Integrity Ideas are specific actions a leader can consider during the RE-ALIGN step of Integriosity^®—actions that will begin to RE-ALIGN the organization with Biblical beliefs, principles, and priorities.  You can find more Integrity Ideas at Integrous | Integrity Ideas (integriosity.com)

INTEGRITY IDEA: Forbid Fear

Although Scripture certainly warns against fear of man, “Forbid Fear” is not about telling people to be unafraid. “Forbid Fear” is about implementing policies and practices that cultivate a culture in which fear is neither used to manage people nor encouraged as a way to gain advantage over others—even when it appears to produce short-term results.

Integrity Ideas are practical actions toward implementing a bigger WHY for the organization.  Some are helpful ideas to consider as a faithful leader prayerfully discerns how best to steward the organization. Others may be important steps in the RENEW/RE-IMAGINE/RE-ALIGN/RESTORE process.

“Forbid Fear” falls into the “necessary” category as part of faithful stewardship in alignment with the Creation Mandate, Imago Dei, the Golden Rule, and the commandment to love your neighbor.

The Inspiration

This post was inspired by a recent article in Above the Law titled “The Biglaw Firms That Strike Fear In The Hearts Of Opposing Counsel (2027).”  It discussed a recent ranking published by BTI Consulting Group of “the firms most likely to trigger dread in opposing counsel, as determined by a poll of in-house counsel.” The ranking places firms in several categories such as the “Fearsome Foursome,” “Feared Opponents,” “Awesome Opponents,” and “Intimidating Opponents.” The BTI release starts with the sentence, “Nobody wants a fair fight.”

Although this ranking celebrates “fear” as a tactic and tool to achieve concessions from opponents, it prompted us to focus on how fear can creep into an organization. The word “fear” comes up hundreds of times in our posts, and we have touched on how it is a hallmark of business as usual manipulation. But we have not addressed intentional discouragement of the “fear” tactic as an Integrity Idea.

Biblical Principles

Proverbs 29:25 warns that, “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” This verse explains not only the effectiveness of fear as a tactic, but also the potential fear-based motivation of the person using fear as a tactic as well as the reason it has no place in an organization seeking to align with Biblical beliefs, principles, and priorities.

The use of fear as a tactic or tool to manipulate a stakeholder is an attempt to catch that stakeholder in a trap. It is a trap that can put pleasing the person laying the trap ahead of doing the right thing.  There is also a good chance that the person laying the trap is doing so because they have been ensnared by fear rather than trusting God. For all those reasons, laying that trap cannot align with trusting God and seeking Biblical flourishing.

Consider the following additional verses in the context of using fear as a tactic or tool:

“Masters . . . stop your threatening.” (Ephesians 6:9)

“You shall not rule over him ruthlessly but shall fear your God.” (Leviticus 25:43)

Speaking to elders, “[S]hepherd the flock of God that is among you . . . not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.” (1 Peter 5:2-3)

Perhaps the most poignant Biblical example of fear failing as a tactic is found in 1 Kings 12 (and even labeled “Rehoboam’s Folly” in the ESV).

• Rehoboam is about to become king and all the assembly of Israel come to ask him to lighten the hard service inflicted by his father.

• The old counselors advise, “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever.”

• The young counselors advise Rehoboam to say, “And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.”

• Rehoboam follows the advice of the young counselors to use fear and the northern tribes rebel and the kingdom divides, “So Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day.”

The “Way” of Business as Usual and the Snare of Fear

While necessary in the pursuit of faithful integrity, “Forbid Fear” is countercultural, because fear as a tactic and tool is a hallmark of business as usual and the “way” of the world. It flows naturally from the key characteristics of business as usual.

We devoted post #169 to describing The “Way” of the World and focused on four key attributes of the “way” of business as usual that are at odds with the “way” of God’s Kingdom:

• Profit as Purpose

• A Scarcity Assumption

• A Self-Interest Assumption

• A “Can We?” Culture

When these work together, organizations and people operate out of fear and use fear to manage others, which leads to manipulative and dehumanizing “survival” practices.

Because an organization manages to its purpose, a key role of the organizational culture of a Profit as Purpose business will be to drive profit. Fear as a survival practice in a culture focused on maximizing profit is tempting because it often works, at least for a while, to achieve a desired result—lower prices from suppliers, compliance from employees, higher prices from customers, and concessions from opponents.

The Scarcity Assumption means everything is a zero-sum situation (my gain is your loss and vice versa). A Scarcity mindset is devoid of trust in God and can lead to fear. That fear can lead, in turn, to using fear as a tactic to “win” the zero-sum situation.

Self-Interest is the assumption that people are self-interested and will act in their own self-interest. People acting in their own self-interest are more easily manipulated through fear-inducing mechanisms of reward and punishment.

