Episode 277 Transcript:

In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to manage your emotions as a leader, especially when you get furious, agitated and annoyed. We wish it wasn’t there and we wish we didn’t have those emotions at work, but we do. And so let’s talk about and plan ahead of how do we show up?

Well when these emotions pop up.

Here are the two questions. This podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted, 

although the competition and the expectations get bigger. This show with The Manager Track podcast will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw. 

I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead. So everyone wins and gross. In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate and act as a confident and competent leader. 

You know, you can be. 

Welcome to The Manager Track podcast. Today I wanna talk about what happens when we feel frustrated at work. And it’s not the most inspiring, positive topic, I totally understand, but yet, don’t switch to a different episode because this is a topic that we really need to think about and prepare for because whether you are a very calm and composed or more of a heated person.

Frustrations do happen in the workplace. Some of us are more composed about it, at least externally, but we need to know how to manage these frustrations. Both, so that we don’t blow up when we don’t mean to, or then regret later, but also that we don’t bottle it up where they start to create resentment over time.

Or were we actually not leveraging our emotions as signals well enough? We kind of just gloss over things or don’t acknowledge when things are not working well, and then we move on, not really feeling the anger that maybe another leader would’ve felt, or the frustration and we don’t address the issue, the underlying issue, and that’s gonna impact your leadership effectiveness as well.

So it is a bit of a balancing act and depending on where your starting point is, whether you’re sort of on the heated side of things or more of the the cool, calm, composed person. We need to talk about what to do in order to leverage your emotions and also handle them well in the workplace so that it’s not gonna impact you negatively when it comes to your executive presence, your confidence, how other people see you, the trust that people have in you, and the list goes on.

So do give a bit of an illustration. I’m gonna start off with an example. Imagine, let’s say it’s Friday afternoon, four o’clock, and most of you have been there, myself included. You still have a few things to do before you wrap for the day and then head into the weekend and suddenly you get an email from your boss saying like, Hey, can you please take care of this?

This needs to happen by the end of the day, which means you might have an hour or two to get that done. At the same time you realize that one of your team members is still supposed to submit a report to you for your review, and so you ping them on Slack teams or you walk over to their desk. Trying to find out what happened to the report and when you can review it so that you know you can manage your own time and, and still get out at a decent hour.

But as you walk over there with your own to-dos this new urgent task on the desk, knowing that this report is on your list too, that team member then tells you that they completely forgot about it. And again, just like with that email from your boss, you start to feel the heat rising in your chest, right? You feel like, okay, now I’m really frustrated. I’ve kind of had it for this week.

I just wanna get outta here. And you snap and snapping could mean different things for different people. It could sound like, okay, how did that happen?

What are you gonna do about it? I need this. I needed this now. And then turn around and walk away. It could sound very differently for you, but we snap, we do something that was emotionally driven. Probably not the best way that we show up after the fact. It’s something that we look back and think, yeah, I could have said that nicer.

I could have done that better. If this scenario sounds familiar, then this is why you’re here and this is what this podcast is about.

Now, before we go into this conversation further, let me be really clear about what we’re talking about. We are not discussing the minor annoyances, like when someone, I don’t know, uses something in the fridge that wasn’t theirs, or when someone, you know, has a. And you don’t see me on video possibly if you’re listening to this but like taps the taps, the pen makes annoying noises has a way of talking or is very verbose in meetings or is the one where everyone is kind of like the end of the meeting and someone says Any final questions.

And there’s always that one person who raises their hands and says, oh yeah, actually it’s not those kind of annoyances. Right? We’re talking about legitimate workplace frustrations that pushes kind of past our breaking point, but also have an impact on how we now appear and how we’re addressing a particular situation when someone’s asking questions at the end of a meeting.

Yeah, it’s something that we could bring up if we wanted to, but that is not a big deal. Okay. So in the grand scheme of thing not that big of a deal.

We’re talking about the stuff that actually matters in order to get stuff and work done and to maintain high standards for your team. And every single one of us who manages people right, has been, are making his guess. Okay. But we all have been angry at work at times. And if you say like, no, I don’t think so.

