I think we can preface this one with a bit of a different thing to introduce the series, instead of just us casually walking into the cafe. Hello everyone, welcome to Management Cafe. Michael host here, his name is Tim Burgess, I'm Pilar Ortiz, and we're going to be talking as always for about 25 to 30 minutes, and maybe a little bit longer because we are kicking off a series on manager emotions, which is really supposed to explain this in a short episode earlier on, just why we were doing this. We've just thought it'd be worth spending some time talking about different emotions, what they feel like, what they are, what their purpose is, how we experience them, how managers experience them, how managers deal with the employees experiencing this emotion.
And so we're going to just kick off with anger. Tim, where should we start? We start with the definition. We found quite a few.
Anger is a difficult one for people to talk about, I think, because there's a lot of judgment around anger, and particularly how it's expressed a lot of the time when we think about anger. Well, I guess we should get into the definition as you've seen. So I just want to launch myself. One of the things I did, and you've got a few books that you may be want to recommend listeners as well, maybe to follow along in the series too, but one book I turned to for definition was something completely different.
It's a book that I use for writing every now and then, and it's called The Emotions, The Sores, a Writers Guide to Character Expression. These are very popular book among writers by Becca Pugliti and Angela Ackerman, and they've got a whole series. If you're a fiction writer, they've got a whole series about other things. And I went to them to define the emotion of anger, and their definition was strong displeasure or wrath, usually aroused by a perceived wrong.
Yeah. And I found that very interesting, the fact that in the definition, it's about the perceived wrong. I've got two more. I do think it's interesting to see where they're taking us.
I've got one from the APA, which is, I think, an association of psychologists. It's somewhat anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism towards someone or something. You feel has deliberately done you wrong again. And then finally, Claude already starts to take us into different things.
Anger is an intense emotional state characterized by feelings of annoyance, displeasure or hostility. It is usually triggered by the perception of a threat, injustice or frustration. When someone is angry, they may experience increased heart rate, blood pressure, levels of hormones like adrenaline or adrenaline. And then anger is a natural human emotion that can range from mild irritation to intense fury or rage.
I think that's really interesting, the spectrum as well of anger. Because there is a pure form of anger, and then there's also anger, it can show up in an emotional mix. And sometimes anger is a masking emotion as well. You mentioned some books, but one of the books that I've enjoyed for this is Big Feeling, Spide Loose, Foslin and Molly West Duffy.
And one of the things they talk about with anger is that anger's pain's bodyguard is a quote that they have in there. And so sometimes anger is a way to protect us, in a sort of a defensive stance. And Brené Brown talks about it as a catalyst of emotion. Anger is really trying to force a change.
And so I think in all of those examples, whether it's a defensive one, whether you feel it's been an injustice, it's trying to protect you by forcing a change or by stopping something happening. But one of the difficulties, I think, with anger in this context is that it can sometimes be a masking emotion. And so sometimes when you see an angry response in somebody, that's sort of covering their true emotional state, which they might not feel safe or comfortable expressing for whatever reason. If we link that to the purpose of the emotion as well, because I think that's linked because one of the things that Claude AI said, and we know that Claude, like in generative AI, collects from other things, psychologically anger is considered a secondary emotion.
So you've got that masking, you've got the secondary, meaning that it often serves to protect individuals from more vulnerable feelings like fear, sadness or shame. And I'll leave it there. I agree. For me as well, I think one of the purpose is it's a red flag, basically a lot of the time.
It will be the first emotion that is triggered by something that's wrong. Or that I'm hearing that sits badly. And my first instinct is usually anger tells me there's something I've got to pay attention to. Yeah, well, so that's really important, is listening to your anger.
As opposed to being controlled by your anger, one of the things we're often told, well, there's a lot of judgment around being angry. And so often people feel like they need to suppress it. Yeah, I've got people in my life who very, really express any form of anger. But I know there's things that upset them and there's injustice to experience, but they're attuned to suppress it.
And I think that's dangerous. But there are a lot of examples of people who express anger in ways that are harmful, in ways that don't serve them well or all the people around them. So it's really, really tricky one, anger. So let's go to what does it feel like?
Some of the things that, for example, in the emotions of the sorrows, one of the reasons why I went to this book was it tells you what the emotion is. And then it gives you ideas for how characters express it, so what physically anger sometimes look like. And also it has a list of mental responses, for example. So what are some of the responses to our anger?
Some of these were very appropriate and more directly linked to our topic of management. So irritability, poor listening skills, jumping to conclusions, irrational reactions to inconsequential things, demanding immediate action, impetuosity, taking inappropriate action or risks, and then it says fantasizing violence. I have to say that I fantasize a lot of violence. But I just let it fantasize and that is fine for me.