A “Can We?” Culture is one in which ends justify means and ethics or the law are seen as the only boundaries (or even obstacles) in the pursuit of the organization’s purpose.  When faced with a choice, people are explicitly or implicitly rewarded for asking “Can We?” choose the alternative that most aligns with a WHY of Profit as Purpose.  Ken Eldred has observed:

Amorality is becoming more and more the predominant moral foundation in the Western world today. The question is not whether something is right or wrong but whether it’s legal or illegal.

In a “Can We” Culture, competition (whether internal or external) and a fear of losing sales (both tied to the Scarcity assumption) can lead to pushing (or even crossing) boundaries.  It is unprincipled, condones risk-taking, and has a short-term focus. It does not worry about whether using fear as a tactic to manipulate stakeholders is the best long-term strategy or the “right” thing to do. It is toxic to the desire we believe is built into each human to do the right thing and glorify God.

Problems with The Snare of Fear and the “Way” of the World

The appeal of fear as a tool for controlling people has a long history. Machiavelli expressed the calculation in The Prince, arguing that, if a ruler cannot be both feared and loved, “it is much safer to be feared than loved.”  In Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear, one character observes, “And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”

In post #171 (How the World’s “Way” Wrecks “Work”), we detailed how the way of the world, which includes using fear as a tactic and tool, is contrary to God’s design for business, work, human interaction, and the world.

• Profit as Purpose, and the use of fear to manipulate employees, suppliers, and customers, devalues human dignity. When profit is the primary end of a business, people become a means.  Treating people as a “means” is dehumanizing.

• The Scarcity Assumption is devoid of trust in a God of abundant provision. The God of the Bible is a God of abundant provision, and a basic Biblical principle is that God can be trusted. Scarcity encourages manipulative and dehumanizing “survival” practices like using fear as a tactic.

• Another overarching Biblical principle is to love and care for others–we are to treat others as we would wish to be treated and as God has loved us.  In Genesis, humans were created in the image of a relational God.  The Self-Interest Assumption does not prioritize or encourage caring relationships or community–it creates an environment based on competitive behavior and mistrust in which fear can be used to manipulate and manage stakeholders.

We can see this wreckage in real-life examples of how fear tactics have been used to manipulate stakeholders. For example:

• Employees. The Wells Fargo scandal that came to light in 2016 revealed how fear was used to drive employee behavior. A Wall Street Journal article about the sales culture at Wells Fargo described one employee’s experience, “Ms. Kamar says laggards were threatened with termination and sometimes criticized in conference calls.”  Our recent post on “ghost” job listings discussed employers using “ghost” job listings to make their employees feel replaceable.

• Suppliers. Post #082 (RE-IMAGINED Implementation – Culture and Capital), included a description from a Wall Street Journal article about how the vice president of procurement for Apple Inc. used aggressive negotiations tactics that played on suppliers’ fear of losing Apple’s business to another bidder to seek concessions and better terms. It noted that Apple CEO Tim Cook “so valued Mr. Blevins’s work driving down costs that the CEO tapped him to manage negotiations for the glass encircling Apple’s futuristic new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.”

He put bidders in conference rooms and went from room to room, pushing them to go lower. If you don’t come down in price, he said, another bidder would. He used familiar negotiation tactics, including prolonged silences and bluffing numbers. . . While Apple got what it wanted, such techniques can strain supplier relationships, some people familiar with his approach said. “His job is to Viking a town and get every resource out of it,” a former Apple colleague said of Mr. Blevins. “It’s like killing sheep versus shearing them.”

• Customers. In post #305 (Encourage “Pinocchio Marketing”), we described how marketing in the way of the kingdom of the world is often deceptive and selfish—manipulating and preying upon customers to maximize sales and ultimately profit, at least in the short-term.  Fear is one tactic, using manipulative psychological practices to prey upon people’s fears, insecurities, ignorance or desperation. You have probably experienced the social media advertisement that deceptively suggests scarcity of supply and a risk that the product will run out, or the price will go up.

• Opponents. The BTI Consulting ranking of the most “feared” law firms can do damage by celebrating fear as a litigation asset. It can encourage lawyers to pursue a fearsome reputation through aggressive tactics and encourage in-house counsel to value fear when choosing lawyers to pursue or defend lawsuits.

Fear as a tactic works—at least in the short term. It works until the employees become disengaged or leave. It works until the suppliers decide to prioritize the needs of other customers or simply move on. It works until customers stop trusting you. It works until a law firm gets sanctioned for its tactics. Marketing guru Seth Godin observes:

The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand. . . You can do it, no one can stop you. You shouldn’t do it, though, because you burn brand trust and you can’t get it back.

More importantly for a faithful leader, it is toxic to the pursuit of faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing. It is toxic because it works against Shalom in an organization, devalues human dignity, is devoid of trust in God, and does not prioritize community.