That’s not me. I would venture to guess that you’re either lying to yourself not actually clearly looking at what’s going on or being connected to how you actually feel you are a saint.

Okay, that’s possible. Or you’ve been, or you’ve not been managing long enough where this stuff starts to pop up. So the question isn’t really whether you’ll get angry, it’s how you handle it when you do, because like I said in the beginning, there are sort of the two sides to it. So when we talk about anger, it’s not all bad.

It’s not the enemy. And we say like, we should never be angry. That’s not a professional thing to do. Sometimes it’s actually useful. I mean, the emotion is actually useful. By the way. In the field of psychology, anger is seen as an emotion that’s covering up the underlying emotion. So it’s sort of a, an expression of something that’s deeper and not the actual thing we need to address.

So it could be feeling disrespected, it could be feeling in sort of insecure about something. Or it could be disappointment, it could be a number of different things. But let’s bundle it up and just call it anger to make this a little bit easier and, and really get to the core of the topic of this episode here.

So again, going back to anger, not not being a bad thing by itself, but more often than not in the workplace. If we’re not aware of the anger bubbling up, it can quickly turn into a destructive force that starts to make our team walk on eggshells and then kill productivity. And if you’ve been a long listener to this podcast, you’ve heard me say before that the amount of time that’s wasted by people being distracted at work, not by their phones, not by emails that come in, but by the emotional burden that they feel when something happens.

For some people, it’s literally just an email from their boss that makes them nervous or that makes them irritated, and they can’t focus anymore for hours after that. It could be a meeting that wants them up. They have to go out and take a break afterwards because they’re so emotionally wound up by it.

And when you are a leader who’s creating these kind of emotional reactions in others, that’s a problem. That’s definitely not creating a high performing team. It’s creating a team that is emotionally distracted from the work because of walking on eggshells around you. That is why it kills productivity.

So today we’re gonna talk about when anger helps, when it hurts, and what to do instead. When you feel yourself getting heated and you wanna let it out, that’s not what we’re gonna do. Okay? So let’s start with the mechanics to speak of how this actually happens or how anger actually starts to build.

’cause understanding the pattern is the first step to really managing it, and the self-awareness is a crucial component in it. So in many cases anger starts to build, similar to how AI pressure cooker builds sort of steam and pressure. And so if you tolerate the steam building up, you let that go and you let it simmer, let’s say because of, let’s say the responsibilities that you have on realistic deadlines, competing priorities.

Behaviors of coworkers that you don’t like. Your boss wants results yesterday that take weeks to produce. Your team needs guidance that you are not getting. HR is bucking you with things and trainings that you don’t deem important.

And you notice how you’re torn into so many different directions when all you really want is to do something meaningful, to actually produce something that creates results and something that you find meaningful or that you enjoy doing. So in that situation where let’s say all these different things come together, the steam starts to build in that pressure cooker and then it can be something small that pops that vent.

And that is the trigger pattern that then lets the steam come out and you go from a little stressed or annoyed to about to lose it or dang, I just lost it.

And sort of the big ingredients in that pressure cooker that I see that really bug leaders are repeated mistakes. Things that don’t happen once, but they continue to happen.

And it could be the repeated mistake of a coworker. It could be the repeated dismissing of your ideas in a meeting. It could be the repeated short notice on tight deadlines. Those are all the things that sort of, one time you make an excuse, for example, like fine. It’s one time they didn’t mean to. The second time you’re like, okay, don’t like it.

Pressure starts to build, but you’re still accepting it. And then depending on your tolerance level, you might accept it a few more times, but at some point you’re like, I had enough. It’s the same pattern over and over and over again. And it’s not to say that you’ve never addressed it before. If someone made a mistake, you probably give them feedback about it or you talk to them about it, and then it happens again. And so not only is the mistake happening again, but it happens again despite you having addressed it.

And it’s like, what am I doing wrong? I did exactly what I was supposed to do, give them feedback, told them what needs to happen next, why, it, then it turns into this, I’m wasting my time. I feel disrespected, or I think I’m being disrespected. If they ignore your feedback or they go around you to your boss or they withhold information and you don’t know, is that because they don’t respect you as a manager.