I know I'm not going to act on it. But I think some of these are really, I think it's really interesting what it's doing. It's not just about the fact that we then show that we're angry, but actually that it affects all kinds of our ways of interacting with others. Oh yeah, because if you think about what does it feel like in turn, you feel hot, you feel tense, you might feel flushed, your head can feel fuzzy, your body can feel tight, your breathing gets fast and shallow.
It's a very primal emotion. There's a real sensory element to it. So if we're fully in the thrall of anger, it can leave us in a state where it dominates. That's one of the reasons why I think anger can be a masking emotion is because if you're feeling an unpleasant emotion, like a great example for this, I think it's shame.
So a friend of mine, a Australian guy was living in London. He came over as a backpacker and he was a bit of a know-it-all this guy. But anyway, he was a guy, a guy, a know-it-from school, whatever. He was walking down through central London and he stopped somebody and said, hey, can you tell me how to get to Oxford Street?
And the person said, you're standing on it. And so my friend, I should have this guy, I know, I should have called, turned around and told the guy to F off. And so he was embarrassed, but he didn't want to feel embarrassed. And so he responded with anger.
And that's one of the ways that it can come in. Because anger is such a dominant emotion, it can prevent us from feeling that embarrassment or shame. And instead all we feel is anger. I love that example.
It's a very light example. A poor guy, the guy who was telling him he's probably then got angry. I know. In reaction.
In reaction. Yes. I think that's, well, I think it's important also just to remember that there is that spectrum, that anger doesn't mean that we have, I imagine that sometimes it can take over, because it can be so strong, but sometimes it can just be a little niggle of something that gets us a little bit holding our breath and glinging our teeth a little bit. Yeah, I think as we talked about at the beginning, anger is helpful in that it can help us understand what's important.
And it drives us to take action for things that are important to us. If there's been an injustice and we need to do something about it, then you can have that feeling of anger, of righteous anger. And it can be a great motivational and energizing force. If you know that your colleague who's doing the same job as you is getting paid much more than you, then your anger can come in and motivate you to go and talk to your manager, which works like how to try and resolve it.
But it can hinder us as well. I think in scenarios where we don't express it in a way that's helpful to us, we can blow up and venting is a great example of this. I think it's been proven that when you feel anger, if you vent, the idea being like, you gotta take it down or a punching bag or you're yelling scream or whatever, it doesn't reduce your anger. It sort of escalates.
It makes you feel worse. I think that's certainly something that I've experienced in the workplace a lot was people who would express their anger through that sort of venting. And it leaves us a blast radius around it. It's unpleasant that people don't want to be around really angry people.
There's a couple of things that one of the things I got from into the Association of Psychologists, I think is the American, we'll put the links in the show notes, but they say anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings. Now when you are talking, I think I wanted to stop you somewhere because you said something, it can help you express, I don't know, you said something, I wanted to stop you to say, you know what, it helps us pay attention, it also helps other people pay attention. Because I've been in many situations where I'm someone who I access my anger really quickly and I've actually had to learn to not express it because it makes other people uncomfortable.
And I've done that, it's all my life. And it's just how, it's just that I let you know, sometimes I'm not even angry and people perceive it as angry and of course when they tell you don't get angry, you know what happens. So I think also my communication style, when something starts to affect me in some way, it can look like I'm angry and people don't like the fact that you're feeling anything about anything. But I'm also a collaborator.
So what's happened is, and you were saying about one of the things we don't want to do is bottle it and bottle it up because that's dangerous in many ways. But what's happened is when I've been in a situation where things were not getting any better and I didn't know what to do, it all just comes out. And it comes out and like you say, it's not that I start to be horrible to people, but people notice that I'm upset, which is really interesting talking about masking emotions. So if I start crying, yes, it will make people uncomfortable, but I'm sure it'll be more acceptable than if they perceive it as anger.
Where actually the anger is just a kind of a frustration of upset. So one of my experiences with this happened just a few years ago, where there was a project and I was so frustrated with some of what was going on that I snapped in a meeting. And I was like, I can't believe this is happening. My colleague and I were doing this really hard.
We're trying really hard to role model this, but our team is not role modeling. And I just all came out badly. And of course, because of the kind of person I am, people don't like it when I'm upset, because I'm always so very positive. So then it's even worse, because you can't say, oh, it's just be large, it's angry.
And interestingly enough, what that did is it allowed me to say, this is how upset I'm feeling. People to see how upset I was, because if I'd said I'm really upset about this, they wouldn't have known how upset I was. Doesn't matter, because people to say all the time, oh, I'm really upset about this. What does that mean?
