Leadership when people are scared II

We have covered some of the physiological effects of being scared. These in turn create change in the heart and the mind. The heart sends signals to the brain affecting the way it operates. We get to a situation where we can't think straight and we soon have the sensation of this. Thought becomes difficult, in fact all we can often to is concentrate of the feelings, which makes the situation worse. Basically our cognitions become flooded and overwhelmed. There is a very good reason for this. Danger produces a fight or flight response, which is fine when there is an immediate physical danger present that we either need to get away from or confront quickly and overpower. However as our lives are a tad more complex than when these responses were required our system doesn't have a way of easily distinguishing between fear from immediate physical danger and the danger of loosing our jobs, or the perceived danger of new and uncertain situations. Our minds and bodies therefore react the way they were programmed; for the more binary threats that existed when the programming was set.
Anyway the issue is that because many people react to uncertainty in this way the important point here is that in this state people are in an emotional space not a cognitive one, so simply resorting to 'reason' and 'logic' is unlikely to work at least in the first instance. Next some smart (and not so smart) things you can do as a leader of scared people

Leadership when people are scared

Leading when things are good is an art. Leading when things are difficult and people are frightened is a whole different matter. When people are scared a number of physical attributes occur which leaders need to be cognisant of as it will affect the way people receive and process information and make decisions.

1. The first thing that most people become aware of is that their heart rate increases significantly. In extreme cases people report the feeling that their hearts were going to pound its way out of their rib cage.

2. The next sensation is that their eyes are wide and that their pupils are dilated. The effect of this paradoxically is that too much light enters the eye and they lose peripheral vision, having to actually stare directly at things to see them with any clarity. This is in acute cases becomes tunnel vision and people find it hard to fix on any one thing with their eyes having to flit between things, often not long enough to take in any detailed information.

3. Their hearing becomes more acute, hearing things in greater clarity. However like the vision there is a paradox here in that whilst the hearing becomes sharper it also becomes more selective, taking in only certain information it deems to be part of the threat, excluding other sounds. People are often unaware that their auditory faculty has changed.

4. Physically people frequently report a range of affects including inability to walk properly, sick / knotted feeling in the stomach, tense muscles. In extreme cases the individual may find that they have lost the ability to talk.

Given these responses it is not difficult to see why leading people in this state takes something very different to normal situations, especially when you add the fact that the reason people are in a heightened emotional state is because either things are uncertain or difficult in some other way. However I have to say it is usually copious amounts of ambiguity coupled with some form of threat that flips people into negative emotional states. So is it is an uncertain situation that has risk associated with it, the leader is also likely (depends on the individual) to be under stress and not performing at their best which compounds the issue, which is why we tend to develop the emotional resilience of the leader(s) first before getting the team into a more resilient place.

The next blog will look at some things a leader should and shouldn't do in these situations.