CONTINUUM: Policies, Practices

The Integriosity model organizes “heart change” along six Covert-Overt Continuums.  There is nothing inherently magical about these categories, but we believe they are helpful in thinking about practical execution of a Re-Imagined Purpose, Re-Imagined Values, and a Re-Imagined Culture.  The Continuums are Prayer, Proclamation, Policies, Practices, Products, People.

Each Continuum represents an area in which leaders can begin to think about, plan, and institute Re-Alignment changes to the heart of the organization.

“Forbid Fear” is on the Policies Continuum and the Practices Continuum. It involves establishing organization-wide policies discouraging the use of fear as a tactic or tool, as well as implementing practices to affirm its commitment to cultivating a culture that aligns with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities by valuing, promoting and prioritizing relationships, community, human dignity, and flourishing.

COVERT-OVERT RATING: Highly Covert

The Integriosity model breaks the Covert-Overt Continuums into six gradations—from Highly Covert to Highly Overt—that we believe are helpful in beginning to pray and think about what is most appropriate for an organization at a particular moment in time.

Most Integrity Ideas have one place on the scale.  Some can vary depending on how they are implemented.  We identify “Forbid Fear” as Highly Covert (an action that would be taken by a secular company). Enlightened management of a secular company might justify it on a purely utilitarian basis, recognizing that fear may “work” in the short-term but does more damage than good in the long-term.

“Forbid Fear” can also be Overt (An overtly faith-based action known generally within the organization) if the faithful leader chooses to explain the practice in terms of the organization’s WHY and Biblical beliefs, principles or priorities.

STAKEHOLDERS SERVED: Employees, Customers/Clients, Suppliers/Vendors

When we categorize faith-based actions, we also consider the stakeholders principally impacted by the action: Employees, Customers/Clients, Owners, Suppliers/Vendors, Community, and Kingdom.

“Forbid Fear” serves all those who might be the targets of fear tactics, including Employees, Customers/Clients, and Suppliers/Vendors, as well as opposing parties and others with whom the organization deals.

IMPLEMENTATION

Implementing “Forbid Fear” in an organization must start from the top. A faithful leader pursuing faithful integrity must model this commitment in their own leadership and reinforce it through policies and practices that cultivate a culture in which the use of fear is understood by all employees as “not how we do things around here.”

Although “Forbid Fear” is focused on the use of fear to manipulate or gain advantage over others, starting from the top means more than faithful leaders examining whether they are using fear as a tactic or tool. “Forbid Fear” can’t be implemented by a faithful leader unless the leader identifies and confronts their own fears. Those may be fears that have been driving the use of fear as a tactic, or those may be fears that get in the way of implementing “Forbid Fear”—fears of abandoning practices that seem to work and that are being used by competitors.

First, a leader must examine whether they are operating out of fear.  Remember Proverbs 29:25—”The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”  The leader or employee using fear may also be operating out of fear.

But the antidote to the snare of fear is trust. Post #91 identified trust in God as one of the five key ingredients for executing a Re-Imagined Purpose, Re-Imagined Values and a Re-Imagined Culture. The Bible is pretty clear about the importance of trust in God:

Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. (Isaiah 26:4)

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord (Jeremiah 17:7)

He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. (2 Kings 18:5)

Trust in God is trust in His sovereignty and promises and trust in His commands. We love how Dr. Skip Moen describes trust in God:

It’s the decision to place my well-being into the exemplified character of another without really knowing how the facts will turn out.  Trust is not a function of facts.  Oh, there are undoubtedly facts preceding the decision to trust, but trust entails deciding a future action without future confirmation.  Trust is, “I’m going forward.  Let’s see what happens”. . . . To not trust God is to reject the divine order of the universe.  It’s much more than simply rejecting YHVH, the God of Israel.  It’s saying that the whole creation is untrustworthy because its author can’t be trusted.  Amazingly, every fact of [the Israelites] past experience shouts out that the divine order can be trusted because it is under the sovereign control of a trustworthy God.

To be clear, trusting as a concept isn’t our problem.  We trust a chair every time we sit down without testing its integrity.  We trust pilots with our lives every time we get in a plane.  We trust taxi drivers and Uber/Lyft drivers with our lives every time we get into a car. But trust in chairs, planes, pilots and drivers does not provide the security we need to face the challenges of leading an organization, particularly in difficult times.

We believe the world–and business as usual–teaches organizational leaders to trust principally in two things—“impressive” people and “secure” money. When those are not a solution, fear can creep in. Oswald Chambers beautifully expresses what God expects and how we often turn to other things (like “impressive” people and “secure” money) out of anxiety, particularly in difficult times:

God expects His children to be so confident in Him that in any crisis they are the reliable ones. Our trust is in God up to a certain point, then we go back to the elementary panic prayers of those who do not know God.