They don’t care enough. They don’t really wanna be here. What is it? And that underbelly of sort of the mistake or the, the behavior that starts to frustrate you and builds up the anger is usually not the, oh, you know, I’m using a lip balm here to say it.

It’s usually not the, oh, someone put the lid on the wrong way and smushed the lip balm. Odd example. But that’s the only thing I have handy right now. So that’s not the issue. It’s like someone deliberately trying to smush the lip balm that. What we think is happening and what gets us so upset. And for some people, we actually don’t, we aren’t sure, right?

We may think they’re deliberately doing this, they’re deliberately disrespecting me, or they’re deliberately undermining me or throwing me under the bus or whatever it might be. For other people, it’s like they don’t get it. And now, even if logically, I can sense that they don’t mean to do something bad.

But I, nevertheless, I still feel disrespected, undermined, not valued, not listened to or not heard misunderstood. All of those things, it starts to feel personal. Let’s say someone misses deadlines.

We’ve all been in those situations

especially if there hasn’t been any communication beforehand. So if you’re sitting there at 5:00 PM waiting for something that was due at noon, only to find out that they’re not gonna make it because they have other more important things to do. So they think, and you, they didn’t tell you at noon that they’re not gonna make it.

They didn’t tell you the day before that they’re not gonna make it, so the poor communication again, seems like someone isn’t valuing your time. And that can trigger anger. Another one would be people not responding to messages. Right. Sort of the. The emails that never get returned. If you give vague updates or you find out about problems from someone else, but the person who’s responsible for it, there might be reporting into you, the list goes on and on.

And in terms of like this, stick the progression of this, it starts with an annoyance, but you’re keeping it professional. Then it moves into over time, visible frustration, and maybe your tone gets a bit sharper. Some of you are gonna keep this in and still show up pretty composed, and then it may turn into body language that changes or more pointed questions.

And ultimately it may lead to sort of raced voices, harsher words, or dependent on personality, maybe even some colorful. Language, so that’s the progression, right, that we go through.

But before we move on from like what creates the pressure cooker to talk about what to do once that happens, I wanna briefly talk about your personal stuff too.

Personal factors play a huge role as well. So when you are stressed at home, you have challenges, conflict, or per other personal issues, or when you are not sleeping well. There’s actually a lot of really interesting research around how sleep changes our perception, how when we are sleep deprived, we see facial expressions as more aggressive than when we’re not sleep deprived.

So people would assess sort of the aggressiveness that they detect in people’s faces or the anger that they detect. And when we are sleep deprived, we consider other people to be more angry, and those factors are really important to consider if you are often sleep deprived, if you have stuff going on in your personal life, know that that is adding to your pressure cooker and understanding that it’s not all your coworkers, it’s not all your boss.

Who does something that angers you? It’s a whole lot of different factors that have been building up or are building up. Let’s now get to that place where this pressure cooker has built up and we’re really starting to feel angry. There are the two sides, right? There’s the one that helps, the one that hurts. Let’s start with why or when it can help.

Sometimes anger is actually exactly what the situation calls for. That is not to say it’s someone else’s fault. We always own our own emotions. What makes me angry is not someone else. This might just be like a mindset, and if this is new to you, this makes it to sound like a weird reframe.

But actually, psychologically speaking, it’s really important to know that nothing and no one makes you angry, but your interpretation of what’s going on to keep this short and concise, ’cause that’s not what we’re gonna talk about here. But when you assigned a reason for your anger to someone else, then now that is out of your control.

That’s not how we do well with managing emotions. So based on what is going on, I have an interpretation of those situations, circumstances, other people’s behaviors. And based on my interpretation, I now get angry or happy or whatever it might be.

So when anger is helpful is when I feel something and then I take a closer look as to what is it that drives me nuts here? And looking back and almost reverse engineering to say like, why am I getting so angry about this?

What is so frustrating here? Because it is my way of interpreting what’s going on that makes it so and so when I own it, I can now look at. What is happening? Is there something genuinely going wrong that , needs to be immediately addressed?

Is there something, a conversation that, man, I’m now realizing I should have had this conversation long ago so that we, it wouldn’t escalate to this point? Is it that I genuinely feel that one of my values or my personality or my person is now being either threatened or diminished and I don’t like that feeling and I interpret certain behaviors as disrespectful or or whatnot?