So they saw how upset I was. And what it gave me was, okay, I've said it. I've done my bit. I can't remember what happened straight away after that.
But I don't know if maybe it happened again or something, but the manager did reach out to me, and she did talk to me afterwards. And basically what she was saying is, you can't do that because you can see the other people are getting upset. Like exactly what you said, they didn't want that. They didn't know how to do that.
So that was my motivation to not be angry anymore. It wasn't my motivation to do anything else. But I think it's really tricky. It's really tricky.
And I think the manager didn't deal with it badly at all, but it's just that she was the problem. Actually, she wasn't running the project like I wanted to. So yeah, but it's interesting. Well, I think that there's a lot in there.
So I've had somewhat, I guess a different experience, but in similar manifestations, what I found was that I felt good about expressing my anger, but I realized it was making other people feel bad. And it helps to understand our own natural expression, I think, how we express it. You might raise your voice, you might become more animated. And I'm a very large human being.
And so if I raise my voice and become animated, it can give off a threatening impression. So I've got to be careful. I'll be careful with that. And it might be that the way we're expressing it, it's not just how we feel and what we think is working, but also everyone brings their own experiences and baggage and so on to it.
So what might feel like to me a tone down and reasonable expression, it might look to someone else like the last step before a major explosion. So they might be interpreting it totally differently. And so one of the things that you said, which I think is really, really helpful is when you said, I can say, I'm angry, but that doesn't really do it. Actually, for me, that works.
I had a situation, it was actually with one of my kids, I certainly smashed the screen on my phone. And I was so angry about it. But what I said was, I'm just so angry about this. I didn't say that I said it in an angry, but that's all I said.
And I wasn't yelling right now. I just said, I'm so angry. It just makes me so angry that that happened. I'm really, really upset about it.
And I felt better in that my anger immediately started to reduce because I expressed, I think my anger came because I felt like there'd been a violation of injustice. And I needed to say something about it, but I didn't need to have a huge, expressive anger. All I needed to say was that this has happened and it's really upset me. And I think that that's really important when we think about emotional contagion and about how people recognize it.
Like, you can't deny your anger. You talk before about how it can bubble longer than explode. And that's what happens. If things are making a scene, we receive a series of injustices and we don't act on them then, eventually it's going to overwhelm us.
But if we can find ways to express it, you know, understand what the injustice is and find a way to express how we feel about that injustice, that we feel like it shouldn't occur or try to change it, then it can actually be a productive experience, productive emotion. But actually, I'm sorry. No, I was going to say I agree mainly. However, I think, and this might be cultural, I don't think that expressing the anger always has to come without the body showing any feelings.
Like one of the things you said is I didn't raise my voice or anything. And that is where I don't want to, for it, I don't want to have to come to a point where actually I'm controlling everything around my feelings and how I express them. But I think it's really interesting to be aware of that and what we can do and not. And what is really like, what is some adjustment in our behavior that wouldn't be too difficult for us to do?
And actually, what is just not going to happen for us? Like it's such an individual kind of thing, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and look, I think for me, the learning there was that my, my customary angry response didn't, it doesn't have to be my only anger response.
Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, and I don't have to deny the fact that I'm feeling angry, I can, I can feel angry, I can feel anger and I can express, express that feeling. There are different ways that I can do that.
But actually, I had an example I wanted to share of, I was in a board meeting the other day and one of the people in the meeting was talking about a situation that he'd been in, where he'd been disrespected. And unfortunately in this meeting, these meetings had been very unstructured. I mean, we were trying to stick to a schedule now. And so he started to tell the story of how he'd been disrespected.
And then we tried to sort of move him on, one person tried to move him on. And then he came back to it, and then someone else tried to move him on. And then he came back to it again. And I tried to move him on.
And then I realized that he was frustrated, that he was upset by it. And actually, I reached out to him afterwards. And because we hadn't let him express his anger, he was so upset afterwards, inconsolable. And that's the danger when we talk about it as managers.
It can be difficult because people can be trying to express anger to you. Your employees might be trying to express anger to you in a way that you find difficult to deal with. But if you deny them that opportunity, it's a very, I think, disconnecting experience. Yeah, I agree.
And I have to say that one of the things that helped me in that situation, was, I mean, unfortunately, things didn't change much, but that's a different story. But in that moment, and what happened with that emotion is that I was allowed to be angry. And also the realization later on, that I was allowed to be angry. Like I couldn't, that even that helped me because it said, okay, this is not great.
You're not happy. You've expressed this. It's not a nice place to be in. But how wonderful that there weren't any huge repercussions.
