Years ago, as a consultant, I attended a meeting to turn around one of America’s iconic retail brands. Sitting in the meeting surrounded by employees of the business and other consultants, we considered the state of the business. We provided insights into how the company could resolve its issues and reemerge as a trusted and sought-after brand. 

Being included in this group of pros was an honor, and, as I sat there listening to the issues at hand, I heard something alarming, to say the least. A consultant spoke to the value of fear in driving business outcomes. Essentially, this consultant said that if employees fear losing their jobs, they will deliver sales and boost business results. 

Fear is no way to run a business. 

Fight, Flight, Freeze

In 1994, Stephen Porges introduced the Polyvagal Theory. Essentially, the theory describes how information and energy enter the brain and drive reactions throughout the autonomic nervous system. The theory helps explain the fight, flight, or freeze response that humans experience. When anyone experiences fear that is intolerable, the brain naturally tells us to fight or flee, and if those strategies don’t work, then we freeze. The issue is that if we are spending our time at work fighting, fleeing, or frozen, we are not able to produce business results. And if we are not producing business results, companies underperform.

So, take a moment and think about your workplace. Do you see a lot of fighting among your coworkers or between departments? If you do, this may be the sign of a mentally unhealthy workplace, one that is set up to drive conflict internally rather than one that is designed to promote teamwork to beat the competition externally. For people to work together, their goals and objectives must align, and they need relationship rules based on commonly shared values that help them unite and tolerate stress. Otherwise, you’ll likely see employees run for the doors. 

Workplaces across the world experience turnover. Many companies even classify their employee resignations as “regrettable” when someone they want to keep leaves the business. Leaving is flight. When a person resigns, they tell the company that the environment has become so intolerable that they can no longer participate in that business’s employee community. We hear a lot about pay, promotions, commute, and the all too often referenced need to “spend more time with family” as the reasons employees leave. We also know that some business practices result in a company’s flight behavior, such as firing a person. Layoffs are commonplace too, and they often represent a flight response to low financial expectations. Flight is everywhere in business, yet we gloss over it with logic. 

By now, you might be wondering about the freeze response. It happens in business, too, because humans are the core of every business. Freeze shows up in managers who avoid decision-making because the stress of making the wrong decision is too much to tolerate. You may also see coworkers who underperform and have performance improvement plans because they get conflicting information and have no idea what to do with it to deliver desired business results. You may even see leaders who try to appease employees to ensure that everyone is “happy” rather than correcting core issues with the business that result in emotional dysregulation. 

Emotional Health is Mental Health

Workplaces can be mentally healthy. To achieve such a culture, leaders, managers, and employees need to feel safe, seen, heard, understood, and valued. So what does that mean? It means that relationships matter--effective relationships. One CEO said to me nearly 20  years ago, “business is entirely about relationships.” That CEO is right. Effective, trusted, secure relationships support emotional health and produce mentally healthy workplaces. 

Researcher W. Gerrod Parrot would likely point to the emotional continuum. On one end of this emotional continuum is fear and on the other end is love. Fear and love are powerful emotions and also core human motivators. If we intentionally use fear to motivate our workforce, we will likely see fight, flight, or freeze, which does not work in any team’s favor when trying to win in a marketplace. So, let’s try love. 

Think about someone who loves you unconditionally. Maybe this person is your grandmother, spouse, best friend, child, or even a neighbor. It is likely that you feel safe, seen, heard, understood, and valued with this person, and they probably feel the same way about you. This is love. Merriam-Webster defines love as “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” In the workplace, we might name this affection “professional love,” as in professional love for your manager, leader, or coworkers. 

When a workplace culture is based on love--and void of threat--it is highly likely that a greater degree of unity, teamwork, creativity, career and talent development, employee and client success, and financial results will emerge. It takes time and care to develop such a workplace, but it is possible. 

These companies exist, and you can be a part of a business that provides a safe place for its people, one where you are seen, heard, understood, and, yes, valued. Emotional health is mental health, and you deserve to be part of a mentally healthy workplace.