Fear

THE TENSION

Fear. For most technical professionals stepping into leadership, the fear is not of failure - it is of exposure. The fear that the people you now lead will discover, sooner or later, that you are not quite who they think you are.

“Impostor syndrome doesn’t announce itself. It shows up as the decisions you don’t make.”

THE SCENARIO

Fatima Al-Rashid has been Mine Geospatial Team Lead at Rio Tinto’s Iron Ore Operations for six months. She manages surveying, pit mapping, and 3D spatial modelling across one of the most demanding operational environments in Australian resources - high consequence, tight tolerances, significant safety implications in the work her team produces.

She is, by every measurable indicator, performing well. Her manager has told her as much. Her team respects her. The outputs are accurate and on time.

What Fatima has not told anyone is that she spends a significant portion of every day managing the fear that she will be asked something she cannot answer - something that will reveal, to the geotechnical engineers or the mine planners or the operations leadership, that she is not fully equipped for this role.

This fear has a shape. She avoids putting herself forward for the inter-disciplinary working group. She defers to the senior engineers even when her spatial read of the situation is the more accurate one. She over-prepares to the point of inefficiency, and she second-guesses decisions she made correctly the first time.

Last week, her team member Yusuf flagged a survey discrepancy in a critical pit boundary. Fatima knew the answer. She took two hours and three conversations with people she didn’t need to consult before she gave it. Yusuf noticed.

WHAT’S DRIVING IT

Fear, in the Being Framework, impacts how you relate to perceived dangers or threats. For technical leaders, the threat is often not physical but reputational - the perceived danger of being seen as less capable than the role demands. It is always related to something particular in the world and has a distinct object. For Fatima, the object is exposure.

The way this fear operates is insidious because it is not always visible as fear. It presents as caution, thoroughness, deference - qualities that can look like virtues. But underneath, each of those choices is being made in service of protection rather than leadership.

The cost is not just to Fatima’s efficiency. It is to her team’s experience of being led. Yusuf needed a clear answer in a timely way. What he got was a performance of certainty that arrived late.

A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FEAR

A healthy relationship with fear means that even though you identify threats, perceived dangers, or the discomfort of not knowing, you are still able to make appropriate decisions and take effective action. Instead of avoiding your fear, you acknowledge it - and remain powerful and courageous in spite of it.

In practice, this looks like Fatima trusting the answer she has and giving it. It looks like putting herself forward for the working group, knowing she will sometimes be the person in the room who learns rather than the one who teaches. It looks like a team that experiences their leader as confident and accessible - not because she has eliminated doubt, but because she does not let doubt make her decisions.

REFLECTION PROMPTS

• What is the specific version of ‘being found out’ that shapes some of your decisions as a leader?

• In what situations do you defer, delay, or over-consult when you already know the answer?

• What would your team’s experience of you be if you acted from your genuine capability rather than from the management of how you appear?

• If the fear of exposure did not have a vote in your decision-making, what would you do differently this week?

  
  

If this touched something that lives close to your experience as a new leader -

the Being Profile surfaces exactly how fear operates in your leadership — its shape, its cost, and what becomes available when you are genuinely with it rather than managed by it.

Get in touch at hello@mappingbeing.com.au

While the organisations referenced exist, the team lead, other people and the team name have been used for demonstration purposes only. Any resemblance to real-life people, teams, organisations or situations is purely coincidental.

Reference: Tashvir, A. (2021). BEING (p. 217). Engenesis Publications.

[Published: 11 June 2026]