EQ Leadership Vital Sign The Power of Anger
EQ Leadership Vital Sign The Power of Anger
While anger is often expressed at work (more than any other emotion, according to Wharton professor Sigal Barsade), the “common wisdom” is that anger is bad. How do you handle your own anger as a leader and a person? Do you tell yourself (and others) you should not be angry? Do you throw your anger around? Do you express anger in a useful, constructive manner?
Left unexamined, anger will typically escalate, and often drives people toward aggression and attack. But understanding the real message of anger allows you to transform it to something useful.
Like all emotions, anger is a signal containing information and energy that you can learn to access. The basic “message” of anger is that there is something you really want to change, but your way is blocked. Maybe you want to change someone’s opinion but they are not listening. Maybe you want to change a policy, but someone is sidetracking your efforts. Maybe you want to change your own behavior, but you are stuck in a rut.
When you clearly understand what it is that you’re wanting to change, and begin to see a path forward, the anger transforms to energy and motivation. In other words, when we stay angry (or get more angry), it is primarily because of our own confusion!
We remain in the confused state if we either avoid or over-indulge the anger. Understanding and transformation come from self-acceptance and a commitment to action.
Avoiding: When we tell ourselves, “I shouldn’t be angry,” it’s very difficult to get the value from the feeling. Anger WILL come out – maybe it passive-aggressive ways – so better to deal with it in a clean, direct way.
Over-Indulging: It turns out that for most people, “venting” (expressing for the purpose of “letting it all out”) actually INCREASES anger (Bushman, Baumeister, and Stack, 1999). Some people like to “wallow” in feelings. Often it feels better to stay angry than to deal with the actual issues (which are often tied to unpleasant feelings such as guilt, shame, and fear).
Accepting: Give yourself time to “sit with” the feeling. Acknowledge that you probably have good reasons to be angry - this is a legitimate feeling. Your feeling will cause your attention to shift to particular issues – let yourself focus into the “heat of the fire” – discover the specific obstacles that are triggering the anger. Ask yourself what you’d like to change about that situation, and then what you can do (focus on your own actions and commitments, not on what you wish someone else would do).
From a leadership perspective, one of the biggest challenges is handling team members’ anger. If anger is a valuable source of information and motivation, employees’ anger could be a great asset. Seeing it that way is a key to accessing the value. Next time a team member is frustrated, remember that s/he is demonstrating a useful, passionate commitment – and your job is to help harness and direct it.
I hope you find some useful anger!
Warmly,
- Josh
EQ Leadership Vital Sign The Power of Anger - To learn more about this author, visit Joshua Freedman's Website.
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Blamed for violence, outbursts, and all manner of relationship troubles, anger has a bad reputation. But what if anger is actually a good, helpful ally that’s just badly misunderstood?
While anger is often expressed at work (more than any other emotion, according to Wharton professor Sigal Barsade), the “common wisdom” is that anger is bad. How do you handle your own anger as a leader and a person? Do you tell yourself (and others) you should not be angry? Do you throw your anger around? Do you express anger in a useful, constructive manner?
Left unexamined, anger will typically escalate, and often drives people toward aggression and attack. But understanding the real message of anger allows you to transform it to something useful.
Like all emotions, anger is a signal containing information and energy that you can learn to access. The basic “message” of anger is that there is something you really want to change, but your way is blocked. Maybe you want to change someone’s opinion but they are not listening. Maybe you want to change a policy, but someone is sidetracking your efforts. Maybe you want to change your own behavior, but you are stuck in a rut.
When you clearly understand what it is that you’re wanting to change, and begin to see a path forward, the anger transforms to energy and motivation. In other words, when we stay angry (or get more angry), it is primarily because of our own confusion!
We remain in the confused state if we either avoid or over-indulge the anger. Understanding and transformation come from self-acceptance and a commitment to action.
Avoiding: When we tell ourselves, “I shouldn’t be angry,” it’s very difficult to get the value from the feeling. Anger WILL come out – maybe it passive-aggressive ways – so better to deal with it in a clean, direct way.
Over-Indulging: It turns out that for most people, “venting” (expressing for the purpose of “letting it all out”) actually INCREASES anger (Bushman, Baumeister, and Stack, 1999). Some people like to “wallow” in feelings. Often it feels better to stay angry than to deal with the actual issues (which are often tied to unpleasant feelings such as guilt, shame, and fear).
Accepting: Give yourself time to “sit with” the feeling. Acknowledge that you probably have good reasons to be angry - this is a legitimate feeling. Your feeling will cause your attention to shift to particular issues – let yourself focus into the “heat of the fire” – discover the specific obstacles that are triggering the anger. Ask yourself what you’d like to change about that situation, and then what you can do (focus on your own actions and commitments, not on what you wish someone else would do).
From a leadership perspective, one of the biggest challenges is handling team members’ anger. If anger is a valuable source of information and motivation, employees’ anger could be a great asset. Seeing it that way is a key to accessing the value. Next time a team member is frustrated, remember that s/he is demonstrating a useful, passionate commitment – and your job is to help harness and direct it.
I hope you find some useful anger!
Warmly,
- Josh
EQ Leadership Vital Sign The Power of Anger - To learn more about this author, visit Joshua Freedman's Website.
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Seems well laid out to me.
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Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
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Linda RichardsonLinda Richardson is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence and she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals.” Ms. Richardson is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling and is the author of ten books on selling and sales management, including Sales Coaching — Making the Great Leap from Sales Manager to Sales Coach, and Stop Telling, Start Selling. She teaches sales and management at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Linda is a frequent speaker at industry and client conferences, has been published extensively in industry and training journals, and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation’s Business, Selling Power, Success, and The Conference Board Magazine. Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com web - Visit Linda Richardson's Website |
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Dianne CramptonDianne Crampton is an executive leadership coach, team culture consultant, author and president of TIGERS Success Series, Inc. Dianne has been helping CEO's and Executives connect their employees to their core values and goals for over 20 years using the trademarked TIGERS team culture process, which stands for trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. To download a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that will predictably tear them down go here. Dianne's contribution to the 2010 Pfeiffer Consulting Journal (an imprint of John Wiley and Sons Publishers) entitled TIGERS Hearted Teams is available in November 2009. Her new book TIGERS Among Us: 5 Winning Business Team Cultures And Why, Three Creeks Publishing will release in March 2010. To receive publishing discounts, subscribe to the free TigerTracks Newsletter here. - Visit Dianne Crampton's Website |
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