Unfear: Transform Your Organization to Create Breakthrough Performance and Employee Well-being

Two top experts on high-performing organizations show you how to reframe your―and your employees’―relationship with fear and anxiety to create a learning culture of engaged workers at the top of their game.

Fear and uncertainty have been undermining performance and well-being in the workplace for as long as we have had workplaces. Here’s a little-known fact of business: mismanaged fear is responsible for almost all of the dysfunction that most organizations experience. While fear can drive short-term results, it does so at the cost of high employee burnout and turnover. It also undermines long-term business performance. But we can’t eradicate it entirely; it is inherent to the human condition. Winning organizations aren’t fear-free; they know how to reframe fear into opportunities for learning and growth. They create resilient cultures of unfear.

In this timely and essential guide, McKinsey alumni Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas show leaders:

• The impact of fear, its biological underpinnings, and the archetypes through which it is expressed as patterns of behavior in organizations
• The strategies, techniques, and actions to bring about an unfear transformation
• The process begins with yourself―how to become an unfear individual
• Transformation doesn’t start with systems and structures but with mindsets and behavior―how to build unfear teams
• Employee well-being leads to high performance for your business―how to build unfear organizations

This proven approach to workplace anxiety reduces stress, boosts engagement, and overcomes obstacles that get in the way of success. It leads to personal rewards greater profits, and sustainable growth. This is only possible with a culture of unfear.

Gaurav Bhatnagar is the founder of Co-Creation Partners and has dedicated more than two decades to helping companies thrive and achieve breakthrough performance. Since founding Co-Creation Partners in 2010, he has designed and led programs and workshops for private, public, and social-sector clients across multiple industries, including financial services, basic materials, manufacturing, healthcare, and technology. Prior to founding Co-Creation Partners, he was a consultant with McKinsey and Company.

Mark Minukas is the managing partner of Co-Creation Partners and works with clients across multiple industries, including financial services, high tech, biotech manufacturing, IT services, and governmental offices, to deliver both top- and bottom-line improvements and build high-performing operations. An engineer by training, he was a Navy officer and member of the US Naval Construction Battalion (Seabees) and the Navy Dive Community. After that, he worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Company.