Leading a Team Through Fear: Ask This Before You Push Them Harder

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

On a HER Collective coaching call this month, a brand new manager told us she could not get her team to do the part of the job that brings in the money. She had been in the seat a matter of weeks. A long list of direct reports, a pipeline number to hit, and people who were quietly not making the calls.

"You guys are in sales roles," she said, repeating the thing she had been chewing on all week. "What are you afraid of?"

Then she went and found out, and that is the part I want you to have.

She sat down with one of her people one on one. Not to deliver a warning. To ask. And what came out had nothing to do with effort. The woman was afraid of cold outreach, full stop, and she did not want the travel the reshaped role seemed to require.

So the manager negotiated the travel down to a tight regional set of accounts and committed to coaching the sales skill herself. Later that same day they ran their first prospecting meeting together and it went fine.

"I feel like I got her head in the right place," she told us.

Then she added the detail that made the whole room sit up. A man on the same team had told her that same week that he was nervous about lead generation too.

One hour, one honest question, and what had looked like one woman's performance problem turned out to be a team-wide fear she can coach.

The Label Arrives Before the Facts Do

Here is the piece that gets me. Before that manager ever met this woman, somebody handed her a warning. She may be a challenge.

I know what that does, because I have been the woman with the label.

Years ago, on a call with a global team, a man kept interrupting me. I told him to be quiet. One sentence. I got called a “loose cannon”, and that phrase followed me around the company like a stray dog. Nobody asked me what happened on that call. The label was faster.

Then I spent years as a Chief People Officer sitting in the rooms where labels like that get said out loud and written down. All a manager has to say, in a room full of executives, is she is not ready yet. Everybody typically takes her word for it. One sentence closes a promotion cycle.

So when your person is not doing the thing, you have two moves in front of you. Reach for the label, which is fast and costs you nothing today. Or ask her what she is afraid of, which costs you an hour and gets you a producer.

How do I lead a team through fear when they will not do the hard part of the job?

Start from the assumption that the hard part is hard, and that nobody ever taught them how to do it.

Salesforce surveyed 4,050 sales professionals across 22 countries for its State of Sales report, published in February 2026. Forty six percent said they rarely get feedback on their sales conversations. Forty seven percent said they do not get enough practice before customer calls. Forty eight percent said they do not have the bandwidth for adequate cold outreach. The average seller spends 40 percent of her time selling.

Read those numbers as a manager. Roughly half your team has never been coached through the single most uncomfortable moment of their job, and they are being measured on it every quarter.

That is a coaching gap, and it belongs to you.

My line on the call was shorter. Nobody likes rejection, girl. Nobody. Not your top performer. Not the guy who looks fearless on the sales floor. Not you.

And this is rarely a confidence problem living inside one woman's head. I talked with Aoife O'Brien about that on Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors in an episode called Your Confidence Isn't the Problem. Your Workplace Is. When the conditions never include practice, feedback or cover, confidence has nothing to stand on.

You Are Running on Empty Too

I am not going to hand you a coaching plan without naming what you are already carrying.

Gallup reported in January 2026 that the average manager now has 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 a year earlier and nearly 50 percent more than when Gallup started tracking it in 2013. In its State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, Gallup found global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, the lowest since 2020, and manager engagement dropped to 22 percent, down from 27 percent the year before.

Managers are the most strained people in the building, and they are the ones everybody expects to keep the room steady.

Now add the part that is specific to us. The Women in the Workplace report from Lean In and McKinsey, published in December 2025, found that six in ten senior level women report frequently feeling burned out, compared with about half of men at their level. And for every 100 men promoted to manager, 93 women were.

So you got the seat with fewer sponsors behind you, you have more people than this role used to carry, and you are the designated calm one. (Cool. Love that for us.)

Which is exactly why the four questions below are built to be done once, in a batch, and then left alone.

Four Questions, One Hour Per Person

You do not need a new framework. You need four questions and one hour each. Put all of these one on ones in the same week so you do it in one pass and you are done.

1. What part of this job do you dread? Not what is hard. What you avoid.

2. What would have to be true for that part to feel doable? Let her name the condition out loud. The travel. A script. Doing the first one with you.

3. When did you last see this go well? She is looking for proof it is survivable, and she may have none.

4. What do you want me to do when you avoid it? Agree on that now, while nobody is defensive.

Then do what the manager on our call did. Go first. Sit beside her on the first call. Watching you survive the ask is worth more than anything you will ever tell her about it.

One more thing, from a different woman in our room who stepped into a senior role and found the teams she inherited had no agreed message and no clarity on how work got finished. She did not call it a talent problem. She wrote the point of view they were missing. Sometimes the fear on your team is just the sound of nobody having set the frame.

What You Get Back

Coaching one person through fear is slow, and some weeks it will feel like it is not your job. Here is the return.

You get a producer instead of a performance file. You get a team that tells you the truth early, while there is still time to make the number. And you get the thing that puts you in the next room, because a manager who turns around the people everybody else had written off has a story that travels, and that story is what gets quoted when the promotion list is being built.

So write it down when it works. Date, what changed, what it was worth in revenue or retention. You will need the receipts, and nobody is going to keep them for you.

Nothing changes until you do. One question, one person, this week.

If you want a room of women working on exactly this, come sit with us. HER Collective runs live coaching every week and brings in an outside expert every month, and the hard conversations get rehearsed out loud before you have to have them for real. Come see what it is. You can sit with us.

More on this pillar: Leading Your Team

I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I tell the difference between a team member who is afraid and one who is not trying?

Ask her what part of the job she dreads and what would have to change for it to feel doable. A person who is afraid will name a condition, like the cold call, the travel, or going first. A person who has checked out will not name anything. You will know inside one conversation, and you will have given her a fair shot either way.

What should I say in a one on one when someone is avoiding the hardest part of their job?

Keep it to four questions. What part of this do you dread, what would have to be true for it to feel doable, when did you last see this go well, and what do you want me to do when you avoid it. Then offer to do the first one alongside her. Salesforce found in 2026 that 47 percent of sellers do not get enough practice before customer calls, so practice is usually the missing piece.

Is my team's reluctance a training problem or a motivation problem?

Check the coaching first. In Salesforce's February 2026 State of Sales report, 46 percent of sellers said they rarely get feedback on their sales conversations. If nobody has watched your person do the hard thing and told her what to fix, she has no evidence she can do it. Treat it as training until the training is in place, then look at motivation.