My wife is good at her job. So are most of my friends. They are experienced, capable people who have built real things and solved hard problems. And for the past year or so, a significant portion of their mental energy at work has gone not into the work itself but into trying to read signals: Is the restructuring coming for us? Is this project about to be deprioritised? What does it mean that the skip-level hasn’t scheduled our one-on-one?

I watch this from close range. The work gets done. It always gets done. But something else is happening underneath it. People who used to bring ideas to meetings now bring updates. People who used to flag problems early now wait to see if someone else will. People who used to care about the quality of what they were building now care about being seen to care.

The work is the same. The people inside it are not.

There is a name for what is happening. It is a tax, and someone is collecting it.

What fear actually does

There is a common assumption in organisations that fear, or the threat of it, keeps people sharp. That a team which knows its position is uncertain will work harder to justify itself.

This is wrong. What fear actually does is make people narrower. A person in a state of chronic workplace anxiety does not think more creatively. They think more defensively. They optimise not for results but for survival: for being visibly busy, for avoiding mistakes that could be attributed to them, for not standing out in ways that might attract scrutiny.

The output looks like productivity. The dashboards stay green. But the things that actually make an organisation work — the initiative, the candour, the willingness to flag a problem before it becomes a crisis, the idea nobody asked for that changes the direction of a project — all of that requires a different environment. It runs on safety, not fear. And you cannot have both at once.

A team operating in chronic fear is giving you the minimum required to stay employed, and nothing more. You may not notice this for some time. The metrics will not show it immediately. What you will notice, eventually, is that the team has stopped surprising you. That problems arrive later than they should. That nobody volunteers for the hard thing. That the energy in the room is careful, not alive.

By then, the tax has been running for a while.

The leader who waits

It is easy to condemn the leader who actively stokes fear: the one who makes pointed remarks about headcount in all-hands, who names individuals when discussing performance in front of teams, who uses ambiguity as a deliberate instrument of control. That leader exists, and the harm they do is real. But they are not the most common problem.

The more common problem is the leader who does nothing.

Who acknowledges in a town hall that yes, there is a lot of uncertainty right now, and then provides no further shape to that uncertainty. Who knows that the team is anxious about a reorganisation and decides it’s easier not to address it directly until they have more information. Who notices that people seem disengaged and attributes it to external factors rather than the environment they have created or allowed.

This leader is not malicious. They are often conflict-avoidant, or genuinely uncertain themselves, or operating under constraints from above that limit what they can say. But the effect is the same. Anxiety left without shape does not dissipate. It grows to fill the available space, and it fills that space with the worst possible interpretations of every signal the team can find.

There is also, and this is the harder thing to say, a passive benefit available to the leader who lets fear persist. A scared team does not negotiate. It does not push back on timelines that are unrealistic or decisions that are poorly reasoned. It does not quit, even when quitting might be the right thing for the person. It complies. A leader can mistake this compliance for good management and never have cause to examine whether the environment they have built is one that a healthy person would choose.

This is not leadership. It is leverage. And the bill arrives late, but it always arrives.

The honest alternative

The starting point is not reassurance. Telling a team their jobs are safe when you do not know that is not kindness; it is a debt against their trust. When the reality turns out to be otherwise, and it sometimes will, you will have spent the one currency that matters most in a difficult period. What people need is not comfort. They need calibration.

There is a meaningful difference between “I can’t tell you anything” and “Here is what I know, here is what I don’t know, and here is what I will tell you when I do.” The first leaves people to fill the silence. The second gives them something to work with. Some of what the team is anxious about is grounded in genuine uncertainty. Some of it is catastrophising: the mind running patterns designed for physical danger on an ambiguous org chart. A leader who helps people name that difference is doing something genuinely useful. Not dismissing the fear, not amplifying it, but giving it a shape that allows for action.

The other thing that matters, and that gets abandoned first, is visibility. The instinct in difficult periods is to retreat to what feels manageable. The skip-level that gets quietly deprioritised, the all-hands that gets shorter, the one-on-ones where the hard subjects are not raised because there is nothing new to report. What the team reads in that absence is not neutrality. They read it as confirmation that things are worse than they know. Showing up, even without answers, is itself information.

And then, the business case. Make it to yourself, clearly, before you make it to anyone else. Not: my team deserves better because empathy is a value. That argument loses every time it meets a quarterly target. The argument that holds is simpler: I am getting the minimum viable version of everyone in this room. The version that does not surprise me, does not flag problems early, does not bring the idea nobody asked for. If I want the other version, the one that flags problems early and brings something I didn’t anticipate, I have to make it safe enough for them to show up.

For the people inside it

Most of what I have said so far is addressed to leaders. But the people I think about most when I write this are not leaders. They are my wife, and my friends, and the capable people I know who are spending their best hours reading signals instead of doing work they care about. This part is for them.

What you are feeling is real, and it is not a personal failing.

The anxiety that makes it hard to concentrate, the constant low-level signal-reading, the instinct to make yourself smaller and less visible. These are rational responses to an environment that has been, consciously or not, tuned to produce them. That does not make them less exhausting to live with. But knowing their origin is something.

The other thing I want to say is this: the part of you that still cares about the work, that still has an idea you haven’t voiced yet, that still notices when something could be done better: that part is worth protecting. Not performing, not offering up as proof of engagement, but protecting. For yourself, and for wherever you end up next.

Fear is a reasonable response to a threatening environment. Letting it become the only thing you bring to work is the tax that gets extracted from you, not from the organisation.

What it costs

The organisations that come through this period with something worth having will be the ones where enough people felt safe enough to keep caring. Not comfortable. Not unchallenged. Safe enough to take a risk, to say the hard thing, to invest in something whose outcome was not guaranteed.

That is not a soft metric. That is the whole game.

Leaders who use fear as leverage are borrowing against it. The team delivers, the quarter closes, the metrics are acceptable. And somewhere in the second year, you notice that nobody is surprised by anything anymore, because nobody is trying anything. The best people left quietly, for places where they were allowed to be the full version of themselves. What remains is a team that has learned, very thoroughly, to do exactly what is asked and nothing else.

It gets built that way. One avoided conversation at a time.

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