How do you shift from Fear to Courage?

Are you paralyzed by fear?

I recently came back from Amsterdam where I participated in The Conference Board’s summit called, Future: Innovate + Transform. The sessions were focused on three forces that advance innovation: Partnership, Technology and People. The group represented executives in manufacturing, R&D, strategy, technology and product development. When I walked into the room, I recognized the names of companies like P&G, Avery Dennison, SD Guthrie Berhad, and BASF.

Andrea Kates at the Conference Board Europe #FutureInnovate24 in Amsterdam last week. 

Just as the program was about to begin, I saw a familiar face. Someone I’d only seen on 3 AM conference calls (in my time zone). A person who had been instrumental to the success of a client engagement I led with Tata months ago, and whose input as a team mentor had brought a lot of firepower and creativity to the experience. I flashed back to the virtual sessions I’d facilitated from California for teams, in India and beyond, designed to break leaders of the habits that put up barriers to innovation and to pinpoint the biases and blindspots that keep lines of business stuck in their ways.

There he was—Ravi Arora,Vice President Group Innovation, Tata—getting ready to present in Amsterdam.  

Ravi’s written two classic books on innovation: Making Innovations Happen and Igniting Innovation the Tata Way. He’s known for understanding that change doesn’t come fast for a large company.

Coming from Tata, a company with a million employees, I expected Ravi’s talk to be heavy on process and how-to’s. But he surprised me when he clicked on an image that looked more like a cartoon than a Gantt chart.

In that room full of business leaders from all over the world, you could hear a pin drop when Ravi’s slide came on the screen. It was a picture of the stages of commercialization that I’m confident Tata has mastered since the company started in 1868: Generating Ideas, Seeking/Sharing, Selecting + Investing, Executing, and Monetizing.

Ravi’s slide had a twist. Under each of the strategic milestones, the same, single, unexpected word was repeated at every step: Fear, Fear, Fear, Fear, Fear.

Ravi was about to go on stage to share the stark truth about what happens when leaders are put in charge of a new venture, made responsible for challenging KPIs, assigned an ambitious revenue goal, or told they’re expected to figure out how to commercialize a new technology. At first, it’s fun—all of the possibilities of how you could hit your targets sounds exciting. 

But then, we lose our courage and face fears of incompetence, failure, loss of peer respect, and the concerns that we’ll never achieve commercial success.

The shadow kicks in, presenting every flavor of fear:

• What if we’re wrong about this project’s potential?

• What do I know about “X”, anyway? [Fill in with AI, global expansion, quantum, new customer segments or any other topic that’s on your plate for the first time.]

• How will we ever get this through the organization?

• What if this project sinks my reputation?

• If we succeed in the new project, what will happen to our current business?

• What makes us think we can actually accomplish this?

These fears are the biggest impediments to innovation. 

How do we overcome those fears and build the courage to lead our teams from what’s comfortable today toward what’s important for tomorrow? What does it take to become courageous leaders?

My first time meeting Ravi in person after working with him for over a year.

Used with Permission by Ravi Arora, Vice President Group Innovation, Tata. Author: Making Innovations Happen, Igniting Innovation the Tata Way.

The truth is that every time we lead, we need to drum up courage. If we don’t have a game plan to look fear in the eye, we’ll risk sinking into what I call SSS—Subtle Self Sabotage. Other projects will keep expanding to keep you from attacking the uncomfortable or the unknown. 

During my time in Amsterdam, I landed on a way to overcome fear when we are at a loss for where to start, by reflecting on Ravi Arora’s slide and tackling each component preventing us from bringing courage forward.

---

Try this…

• Try This… When Fear is Holding You Back

  1. Start with curiosity instead of judgment about yourself. Shift from questions about what could go wrong to questions about how you could learn more, who else you might bring into the conversations, or where else you could get support.

  2. Act, don’t ruminate. Getting started and keeping up momentum puts fear in the corner. The energy of the new initiative creates positive flow for your team and is a strong attraction for support with partners.

  3. Put courage on the calendar. Break down the fears into bits and tackle them one by one. If you’re fearful of customer response to a new product–name it, address it, and schedule a session to fix it. If there’s a technology that’s out of reach, make a game plan to learn it, and schedule a progress report. 

  4. Cultivate a core group of support with strengths in four dimensions of talent: big picture thinkers, connectors, technical capabilities, and logistics. Combined, this core team can bring reinforcement to replace fear with confidence.

Are you ready to conquer your fear? Take the 3-minute diagnostic to help you identify where you might be stuck and get an exercise to help spark the courage you need to quiet the fears.