Stalingrad - Management by Fear

In Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, Antony Beevor describes the horrific brutality of this pivotal siege, which resulted in the first major loss experienced by the German armies of World War II. A recurring theme in the book is how the Russian army motivated their soldiers to fight. What lessons can we learn for our own businesses from this extreme and terrible situation?

As the Russian armies moved forwards, each attacking line (those running forward to engage the enemy) would be followed by a second line. This second line's job was to shoot their own soldiers if they ran away or even stopped for too long. If you charged forward, you would likely die from enemy fire. If you ran away, you would likely be shot by your own leaders. Throughout the siege, execution became a routine punishment for any display of cowardice, hesitancy, or lack of loyalty by Russian troops. Stalingrad, then, demonstrates the extreme definition of Management by Fear - "we will kill you if you don't do your job".

In the hell of Stalingrad, this approach did ultimately contribute to Russian success. Though horrifying, we see that such an approach was somewhat necessary, and somewhat effective. We wonder what we would have done, either as a soldier or a leader, if faced with the same extreme situation.

In management of people in our organizations, we certainly don't face the same challenges of Stalingrad; not even close. Yet many managers still consciously use fear to get people to do what they want. We know that fear does motivate - people generally try to avoid pain in its various forms - but when is fear appropriate and when is it damaging?

In Russia, in Stalingrad, most of the soldiers were conscripted, taken from their villages and forced into immediate active duty with little training and little equipment. They were not asked to think, they were asked to run forward, and do their best to shoot and fight. The likelihood of death was very high. Any sane person would be hesitant to charge into almost certain death. Combine this with the lack of value put on individuals in the 1940's Russian world view and the relative ease of conscripting more soldiers, and the individual soldier became an expendable resource. Sacrifice for the Motherland was the greatest honour (although the tendency to sacrifice decreased the higher up your were in the chain of command) So, the soldiers faced extreme fear and death in their job, the soldiers were forced to take on the job in the first place, the job didn't require much skill, and leadership could (relatively easily) replace soldiers who were lost.

In our business and service organizations, we have very different conditions. Though it may feel like we're under siege and engaged in battle, the reality is we are not. Our people have voluntarily taken jobs with us because they have an interest in what we do. Our people don't face terror or death in our organizations, though they might face some unpleasantness and challenges. Our people are usually not easily replaceable; we can't just hire warm bodies and expect good results, as many of us learned in recent boom times. And, much work in business is now knowledge work, technical work, service work, and leaders often don't know how to do the workers' jobs, let alone evaluate whether someone is doing the job or not. Further, we've stripped out middle-management in efforts to cut costs, so we really need our people to be engaged, interested and self-motivated.

In this environment, fear is very counterproductive. Fear, anxiety and worry inhibit creativity, inhibit communication, inhibit engagement, and distract people from their goals. Fear produces defensive strategies of self-preservation, rather than creative strategies of collaboration and corporate success. When we hire people, they have a fire burning to do great things with us. Management by fear extinguishes this fire, and replaces it with secretive attempts to survive within a system of anxiety and worry.

There may be harsh realities in our businesses and it's useful for employees to understand these realities - "unless we can reduce our prices by 15% in twelve months, this new competitor will put us out of business." But if you are intentionally creating fear for the purpose of "keeping people on their toes", the reality is that your style of management was proven unsuccessful back in the 1950's. It's time to change.