.

Self-awareness, a key aspect of Emotional Intelligence, is a subtle force that is easily missed by those who lack it, but it is an essential quality of great leaders.

Being self-aware means that you are in touch with your own truth. When you lack self-awareness, you are more likely to take an authoritative and fear-driven approach to management. You often don’t have an accurate read on a situation, might behave in ways that demoralizes your employees and you might lack empathy. Your behavior could cause employees to operate from a position of fear—they won’t speak up, take risks, be creative or cooperate.

With a high degree of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, leaders can disarm anxieties that ultimately reduce productivity and create conflict.

One way to start this process of changing your own thinking is to keep repeating positive thoughts often. Whenever an anxious thought enters your mind, don’t give it the focus it’s craving, observe it without judging it, and then either focus on something else (such as your breath) or replace it with a positive thought. Doing so reshapes your brain over time to make pathways to new ideas and habits. It’s a concept called neuroplasticity, based on neuroscience.

With time, you will experience changes in the way you think and how you interact with others, improving your own life and the life of others.

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However, over time, it became clear that the finance and efficiency-dominated mental frameworks that still seem to guide managerial instincts and decision making in Manhattan, have slowed down its pace of innovation. This was especially true when compared to the growth and innovative leadership styles that have, in the meantime, emerged in Silicon Valley.

There were tangible differences from the start. First of all, it was difficult finding employees with the right skillset to use modern, cloud-based business management tools. Secondly, there was a lack of familiarity with new lead generation methods including nurture marketing or account based marketing across the organization. There were other differences too—more subtle perhaps, but still very important. In Silicon Valley, there is emphasis on independence of employees and their empowerment to be problem solvers, whereas in New York, I realized that there seems to be a structured top-down approach with employees following tightly defined management directives.

I’m not trying to position this blog into a mouthpiece for political ideologies. But these trends are worth pointing out because emerging marketing technologies are outpacing outdated management models. This is analogous to what happened with the manufacturing quality revolution that returned to the USA from Japan in the 1980s. It resulted in a necessary overhaul of motivational management styles to encourage employees to not just perform tasks but do them well.

Modern marketing methods like account based marketing rely on employees entering data accurately, reporting outcomes transparently and truthfully, and constantly tuning marketing campaigns to optimize their performance. However, in a top down approach where employees are worried about getting laid off or not receiving approval from their managers, they will often not provide the data necessary to make the right decisions. In these environments, employees are often hesitant to share ideas that could help optimize marketing campaigns and associated analytics, which contribute to a high velocity, rapidly growing opportunity pipeline.

If you see employees as sources of innovation and the providers of new solutions to problems, you will give them access to all data and tools needed and tap into their technical expertise and instincts for what marketing techniques work in the market place.

If your management style is more top down, then you’ll run the risk that they won’t tell you what you need to hear because they’re concerned that you might not want to hear the truth or that they could get in trouble. In the latter mindset, the company is more likely to view employees as cost centers that need to be managed and kept in check, because their sole contribution is to execute tasks, but not be consulted for their intellectual contribution and innovative thoughts.

Whether employees are seen as cost centers or as sources of growth has massive implications:

Empower autonomous decision making vs. enforcing directive management

• More brain power: In the empowered model, all the employees’ are thinking and coming up with solutions vs. just the executive staff. What’s the impact? More Bottom-up ideation and faster resolution of problems. With technologies like cloud based management systems or social media networks, the younger, more junior employees will be the ones knowing how to leverage them. If they keep silent, the organization loses out.
• Upside down pyramid: In the empowered model, management sets the overall goals and budgets, then asks the employees to put the plans together to achieve those goals. Management’s role then shifts to deliver needed resources and remove obstacles, and counsels as needed to accommodate budgetary or political realities.
• CEO commitment: If the CEO does not value analytics and transparency then modern, analytical marketing techniques are doomed to fail. The CEO needs to step up to this responsibility to leverage all the dashboards, analytics and real-time data the new marketing systems provide.

Drive needed cultural changes

• Celebrate corrective action: In a a complex lead generation environment that depends on leads coming through a multitude of channels like social, email, events, web traffic, or advertising, and that hinges on timely and accurate analytics, failure must be tolerated. At the onset of a new marketing initiative, no one will know what messaging, formats or channels will work, and thus everyone should be willing to shut down non-performing campaigns in favor of the ones that do perform. To that effect, management needs to define and fund the tools with which the employees can measure and improve their own department’s performance.
• Encourage risk taking: The entire system depends on trying new ideas. We used to rent latte machines for our events to drive traffic to our booth; even though the expense was significant, we tripled our lead volume through the booth from one year to the next. The same is true for new content pieces, messaging, or campaigns. Employees worried about getting tainted by failure will not initiate this needed experimentation.
• High ego vs. low ego: In a data-driven, fact-based organization there is no room for “because I said so” behaviors. The entire system depends on collecting data and accurately reporting on the conclusions that data drives. If politics or egos get in the way of accurate reporting, management will operate blind to the facts of what goes on at the frontline because data is withheld from them.

New kinds of employees:

• Hire self-motivated, self-starters: The entire philosophy of giving employees the tools to monitor their own work and their department’s performance only works if they can report bad news, as we described above, but they also need to be motivated to proactively find their own problems and improvement opportunities. Management needs to provide the tools and the culture for that to happen, but the employees need to seize the moment and truthfully drive the needed actions and analyses.
• Non-political problem solvers: We have written about the challenges of getting sales and marketing to work together, and especially during the ramp-up phases when marketing spends lots of money and no leads are flowing, the same can apply to marketing and finance. In a data-driven, transparent culture, management needs to constantly strive to eliminate political or manipulative behaviors because they are anathema to truth in reporting.
• Need to be detoxed from earlier experiences: I have always been amazed at how long it takes to get employees to trust that they will not be punished for reporting their mistakes, or for identifying improvement opportunities. Or for not supporting their management’s ideas, even if those ideas are outdated or bad. If someone has had past, bad management experiences, they may well be reluctant to contribute proactively and openly to the kinds of transparent analytics machine we have been talking about. If that’s the case, their trust needs to be earned so they begin to share the facts needed to optimize the lead machine.

Modern marketing machines with the associated real-time analytics are works of art. The upsides are motivated employees, high productivity, and faster and better innovation in the pursuit of rapidly growing pipelines.

There are no alternatives to efficiently and effectively leveraging these modern marketing and analytics approaches. We believe that the above dynamic is a contributor to the relative lack of innovation in certain sectors of the US economy: Distrust between management / investors and employees result in modern analytics tools and marketing methods to remain underutilized. As with the quality revolution of the 1980s, today’s innovation requires empowered employees who can be sources of growth. Autocratic or non-empowering management styles fail to leverage those technologies.

For some more reading, here are two relevant blogs on a related phenomenon, “Digital Taylorism”:

• New Taylorism: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21664190-modern-version-scientific-management-threatens-dehumanise-workplace-digital
• Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Taylorism

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