Then I may see, okay, that is what gets me angry. I feel personally attacked. I feel personally disrespected, not they disrespect me. In most cases, we don’t know. In most cases, not all cases, but in most cases when we feel disrespected, the other person has no idea that we were disrespectful. It is a bit like, you know, in how, in certain cultures they hand over business cards with like two hand with both hands. They hold it with both hands and then they sort of almost like a, a slight bow.

And they give you the, the business card that is the respectful way to do this. And if you grab it with one hand and then hand your business card back with one hand. This other person who just handed it to you so politely and culturally appropriately with the two hands may feel disrespected. Did you mean to disrespect them?

Likely not. It is cultural unaware or situational, unaware that happened, not the intention, disrespect. And so similarly, again, not in all cases, in many slash most cases, people don’t mean to disrespect you, but we interpret it this way. So own your power by really noticing what is happening for you.

So if someone is treating you or others unfairly, if someone is unreasonable, if someone’s cutting corners or throwing people under the bus, and then you get angry because you see it.

You realize like, I get angry because this is going against my values. It is not what I wanna cultivate in this organization on my team, not what I wanna be part of. I don’t like it. Now we get signals,

and it is now the anger that often gives us the courage to do what is needed to do. So courage. Here is the key word to address what’s needed, not to blast out our anger being ineffective By doing so, no.

The courage to take action to resolve the issue. That is now what we are gonna use it for. But if I don’t feel angry about a situation, I might not have the courage to stand up. I might not have the courage to say something to address it, to give the feedback, to set the boundary and say like, no more if you do this, I’m outta here.

Or If you do this, we’re gonna end the call. This is now the courage that I’ve maybe never had before until I started to feel this angry. And that it is that incredibly helpful part of anger that we wanna make sure we’re leveraging. Because if you are on the spectrum of people who are fairly composed and patient and persevering and tolerant, and if those are words that resonate with you or even one or two, then notice when is it that you are tolerating things too long?

Because you wanna remain professional and not really show how you’re doing, and hence, you’re letting it go. You don’t have the courage to speak up. That is when the cool, calm, composed part is. Now be used as an excuse for not speaking up. It’s like, oh my gosh, I’m getting angry, but I have to be professional.

I have to put myself together, and I have to just be tolerant and accept it and move on. Now, on the inside, you might feel the tension and the friction, but on the outside are all okay. Your team doesn’t know what’s going on on the inside. They can’t see how tense your apps just got because of it, or how short your breath is or how hot your head feels because of, of the, what’s going on right now, or the convers because of what’s going on right now.

They would only know that if you were to articulate it. So oftentimes with leaders, one of those problems is to not feel that anger, to not let it, let it bubble up. To the extent, to the degree to at which this courage starts to kick in.

And if you really look at that emotion, any of those negative emotions, the frustrations, the annoyance, the anger, the upset, the sadness, the disappointment. If we hold all those facts, we’re actually really limiting our effectiveness as leaders. Yes, we have a megaphone. And yes, our emotions impact other people.

And what we do and what we say has a ripple effect. It’s like a megaphone, right? That we’re talking into and how our behaviors are sort of carried out in, in way more areas than if we’re just an individual contributor, so to speak, or, working without those people leadership responsibilities.

But that does not mean that you can’t use and leverage your emotions to take actions when things aren’t going well, when stuff isn’t sitting well. Okay? So that actually makes you a lot more effective.

Another word or way to differentiate it here is there’s losing control, which would mean. That brush of cooker just popped open and steam is just going anywhere. It’s uncontrolled. It just blows out versus controlled intensity. So you are feeling the intensity go up and you are able, you have to self-awareness and notice it and then to control it and to leverage it in a useful way for you.

So losing control versus control intensity. Two different things. Control intensity will help you make a point, will help you have the courage to do things you didn’t do before, or have conversations you didn’t have before. And it often also helps create urgency. It might inspire your team sort of to have a final push or to give it their best.

