Manage your drivers
Karsan isolates fear, in particular, as an emotion that you need to manage both in yourself and in your employees if your company is to remain successful over the long haul.
Fear is bred by risk and uncertainty, something that every business will encounter at some point.
“In our drive for growth, we have inevitably run into cash flow problems, and we have gone to the brink of bankruptcy,” he says. “That’s happened maybe three or four or five times in our history. When we are in one of those modes, a huge challenge for me is to keep my fear under control, and continue to manage the company for the benefit of the stakeholders, clients, owners and employees. We were very close in terms of cash flow problems to going belly-up or missing a payroll. If you miss payroll, you do a lot of damage to a company and you might not recover from that. So fear starts dominating, and under fear, you tend to want to fight or flee.”
Karsan says fear produces three essential responses in people: the adrenaline-spurred fight or flight mechanism or a tendency to freeze like a deer caught in headlight beams.
As a leader, the key is to emphasize those in your organization who have a tendency to stay the course and fight and neutralize the effect of those who tend to flee or freeze.
“As a leader, you have to be flexible,” Karsan says. “There might be individuals who are predisposed to fighting, some who are predisposed to fleeing, and some who are predisposed to freezing. First off, the way you manage it is you find out who the fighters are, and they are the ones who are going to be naturally accustomed to being on the vanguard of that battle. In a time of crisis, you take your fighters and put them on the front lines.”
Your fighters will be relatively easy to spot. They’re the ones who enjoy taking initiative and leadership roles and thrive on challenging projects. Identifying those who flee or freeze can be a bit more challenging for leaders in upper management. Once you’ve identified those who are less willing and able to meet a fear-producing challenge, you need to decide how best to handle the situation.
“With people who flee, you really only have two tools at your disposal,” Karsan says. “One is that you try to engage them and pull them into the decision-making. You explain how we’re going to get through this, and how we’re going to create a positive environment. The second choice is to find out what drives the flee response. What is the next level below the fear for that person? Is it a fear of having an incident of failure on their resume? A personal fear of failing? The fear of not having a paycheck? You need to find out what that fear is, and attack it. You can be flexible around how you do it, but you need to develop work plans around each of those three modes of fear.”
Fear can take hold within an organization when employees and managers are worried about potential injury to their egos. Which means that, along with a person’s fear points, you need to identify what inflates and deflates their egos.
“When you think about ego, it’s the internal driver to want to do well,” Karsan says. “It can go to an extreme, to narcissism, but in the midpoint is this incredible will to overcome odds to succeed. When ego is not out of balance, it is essential for success.”
You need to know what drives the egos of your employees so you can understand how to best utilize their egos to better your business. Some employees are driven by receiving accolades. Some are motivated by working on a product or project that substantially affects the markets you serve.
“In software, for example, some engineers have a lot of ego around the number of people that touch the application they created,” Karsan says. “So you make sure that your super-high performers are working on your most robust and highest-selling products. There are some that have an ego around speed and accuracy of coding, so you might have them fixing bugs in the software and the like.”
You need to dig for underlying reasons when it comes to the other emotional drivers that affect your work force. Even positive characteristics, like a sense of purpose, can have negative consequences if not managed properly.
“We have a sense of purpose as a company, which is to serve humanity,” Karsan says. “To many people, ‘purpose’ is a very positive word. But if we let our people get too extreme on that phase, every one of our leaders would be sitting on three or four nonprofit boards and we would be giving away our work pro bono to a hundred different nonprofits. Then, we’d go belly-up. So while serving humanity is a part of our founding reason and something we continue to do as part of our mission, we can’t lose sight of the fact that a business is built on growth and profit.
“You always need to remind yourself of two things: Cash is king and sales rules.”
