Stop Running Your Company on Fear
The Fear of Failure Behind Hustle Culture
Does Fear Run Your Company?
No matter how confident they might appear, nearly everyone is afraid of failure. We’re social animals, and humiliating ourselves in front of the pack isn’t exactly on our list of favorite pastimes. So it’s no wonder that those few souls brave enough to lead companies—even highly successful ones—still tend to be terrified that they will publicly prove they don’t have what it takes.
Faced with a tough decision, these powerful, intelligent, resourceful leaders often lean in and ask me earnestly what I think they should do. I smile and laugh, because who would know their business better than them? They know what to do. They just don’t know whether it will succeed. Consciously or unconsciously, they’re afraid of failure.
They’re stressed, so their team is stressed. They rush, so their team rushes. Afraid of conflict, some avoid hard conversations. Afraid of losing control, others micromanage instead of delegating. Either way, their teams notice and adapt accordingly. Soon the fear of failure guiding their days is guiding their team too—and thus running the company.
Does fear run your company? Well, does your stress come and go? Or do you feel persistently stressed over days, weeks, or months? Do you rush occasionally when speed matters? Or does it never feel safe to slow down? Is it just you, or do coworkers complain about the same issues?
Rushing is the pure physical manifestation of fear. Our jaws tense up, our eyes scan for threats, our pulse quickens, our breath becomes shallow. It’s great preparation for sprinting away from a predator! But it’s terrible preparation for a day spent in meetings and emails. You can’t make thoughtful decisions when your nervous system is in fight-or-flight. Running from danger for even a few minutes is exhausting—let alone weeks, months, or years.
But rushing is just one example of fear-driven behavior. It’s shocking how often fear of failure rears its head at work! It’s not just worrying you’ll be fired. It’s always feeling behind, no matter how many hours you work. It’s feeling obligated to read and respond to messages at all times, no matter your other priorities. It’s having a thought in a meeting, but deciding it’s too risky to say out loud. It’s punishing yourself or making excuses for mistakes, instead of learning from them and doing better next time. Fear of failure distorts the significance of these small worries until they truly feel dangerous—and we react accordingly.
If you want to know how dominant fear is in company culture, look how these fear-driven behaviors are glorified! We reward people who never stop working, never make you wait for a response, never ruffle feathers in meetings, and seemingly never make mistakes. But we seldom consider their motivation. Is their uncommon devotion driven by passion for the work? Or fear of the consequences if they stop? It’s the difference between a sustainable pace and inevitable burnout. When I ask, usually they say they have no choice but to comply.
Sounds bad, right? This is a highly ineffective way to run a company! Never mind the ethical implications of cultivating such a toxic environment. It burns people out, creates unnecessary conflict, and dulls the impact of their hard work. It’s tough to create a massive success when all your focus is on avoiding failure! Yet it’s everywhere, especially in the risk-laden startup world: teams stressing and rushing and hustling to avoid failure.
Anyone who’s run a business will tell you: failure is inevitable. The more ambitious your vision, the more failure you can expect on the path to glory. Intellectually, it’s straightforward: the road to success is indeed paved with many, many failures. Emotionally, it’s challenging: it takes real courage to embrace risk-taking and the failure that comes with it.
How Does This Happen?
It would be easy to lay blame at the feet of the founders and CEOs who started and run these companies. But I know these people: they’re my clients. They didn’t set out to create a toxic work environment—they just wanted to win! They could have stuck with a stable, prestigious job in middle management at a blue chip company. Instead they chose to take a big risk: to dream up a company out of nothing and stake their reputation on making it real.
I can’t overstate what a courageous and vulnerable act this is! Sure, the business world glorifies entrepreneurs, but that’s after they’re successful. Before they’re successful, people call them crazy—and not in a fun way. Their parents wonder why they would abandon their hard-earned place in the world for nothing. Some of their peers are jealous, others are patronizing or dismissive. Who do they think they are without their big company title?
I set this context to say that if you think working at a startup is scary, founding one is truly terrifying. So it’s not exactly a mystery how fear creeps into these companies’ cultures at their earliest stages. For many founders, failure feels not like a distant possibility but a daily threat. So it seems entirely reasonable to treat it as an ongoing emergency! It’s only later the costs of that culture emerge: the personal, interpersonal, and business consequences of every employee being in constant fight or flight. Whether something’s actively on fire or not, there’s a perpetual sense of danger—and it comes right from the top.
Some leaders eventually recognize their mistake and approach me for help reshaping their fear-driven culture. But others come with the opposite goal in mind: pushing even harder and faster! How can they work long hours at maximum intensity without burning out? How can they push their teams to work just as hard as them without complaint? How can they set a pace that guarantees they produce quality work on time and achieve all their goals?
