Overcoming the Fear of Extinction or Suffocation

In many organizations, there is an attitude of self-sabotage among workers. This is based on two types of fear: extinction or suffocation.

The fear of extinction rides on the rusty hinges of scarcity. Jobs are scarce, people and technology are not. Some employees don’t want to learn new technology because they fear that the technology will replace them in their job. The secretary that refuses to learn how to use computer programs to do her job more efficiently is self-sabotaging based on fear of extinction. If she learned how to do her job with the help of technology she would be four times as efficient. But if she was four times as efficient, only 25% of her day would be filled with activity. If only 25% of her day is filled with activity and she doesn’t know what else to fill it with, people might start to question the need for her position. And that scares her.

The other type of fear, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is the fear of suffocation. This is the fear seen at the desk of a worker at the department of public safety. This fear stems not from scarcity, but abundance. This is the idea that the job is still going to be there tomorrow regardless of how many customers you serve today. There will always be people that need a driver’s license, so it doesn’t matter if he serves 7 or 70 customers today. Either way, he’s going to serve the same unending flow of people tomorrow. If he serves them faster today, that just means he has to serve more customers before quitting time. And he fears suffocating under all of the work.

In both scenarios, the worker is trying to preserve his or her well-being. They sabotage the outcome of their work by not producing what they’re capable of producing. Neither the secretary nor the DPS worker is as efficient or effective as she or he can be in order to prevent extinction or suffocation.

But here is where their formula is flawed.

What these two don’t realize is that they’re measuring the future on the wrong rate of return. The secretary fearing extinction is thinking that her rate of return for work will diminish. The more efficient she becomes, the less work there will be and the less of a need for her position. The DPS worker, fearing suffocation, tells himself that the faster he does his job, the more he’s going to have to process, which means he’s going to keep getting the same rate of return for his work. No matter how fast he works, the work will always be there and he’ll be getting paid the same amount. “So why don’t I just relax, take my time and just do what I can within the eight hour day?”, he thinks.

However, there is a different outcome possible in this scenario. Workers that ignore the fears of extinction or suffocation and instead look for ways to approach the problem with a different mindset will ultimately end up changing the rate of return. They’ll even end up altering the scale of measurement. When the secretary becomes more efficient at her job by using new technology, she clears her day of the mundane tasks and leaves room for new ideas, new ways of doing things and new projects to come through. More work flows through her pipeline, enabling different parts of the organization to reach solutions faster, lifting organization as a result. When the DPS worker chooses to approach the customer not from a work flow perspective, but a problem solving perspective, the worker is open to new ways of thinking and approaching the situation. He frees himself to find ways to improve the problems rather than simply process paperwork. He has the potential to satisfy customers in a different way and change the environment of the organization as a whole.

Over time, this shifted perspective can change the status quo in the organization, enabling workers to serve the market in new and different ways. Re-channeling the fear can have long-term benefits to the system.

Coming soon…an example of what it looks like when a leader refuses to accept the status quo and ambitiously forges a new path as a solution to an age-old problem. Stay tuned!

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