It can also be to set boundaries that you didn’t set before. But the way that it feels is as if you are still in the driver’s seat. It’s not like you’re in a rollercoaster and it’s just taking you places out of your control. No, no. You’re still the one driving the car so to simplify all of this, the question to ask is, am I using my anger or is the anger using me? Am I using the anger to be more effective, or is the anger using me as a way to let itself out? Right? Is the anger, the steam and I’m like the lid that just popped. The steam is really in charge. That is what makes a difference.

Now that we’ve talked about how anger builds up, what are the different factors that contribute to anger

and then how to use it. Well, now let’s talk a little bit more about what happens when anger starts to be destructive.

So like we just said, if it’s, if anger is using you, we know that turns into destructive behaviors. But to take this a step further, what really the cost is of all of this, the price that you pay when you don’t manage your anger well is the fear factor. When you regularly lose your cool with your team, you create what is often referred to as psychologically unsafe environment and it is going back to the walking on eggshells, right? It’s the never knowing what sets you off. Never knowing when that next explosion is.

Always, always checking in what your mood is. People even chatting behind your back. What’s their mood today? And then determining whether did you bring something up or not based on how you seem to be doing.

Because they know if you’re not in a good mood, anything could tick you off and that event could come off and then they’re on the receiving end of it, totally unjustified and that kind of envi environment. May seem like something out of the movies like, yeah, that doesn’t happen. Not, not here, not me, not in my work culture.

But let’s be clear what you see in movies, just thinking of the Devil War Prada, but there are many more, or maybe exaggerations, but in smaller ways, this happens all day long all the time.

It is the small nuance. It’s the small signals that you send that other p other people pick up, that you are not in a good mood, that you’re frustrated or that you can easily be angered or that you’re not really talking about what’s bothering you, that you’re not really giving feedback.

But we can all tell that you’re being annoyed. You get short in conversations, you close the door, you don’t say hi. You are distracted in meetings. You’re making weird, maybe even inappropriate comments in meetings. And obviously I’m not saying that you are. People are, and this happens a lot, then we feel like we kind of walk on eggshells.

And for some people, when I talk to them about a situation like this, they say, you know, it’s not all the time, but it’s always the two days before a board meeting or it’s always right after a client meeting or it’s always right.

Before or after their leadership meeting. There may just be patterns that they’re detecting that every time X happens you then are in a bad mood after. And so just avoid that time or walk on eggshells during that period. But if it’s a lingering thing where people don’t feel good around you and the energy that you bring to a room, a conversation is not, how do I remove fear here and create more safety?

But the mood in there is fearful. Like, and you might be intentional unintentionally feeling like you’re in control and you’re being respected. Fear is definitely a control mechanism, right? It’s a way to ensure. People do as you, as you say. We see this on a big scale again often, and it’s very obvious, but it happens in sort of a worth ways all the time in our interactions with other people as well.

And when people walk on eggshells, what happens to team performance is pretty clear. Creativity goes out the window because creativity requires risk taking. And fearful people don’t wanna take risks.

They stick to what they know is safe, even if it is not the best solution. They also do what they think you want to do. And if you make a suggestion, you didn’t mean to give a direct directive, but you made a suggestion, they will do whatever you say. They may also come ask you and want validation from you way more often than they need to.

It’s by the way, also signals like why do all these people come to me to get advice or to give them validation on an approved stuff? It might be because they think that if they don’t and they do something that you wouldn’t have done, you are gonna flip or you are going to get so frustrated and angry that they just wanna avoid these type of situations.

So rather go run this by boss first or IE you first before moving ahead. It could also be that they don’t bring problems to you. They also stop suggesting ideas. They stop challenging bad decisions. They just think it’s better to let things fail quietly or to not address it, rather than to speak up and to take the risk to annoy you, right?

And to possibly even frustrate you. Then what happens after that phase is that good people, especially good people with good op opinions, they don’t stick around. They will find a different place where they feel they can be more pro creative.

They can bring their opinions to the table. They don’t wanna work for an angry manager. They’ll leave and they may not even tell you why in an exit interview, they may not say, oh, because my boss wasn’t creating a psychologically safe environment. They may not say my boss was angry, or I didn’t feel I could express myself creatively.