That’s when I share the hard truth with them: they probably can’t sustain any of those for long. Each of those outcomes are fundamentally unsustainable, even with the most passionate, devoted, fearless team. Motivating them with fear might get you there temporarily, but it won’t last. Fear isn’t meant to be sustainable! Sure, it gives us an extra boost in energy and alertness—but as a last resort, when our safety depends on it.
Some leaders are understandably skeptical of this view. When you’ve spent years immersed in hustle culture, it’s easy to think working harder is always the answer. Often they’re proud of their “culture of urgency,” so of course they push back! These leaders hire hustlers and push them hard, aiming to beat the odds and achieve outsize results. People who don’t want to hustle? They can go work somewhere else.
These leaders tell me their intense work culture is a necessary reaction to their circumstances, especially in the age of AI. For them the stakes couldn’t be higher, and they’re looking for teams that are similarly committed! Faced with an extremely dynamic and competitive market, and a finite number of months until their burn rate empties their bank account, they see no choice but to perpetually rush towards their next milestone.
I get it, but I don’t buy it. My experience is that fear-driven work cultures exploit people already prone to fear of failure, and burn them out without ever creating a sustainable business. Let’s check the facts: we always have a choice, and founders have more choice than most. They’re choosing to push their teams to the limit despite ample evidence that it leads to burnout. It’s unsustainable at the individual level and the organizational level. It’s the best employees, with the most options, who jump ship first! Pushing people that hard produces worse outcomes, not better ones: unsustainable leadership is ineffective leadership.
So given millions of dollars in the company bank account and the freedom to cultivate any culture they like, why would leaders choose to spend every day running from failure? Often they’ve spent their whole lives proving their worth in progressively more prestigious institutions: top universities, blue chip companies, unicorn startups, maybe even Y-Combinator if they’re lucky. They’re used to winning!
But these institutions all provide reasonably clear paths to success within a few months or years. No matter how many essays Paul Graham writes, there’s still no path to guaranteed success in startups. Eventually failure comes for all of us, and often it’s the high achievers in leadership that are least equipped to cope with it. Of course they do everything in their power to avoid failure! But there are better ways to build a great company.
What’s the Alternative?
Now consider a company run on passion instead of fear. Passion is like sunlight: a safe, reliable, near-infinite source of energy. Fear is like oil: an explosively powerful source of energy—but dangerous and unsustainable. It’s easy to fuel your company with fear. Like oil, it’s readily available, ignites easily, and burns with intensity. But eventually it runs dry—or goes up in flames.
Fueling your company with passion takes a bit more work. You have to help your people feel safe for their passions to emerge! Otherwise their fears will always take priority. Show them it’s OK to have an off day every so often: everyone gets sick, worried, frustrated, tired, disappointed or distracted from time to time. Show them it’s OK to share what they’re thinking and feeling, even if they disagree with those in power. Show them it’s OK to log off on evenings and weekends, to take real vacations. Show them it’s OK to make mistakes.
That doesn’t mean no accountability! Go ahead: set expectations, give feedback, mete out consequences as necessary. Clear paths to success help people feel safe. It’s endlessly running from failure that feels dangerous! It’s still on them to work through their feelings and figure out how to meet their goals. But they’re more likely to succeed if you let them know it’s OK to fail sometimes too.
Making space for failure helps people feel safe enough for their passions to emerge. Turns out people are positively brimming with untapped passion! We all want to change the world for the better: that’s passion for societal development. But our passions for personal and interpersonal development can be equally powerful.
Personal development is becoming the person we want to be. Our passion to do better, to be better, to learn and grow, to live by our principles, to solve problems, and to create meaning in our lives can be a powerful force for change.
Interpersonal development is creating genuine relationships with the people around us. We do things for others we would never do for ourselves: out of passion for service and duty, building effective teams, cultivating harmonious relationships, and creating impact that would be impossible alone.
Culture comes from the top. So transforming a fear-driven culture to a passion-driven one starts with the CEO (or founders) working through their own fears. I love helping these folks regulate their emotions because the impact can be so massive when they sharpen those skills. They can find calm, confidence, and passion no matter the challenges they’re facing. They can cultivate those feelings in their teams instead of fear. They can be proud of the culture they’ve built: the potential impact of a calm, confident, passionate team is immeasurable.
Curious how to work through your fear of failure and run your company on passion? Please reach out or comment with your questions! I’ll write about how to tap into the endless energy and enthusiasm of passion next time around.