When I’m teaching MBA students or executives or when I’m working in my role as an adviser to family-owned enterprises, I spend enormous energy looking for evidence of an emotion people try to hide. That emotion is fear.
Humans underestimate how much fear drives our behavior. We’re familiar with the “fight or flight” response that helped our prehistoric ancestors survive in a dangerous world, but we fail to appreciate how much this evolutionary imperative lives on within our biology—and how much it drives our behavior at work.
Over many years watching how fear shapes behavior within organizations, I’ve identified six common forms it can take. If the six forms were put into a Venn diagram, you’d see substantial overlap. Although people are sometimes driven primarily by one type of fear, more often these forces mix together, overlap, and reinforce each other.
People prefer not to talk about their fears. It makes them feel uncomfortable, weak, or vulnerable. We think of courage or bravery as virtues, and fear signifies the opposite. It’s not surprising we work hard to conceal it.
That’s a problem. To manage and lead people effectively, you need to understand what’s motivating them. When we pretend fear doesn’t exist, we’re neglecting to recognize a primary driver of our behaviors. The more openly we can learn to talk about our fears—and encourage those around us to do the same—the more likely we’ll be to create environments where people can do their best work and be happier while they do it.
Here are the six types of fear I focus on:
Fear of Punishment
This is the most basic form of fear. In organizational life, punishment can take various forms. The most obvious are explicit: bad performance reviews, financial penalties such as a reduced bonus, a demotion or, in extreme cases, dismissal.
But punishment in organizations is often more subtle. Who’s being excluded from meetings? Who’s getting fewer desirable assignments? Who’s being left out of the congratulatory memo from the boss?
In my first job on Wall Street, I was assigned to work for a bully. He questioned my intelligence. He called me stupid. Many days he seemed intent on making me cry. (I never did so in his presence.) He was using verbal punishment as a motivational tool, which didn’t work at all. It took me a few weeks, but I overcame my fear and told him I was asking to be reassigned. Fearful of the reputational damage if someone asked not to work for him, he changed his approach, and instead of berating me, he began teaching me what I needed to know to succeed at the firm.
Fear of Authority
Humans are keenly observant of power. Organizations are full of markers of status—job titles, org charts, executive dining rooms. If you’ve ever felt a knot in your stomach taking the elevator up to your boss’s boss’s office, you’re experiencing the natural fear of power and authority.
Recently I was in a meeting with a long-standing client and one of my firm’s new associates. The associate had prepared extensively, much more than I had. But as often happens, clients expect the senior person to present, so I was taking the client through the presentation.
About halfway through the meeting, when the client got up to refill her coffee, the associate slipped me a note: I think you’re working off the wrong numbers—that’s an outdated deck. I smiled at her and encouraged her to speak up when the client came back. She calmly said we were using an outdated deck, handed us new copies, and suggested we resume on page 16. We did. Hopefully this experience will encourage the associate to interrupt and speak up sooner next time.
Fear of authority plays out in other ways. When no one speaks until the most senior person in the room does, or when no one asks questions even when a leader invites them, it’s often due to fear. Leaders who don’t overcome the silence that’s created by this fear lose out, because the silence is often depriving them of valuable information that might help them lead more effectively.
Fear of Judgment
We’ve all experienced the phenomenon. You’re going to an important event, and you’ve chosen your outfit carefully. The moment you walk into the room, you can see people’s eyes moving up and down as they eye you from head to toe. They’re sizing you up, judging you, and it creates discomfort.
People judge us for an array of qualities: our appearance, our educational background, our friends and family, our socioeconomic status. At work, people tend to be most worried about being judged for saying something others believe is incorrect. That leads many people to keep their mouths shut even in situations in which speaking up would be the easiest way to solve a problem.
I once worked with a family-owned real estate company owned equally by four siblings. Three brothers ran the business day to day; their sister, who’d moved from the United States to Italy, served on the board. Over time, the brothers began to see the sister as meddlesome for voting against new investments and pushing the company to pay out profits in dividends.
Digging into the situation, I discovered the root cause: The sister’s lifestyle in Europe was expensive, and although her equity in the company made her wealthy, she needed more liquidity to pay her bills. She didn’t want to tell her brothers because she feared their judgment over her financial choices. We found an easy compromise: She sold a portion of her stock to her brothers, which eased her financial situation and made her more willing to go along with their plans to reinvest to grow the company.
Fear of Conflict
In my advisory work, my team and I are often brought in to try to resolve conflicts. Very often, fear is the root cause.
In organizations, conflict avoidance typically results in silence. Proposals are met with few questions and no objections, even when people privately doubt their odds of success. Smart leaders take steps to counteract the silence and foment polite dissent. For instance, the practice of red teaming formally assigns a group to probe weaknesses and provide a devil’s advocate view of a project. Anonymous suggestion boxes allow people to raise objections without being identified.
As much as I try to encourage polite conflict within my teams, I’ve experienced fear of conflict at my own firm. Recently I learned that two of my colleagues disagree strongly about the direction of a project. Fearing conflict, neither of them has said so in meetings. But outside the room, they’ve been complaining to others and working around each other’s decisions. I wondered why the project had stalled out—and when I found out about the unspoken conflict, I brought the two of them into the room, where we worked to get the conflict into the open to try to resolve it.
Fear of Failure
We fear failure because it represents a threat to our identity, a blemish on our resume, a flaw on the image we’re trying to present to the outside world. As a faculty member at Harvard Business School, I teach high achievers in whom this fear can be palpable.
We need to get over it. You can’t achieve anything meaningful without taking a risk, and any risk involves a probability of failure. When we don’t apply for the promotion, make the investment, or hire the candidate with the unconventional background, we need to assess whether fear is what’s holding us back.
I keep in touch with many of my former MBA students, and I see many of them stay in jobs they dislike even though they have ambitions of being entrepreneurs. They do so because they’re scared. One of the questions I ask would-be entrepreneurs is whether they have a backup plan. Many of them do. They’ll say something like, “If my startup fails, I can always go back to consulting.” I advise them that when they think this way, they’re not only fearing failure—they’re planning for it.
Fear of Ambition
This is being afraid to tell others you want more. Power. A promotion. Money. Recognition. Even in an achievement-focused society, many people feel an inhibition against trying to stand out too much. We prefer to blend in.
As a manager, I’ve experienced big losses when people have felt afraid to be open about their level of ambition. At least twice a year, I asked one of my most talented employees: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” She repeatedly told me how happy she was doing her current job. She loved her team and wasn’t looking for a change, she said. What she didn’t say is that she really wanted more responsibility, and she believed she was ready for it. One day she submitted her resignation—totally out of the blue, as far as I was concerned—and said she was taking a management role at another company. I was crushed.
Looking back, instead of generically asking about her five-year plan and accepting her generic answer, I should have probed more deeply, asking more specific and directive questions, describing the next role I had in mind for her, and gauging her reaction.
I’ve never met a great leader who shies away from fear. Never. And often I’ve seen people without a formal title be recognized as a leader because they had the courage to speak up even in the face of fear.
Aspiring leaders who don’t learn to do this are holding themselves back. And organizations that don’t build a culture in which it’s safe to talk out loud about fears won’t succeed for long.
Adapted from Unspeakable: The Taboo Topics We Avoid and How to Talk About Them, by Christina Wing (2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation). Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. All rights reserved.
