Is Fear Quietly Holding Back Your Team?

How fear disrupts learning, trust, and accountability

What if your team’s resistance isn’t a mindset problem at all—but a fear problem you haven’t named yet?

I met with a leader recently who was exploring a workshop for her team. As we talked through what she hoped would change, she admitted she’d been struggling with a lack of accountability and cohesion on her team. She paused for a moment, clearly frustrated and a little confused, and finally said, “They just need to have a growth mindset.”

To her, the mindset shift felt obvious. But she couldn’t understand why the people she depended on weren’t simply adopting it.

She's not alone. Many leaders can clearly identify the behaviours they want—more initiative, greater ownership, healthy accountability, but feel baffled when simply telling people to "have a growth mindset" doesn't spark change.

This conversation reminded me of something essential: before teams can embody a growth mindset, leaders need to understand the forces working against it.

Here are three reasons this work is harder than it looks — and why it matters.

1: Leaders often underestimate how fear shapes team behaviour

Teams don't drift into fixed mindsets because they're stubborn or uninterested in growth. More often, they're responding to fear, sometimes subtly, sometimes visibly, but always powerfully.

Research from Harvard professor Amy Edmondson demonstrates that when people feel psychologically unsafe (when they fear embarrassment, judgment, or repercussions), performance and learning drop sharply, even among capable and motivated teams (Edmondson 1999). People take fewer risks. They contribute less. They hesitate. And that hesitation quickly becomes a fixed-mindset environment.

In organizations where stakes are high, resources are limited, and scrutiny is constant, fear can surface in different ways:

• Someone hesitates to speak honestly because they worry about making waves.

• A staff member avoids experimenting because the cost of failure feels too steep.

• A long-time employee clings to old processes because they fear what change might mean for their role.

Carol Dweck's research on mindsets shows that fixed-mindset behaviour is often a protective response, an effort to preserve competence, belonging, or status (Dweck 2006). In other words: people don't resist growth; they resist what feels unsafe.

This is why simply telling a team to “embrace growth” rarely sticks. A real growth mindset can’t emerge in an environment where people feel exposed. It grows only where leaders consistently normalize learning, uncertainty, and “not yet.”

2: Leaders overlook the hidden saboteurs driving fixed-mindset habits

One of the most under-appreciated dynamics in team behaviour is how quickly the brain defaults to scanning for what's wrong. This is not a character flaw but evolutionary design. Psychologists call it negativity bias, the brain's ancient tendency to focus on danger or deficiency far more than possibility.

Shirzad Chamine’s work in Positive Intelligence translates this into something practical for leaders: the “Judge,” the inner voice that constantly evaluates what’s wrong with us, others, and our situations (Chamine 2012). The Judge is not metaphorical. It’s the survival system at work.

When the Judge drives team culture, you’ll see familiar patterns:

• Assumption spirals: People default to worst-case interpretations of others' intentions

• Overreaction cycles: Minor mistakes trigger disproportionate responses

• Defensive walls: Individuals armour up rather than open up

• Feedback becomes personal rather than developmental

The tricky part is that the Judge often looks reasonable. It dresses itself up as “high standards,” “critical thinking,” or “protecting the team.” Leaders misread it as rigour when it’s actually fear in disguise.

Dweck’s research shows how quickly the Judge locks people into fixed-mindset responses — avoiding challenge, concealing struggle, or interpreting feedback as threat rather than support (Dweck 2006). It’s not that people don’t want to grow; it’s that their saboteurs are faster than their intentions.

Until leaders can spot these internal dynamics in both themselves and in their teams, a growth mindset will always be aspirational rather than operational.

3: Leaders assume mindset shifts happen naturally rather than through practice

Mindset is often talked about as an inner attitude, something you either "have" or "don't." But research in learning science tells a different story.

Growth mindset is not an attitude.

It’s a practice.

Teams strengthen it the same way people strengthen any skill: through repeated behaviours, deliberate structure, and small wins.

In fact, one of the strongest findings in organizational learning research is that teams learn best when they run short, low-stakes experiments — testing something small, observing the outcome, and adjusting accordingly (Argyris and Schön 1978). These micro-experiments shift teams from theoretical learning to real-time discovery.

This is where the P-A-C-T model, developed by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, becomes so valuable. (Le Cunff 2024).

It breaks experiments into simple, doable components:

• Purpose — What’s the learning goal?

• Action — What small step will we take?

• Consistency — How often will we try it?

• Time — What’s our timeframe? (7–14 days is ideal)

This approach aligns directly with findings in behavioural psychology: small, consistent actions drive identity change far more effectively than large, infrequent efforts (Fogg 2019).

Yet many leaders assume mindset shifts happen because they’ve explained the concept.

But mindset is not taught — it’s trained.

Teams need repeated exposure to small experiments, regular reflection, and shared language. Without structure, growth mindset remains an inspirational idea rather than a lived experience.

Putting It All Together: A Practical Application for This Week

If you want your team to grow, don’t start with the pep talk. Start with the environment.

Try this: Identify one place this week where your team feels tension, hesitation, or uncertainty. In that moment, name the learning goal out loud. Then propose a simple P-A-C-T experiment — something small enough to try, safe enough to repeat, and defined enough to review.

Something like:

“What if, for the next two weeks, we end every meeting with a 60-second ‘what did we learn?’ round and pay attention to how it changes the conversation?”

Or:

“Let’s try giving each other one piece of specific feedback after every project for the next 10 days. Our only job is to notice what happens.”

Safety.

Curiosity.

Small action.

Time box.

Review.

Repeat.

That’s how teams shift.

Closing Thoughts

The leaders who build growth-ready teams aren’t louder, smarter, or more charismatic. They’re simply more grounded in the realities of human behaviour. They know that fear is real. Saboteurs are powerful. And practice, not pressure, is what unlocks change.

But here’s the hopeful part:

Once teams experience real learning, even in small doses, something opens up. People breathe easier. Conversations deepen. Accountability feels less like a threat and more like a shared commitment. The room becomes braver.

Growth stops being an expectation.

It becomes a way of working together.

Imagine what would be possible if your team had one safe experiment running at all times — something small, intentional, and focused on learning. How might that shift the energy in the room? What’s one growth experiment your team could start this week?

Footnotes

Argyris, Chris, and Donald A. Schön. Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978.

Chamine, Shirzad. Positive Intelligence. Greenleaf Book Group, 2012.

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, 2006.

Edmondson, Amy C. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–383.

Fogg, B. J. Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Harvest, 2019.

Le Cunff, Anne-Laure. **“Tiny Experiments: How to Build a Happier, Healthier Life One Step at a Time.” Penguin Life, 2024.