They probably just say, no, I got a better opportunity for better career growth elsewhere. And then you are stuck with people who either can’t leave or don’t mind working in fear. They might be used to this, but

that’s not a good setup. Your team will become hypervigilant. It’s constantly, they’re constantly monitoring your mood, by the way, speaking of being distracted, right? Emotionally distracted, that’s definitely one of them. Because they spent that mental and emotional energy in figuring out how you’re doing instead of being focused on the actual work,

By the way, that reminds me of a situation. I remember being in a meeting once where someone said to, I was walking in and someone said to a peer of mine, Hey, don’t bring up this project today. Because boss is not in a good mood. And you know, I, and it’s a long time ago. And I remember at the time I thought, man, I never thought about this. I never thought about what I bring up when I bring up something, when it’s important, relevant, urgent, timely. But oh, I guess I need to consider my boss’s mood. I guess that is like a good way to sort of manage up and pay attention to when is a good moment to address have, when it’s a good moment to challenge their idea or to bring up a problem.

And per se, that’s actually all good. It demonstrates that you are aware of what’s going on. And you’re being smart about what to bring up when not all the days and all the times are appropriate for everything just because it’s pop top of mind for you.

That is very true. But the side effect, if I was that leader and there’s a problem with a project, I would wanna know and I would wanna know. At that time. I wouldn’t want them to think, don’t say it today, because they’re not in a good mood. That’s not a good thing for a leader.

In that moment, right? These two coworkers were protecting each other from the manager instead of actually solving the problem with that project and looping in the manager. ’cause that was important to do. So the long-term consequences go beyond just your perception and maybe sort of a bit of eroded trust and eroded executive presence because you’re not managing your emotions well.

Or because some of the relationships may be a little damaged. No, they have way more profound negative impacts on your mid to long-term leadership. And oftentimes it is only sort of one snapping, one letting go of that anger.

One napping one time losing control over it. That can change relationship sense of erode to trust. And it’s really important that when that does happen, that you address it afterwards. Like, Hey, I noticed I came off harsh. I noticed I said something that in retrospect, I wish shouldn’t, I wish I hadn’t say, said it that way.

My goal was to communicate X, Y, Z, but I was emotionally reactive and I didn’t communicate this well and apologize. That would be a way to demonstrate that kind of vulnerability. And also owning your mistakes and also letting them know, it matters to me and how I communicate and how we all communicate to each other.

I will work on this and that is a way to demonstrate the own mistakes and to show some vulnerability, which, especially for people walking on eggshells, that is a really important thing to see from you.

And that can help sort of recover from losing it, so to speak. And then last but not least, when we’re either bottling up anger, because we don’t wanna express it, we don’t wanna come off as emotionally reactive in the workplace, and so we’re bottling it up, or when we’re on the other side of that spectrum, we’ll just blow it out. Both aspects have not just impact on other people, your career, your leadership effectiveness, but also on you personally.

It is typically not the work in itself. Like, not the reports and words you write or the, the actual meetings you’re in. It’s typically all the emotional stuff that creates burnout, that creates stress and overwhelm and the list goes on. And so when we aren’t able to really manage the anger well, we don’t know how to actually process it throughout our own ways, which is also a bit outside of the scope of this episode.

But if we don’t know and we haven’t figured out how to deal with it, and then we don’t yet know how to ex, how to leverage it as a signal and use the anger to our benefits and with intention or when we just let anger sort of take control of us. The, the impact on us personally and how we are feeling about work and life overall is pretty immense.

And it’s often one of those first signals that we then see when we just feel exhausted, tired, and so forth. So now before we wrap up, a few practical tips or suggestions of what to do when you notice you’re starting to feel angry in a meeting or in a conversation. The first one is, it’s totally okay to ask for a pause or a break even in the middle of a conversation.

Hey, this topic is really important for us to talk about. I’m also noticing I need a moment to like compose myself, process. Think about what you just said or what we just discussed. Can I get back to you? That is a totally okay. To do that actually means you have self-awareness and the ability to cope with what’s going on.

So asking for a pause if you’re in the middle of a meeting, and you’ll notice even as you’re talking that you’re starting to get frustrated. It is even then okay to say, actually before I continue, let me just take a quick beat. Can we talk about something else first and then get back to that?