The most difficult aspect of implementing “Forbid Fear” may be the trust required to move away from the ways of the world and the fears of Scarcity.  It is trusting in God’s promises, commands, and sovereignty. As we have written several times, trusting God means trusting God’s process, timing, and outcome:

• Process: God’s process is often counter-intuitive and counter-cultural.
• Timing: God’s timing often seems excruciatingly slow.
• Outcome: God’s best outcome for a business (the “all these things” promised in Matthew 6:33) may not be the world’s best outcome.

Fear begets fear, and trust begets trust. When the use of fear is modeled, encouraged or rewarded, employees will see it as “how we do things around here,” and that is culture. In the words of Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM:

What is critical to understand here is that people do not do what you expect but what you inspect. Culture is not a prime mover. Rather it is a derivative. It forms as a result of signals employees get from the corporate processes that structure their work priorities. . . Go deep and understand what each process in the company is telling employees is important.

After an honest assessment of whether the faithful leader is using fear because they are fearful, implementing “Forbid Fear” requires an honest inventory of the corporate processes that may be encouraging or rewarding the use of fear as a tactic, whether to lower prices or get better terms from suppliers, motivate compliance from employees, secure higher prices or larger orders from customers, or obtain concessions from or eliminate opponents.

That inventory should examine, for example, whether performance reviews reward managers who intimidate employees, procurement targets reward squeezing suppliers regardless of the harm caused, marketing practices manufacture urgency, or instructions to counsel prize intimidation. Policies can make the organization’s expectations explicit, but those expectations must also be reflected in training, incentives, accountability, and the way leaders respond when someone raises a concern.

The use of fear as a tactic and tool treats people as objects to be manipulated to achieve the self-interested goals of those wielding it, which is contrary to the Creation Mandate, Imago Dei, the Golden Rule, and the commandment to love your neighbor.

PERSONAL NOTE (from PM):  I was recently the victim and perpetrator of fear tactics as a customer. I went online to buy tickets for Lisa and Annie to attend The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center—it has been a Mommy/Daughter tradition since Annie was little.  When I Googled “Nutcracker Lincoln Center,” the first site that came up looked like it was the Lincoln Center ticket site.  Then I saw the tactics that led me to operate out of Scarcity: a red banner that said, “In High Demand“, a counter counting down the seconds until my tickets disappeared, another banner crossing the screen that said, “30 people have purchased tickets in the last 45 minutes.”  I quickly purchased extremely overpriced tickets without seeing the teeny, tiny print disclosing it was a reseller site.

After securing the purchase, I realized what had happened. I found out that public ticket sales wouldn’t be starting for a few weeks.  I discovered that I had grossly overpaid. I then turned to fear tactics to secure a refund. I sent a detailed demand identifying the scarcity claims that had influenced my purchase, questioning whether the reseller possessed the tickets, and stating that I had notified American Express and reserved my right to dispute the charge and pursue other remedies. I gave the reseller five business days to confirm a full refund.

It worked.  Fear begets fear.  Several lessons learned.

ESSENCE:  Integrity Ideas are specific practical actions a faithful leader can consider in leading faithfully through business a better way.

INTEGRITY IDEA: Forbid Fear

Although Scripture certainly warns against fear of man, “Forbid Fear” is not about telling people to be unafraid. “Forbid Fear” is about implementing policies and practices that cultivate a culture in which fear is neither used to manage people nor encouraged as a way to gain advantage over others—even when it appears to produce short-term results. “Forbid Fear” is countercultural, because fear as a tactic and tool is a hallmark of business as usual and the “way” of the world. It flows naturally from the key characteristics of business as usual: Profit as Purpose, the Scarcity and Self-Interest Assumptions, and a “Can We” culture.  Fear as a tactic and tool is tempting because it often works, at least for a while, to achieve a desired result—lower prices from suppliers, compliance from employees, higher prices from customers, and concessions from opponents.  But it is toxic to the pursuit of faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing. It is toxic because it works against Shalom in an organization, devalues human dignity, is devoid of trust in God, and does not prioritize community.  The use of fear as a tactic and tool treats people as objects to be manipulated to achieve the self-interested goals of those wielding it, which is contrary to the Creation Mandate, Imago Dei, the Golden Rule, and the commandment to love your neighbor. A faithful leader pursuing faithful integrity must model this commitment in their own leadership and reinforce it through policies and practices that cultivate a culture in which the use of fear is understood by all employees as “not how we do things around here.”

COVERT-OVERT CONTINUUM (six Continuums for action): Policies, Practices

COVERT-OVERT RATING (several levels from Highly Covert to Highly Overt): Highly Covert

STAKEHOLDERS SERVED: Employees, Customers/Clients, Suppliers/Vendors

Copyright © 2026 Integrous LLC.  Integriosity is a registered Service Mark of Integrous LLC.

Photo credit: Original image by Paul Michalski using Gemini
(photo cropped)