Amen to that.

If I am understanding you correctly, you propose employees or, perhaps leaders, eliminate fear within themselves or others. While this is the ultimate goal we must remember that fear is a normal human emotion like “love.” One cannot simply “eliminate,” remove or legislate fear out of people. Fear “emerges” within a human being when faced with experiences that can harm emotionally, physically or monetarily. Therefore, the obvious choice is to do the opposite of what average human logic would suggest. One must turn and face the fear in order to overcome it.  For instance:

1. When John VP of marketing is in executive meetings with Frank the CEO, John always hedges a bit and doesn’t provide all of his ideas because Frank has shot him down in the past. There may be many reasons for this but the only way for the duo to get the best ideas and the subsequent best marketing plans out to the potential customer base is for John to work through his fear with Frank. If they do not “work through this” most discussions will result in substandard plans and/or poor execution.

   1. I handled this situation with these two executives a few months back. I had the trust of both so the three of us sat in a room together with them sitting face to face. I had them discuss the dynamic between them and then in an attempt to “extinguish” this dynamic I told Frank the CEO to chew out John for five seconds. When Frank was finished I asked John to chew out Frank for five seconds. At first John could not but Frank and I encouraged John and he finally submitted against all of his inner fear of reprisals from this authority figure (which were totally in his head. Frank was a trustworthy CEO). John did it and there was silence then nervous laughter and then normal laughter. We did this a few more times with general chewing and/or cussing. This broke all the rules but that was the point, sometimes we must break old paradigms that do not work for us anymore. In the end, this was very powerful because the real problem was with John’s fear of authority, or rather, his need for approval from authority, which may have served him well when he was ten or in one of his old positions but not in this organization.  

   2. Next we discussed Frank’s style of dialogue and his need to argue ideas in an attempt to gain the best from his team. I had both of them "teach each other" about how they viewed “heated discussions” and I reframed this as "passion" not "anger." We made huge strides in helping John significantly reduce his fear of authority and John taught Frank how to fight fair as an authority figure.

I hope this response and my example helped clarify this a bit. Thank you again for the question.