Or even in the midst of a meeting, a team meeting and you notice like, oh, I’m getting heated. It’s okay for you to walk away and say, I’ll be right back. Give me two minutes.

You remove yourself if you are on a virtual call, right? You get up, you get some fresh air, then you get back on and you turn your camera back on. Or if you’re in a physical situation, right? Walk out to the bathroom, come back in. But a break deep breath can do wonders in such situation when they’re immediate, when you’re like in the midst of it.

Okay? Then a bit more reflective afterwards would be to actually sort of investigate what was going on. What are you actually angry about, or what were you actually angry about and what outcome do you actually want here? What’s what’s the signal? What’s the courage that anger provides you to do something that you would otherwise have not done or not said?

So those as a second step are really important reflections. And then the next step would of course be to actually do the thing.

So if you need to talk to someone about an issue like, Hey, I need to talk to you about what happened with the deadline, you can totally say it’s called what we call emotional transparency, how you feel without acting it out. Hey, I need to talk to you about what happened with the deadline. I’m frustrated because we agreed it would be done by noon, and I didn’t hear anything until five o’clock.

Yeah, that’s concerning or that is impacting how I spend and, and manage my time this afternoon or tonight. Help me understand what went wrong and let’s figure out how to prevent this going forward. So I didn’t just say like, Hey, what happened with the deadline? You know, I was waiting on it.

Also true. But then the other person, especially if I have someone who’s like, calm and composed, the other person doesn’t maybe know how you’re actually feeling about it. They may just think, Hey, yeah, okay, wasn’t there, but no big deal. They go home and they’re having a fabulous weekend. You are fuming instead.

So us saying like, Hey, that worries me. That makes me concerned. Hey, this is frustrating. I’m disappointed in while having normal tone and expression can be really useful. ’cause then you’re sending the message. And by the way, you can also increase the intensity in your language, meaning like, you can sound a bit more firm as well.

When you’re trying to express this. The point is not to come off as if you’re losing it, so walk away is one, take a break, reflect after what was actually going on. When you clear what’s going on, have the conversations express your emotions transparently without acting them out.

Right. This is sort of saying the, Hey, I’m frustrated. And then fourth is a bit of like the bucket that I leave open. ’cause each of us, over the course of our lives, we’ve identified ways to process emotions. Ideally I hope you have, is this by working out, is this calling someone, is this taking a walk outside fresh air, breathing?

For some people it might be doing some stretches, it, whatever that may be for you, do whatever you need to do to get to a place where you’re not just bottling it up, but you were able to sort of like. Ride the waves of the emotion. And then you have more clarity afterwards and you can get back into the conversation or whatever you were doing before with a more focused mind and a more calmer emotional state.

Okay, so as you’re wrapping this up, some key takeaways that I hope you walk away first, here are the signs that your anger is helping versus hurting. Anger is helping when it drives you to address real problems when it motivates you to protect your team or uphold important standards.

And when you stay in control of how you express it on the other side, anger is hurting when people start avoiding you when performance drops because people are scared to take risks. When you find people walking around you on eggshells and always looking for your approval or validation of something, right?

And probably you also find yourself apologizing or not feeling good about having lost it on a regular basis, pay attention to what’s causing the anger, the steam in that pressure cooker. What are the personal things that feed it and, and go into it?

What are the work things and what specifically is it? Is it being disrespected, not heard, not valued? What is it? That’s bothering you. Remember, it’s not what people do, it’s how you interpret that. So what are your interpretations and why is that a problem? To get really clear on that, that helps you process, but also that helps you use anger as a really important signal that will make you a more effective leader in your actions.

With that, I’m gonna wrap up this episode. I hope you found it useful, even spending this time really thinking about those negative emotions at work. Because unless you’re saying, again, we all deal with them, we all have them. The question is, how skilled are you and how self-aware are you to use them to use them to your advantage and not let them become a disadvantage.

With that, I’ll see you next week. Another episode of The Manager Track podcast.

If you enjoy this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader. People love to work with. This includes a free master class on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it at archova.org/masterclass. 

The second resource is my best-selling book, the confident and competent new manager, how to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out at our archova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. 

You can find all those links. In the show notes down below.