And another thing that I don't think happens is that anyone told me to calm down or anything like this, you know, it's like, and that's difficult because there might be situations where the anger is escalating and you really think that something's going to happen and that, but that's a, yeah, I'm not going to the extreme. But I think that acknowledging, just giving the space to the person to kind of deal, however, and just recognizing that it's happened and then taking it, rather than either trying to suppress it or pushing to one side, which is probably what we want to do and what other people would like us to do, is really tricky this. And I think it comes back, I think, to the concept of radical candor, which is to really get to know people as individuals a lot, really get to know them so that you can know how to support them. Yeah, absolutely.
I think, I mean, I do think as a manager, there are situations where you need to take the time out. You know, it might be where you're upset or where someone's expressing the anger in a way that is counterproductive. One of the things you need to be able to do is to say, look, I want to pause. I want to pause here because this is, I don't like the direction.
This is, no, I'm not comfortable having this conversation right now. You have to come back to it. You do have to come back to it. But like you did, you came to it afterwards.
I didn't handle it. Great. Yeah. But I did try and come back to it afterwards.
Yeah. You came back. Yeah. Yeah.
And but also, I think in the moment, what I tried to do in that conversation, but I didn't do it successfully was if you can identify the emotion that they're experiencing. And so, look, I can see you're really upset about this. And I understand that what you're saying is, and you're paraph, you know, you've got to give them enough time to express it, ask some questions, and then try and, you know, one of the things I try and do is say back to them what they're telling you, you know, in your own words, to show that you've heard what they're saying and what are the points that are most distressing to them that didn't work in this instance because we didn't fully get through it. But often that is enough for them to go, okay, my anger is being recognized, you know, the injustice is understood.
The difficulty we had in this situation was that the individual wanted a particular action to be taken. And we didn't agree with that action. And so continue to be angry. But it is very difficult to deal with, I think.
I think the, I mean, looking back, what's interesting is to see a workout with a person what it is that's led to it. I mean, like you understand kind of where it was coming from and it just meant that you couldn't do what the person wanted. But I think that understanding that giving space for that and in a way, keeping an ear out or an eye out if a lot of the communication is done in writing asynchronously because sometimes it can emerge there and we can just, it's very easy in a conversation, in a written conversation to think that someone might be a little bit frustrated or angry, but hey, let's leave it because we don't want to start a whole match or we don't want someone to start to vent angry in writing, but actually to not let it come out sometimes is also dangerous. Oh yeah.
And I think for me, if you're thinking that that you should pick up the phone, you know, or get on a call. Yes, if you start to see that someone is there's something going on with someone. Well, I think when you're in that situation where you're not sure of your interpretation, I think moving towards higher fidelity means of communication. And I guess the last thing I would say about about this one is well, you know, I've had a lot of instances, I think where I've expressed my anger in a way that wasn't productive, you know, where I've entered or where I've got angry at someone over something and just, you know, said more than I should or said it in a way that wasn't very supportive.
And it's really important in those situations, I think, to try to repair. There'll be a situation like that might happen. This certainly happens to me. And you know, a day later or two days later or a week later, whatever, I think, oh, you know, I was upset about this thing, but I didn't need to say like that.
Or, you know, I remember that, you know, the look on their face, they said that's a look apprehensive or whatever. And it can be easy to try to, you know, go, oh, well, it's okay now, you know, and just sweep it under the carpet. I think it's really important in those situations to go back and say, you know, I wasn't at my best, or that, you know, I let my frustration get to get the better of me, or, you know, that's not how I want to, we don't have to deny how we felt or what we thought, but we can, we can try and repair how it was expressed. I think it's very important what you're saying that it's not about apologizing for how we felt.
It's about apologizing for how we interacted, because if we apologize for how we felt, then we're giving a very strong signal of it's not right to feel like this. Whereas actually, what we're saying is it's okay to feel like this. Hopefully, we can do something about it that's more positive than what I did with whatever, whatever came out. I think also from looking at the manager experience of the emotion point of view, I think there's a lot of work that can be done any way beforehand.
I remember along, yeah, when I was leaving the theater company and I didn't even notice that this was happening, I think I was a little bit, I was upset because I was leaving, I was leaving some people in charge. And obviously, I didn't realize how upset I was that I was grief, that kind of grief. And I remember once I snapped at someone, and it sounded like, well, I was frustrated again. And this is a pattern in my life that I let things stare until I snapped.
But it was really light. It was a very, it was a comment kind of thing. And I just snapped at them and she just said, Are you all right? And what that meant was, what's going on?
This is not what I'm used to. This is something wrong. I mean, this person is still a friend. And I think that just having been able to build something where someone can turn around and say that to you.
She didn't say, Oh, are you angry at me? She said, Are you okay? Like, it was such so good that way of saying it. So I think that in order to one, give ourselves a little bit of space as well, so that when we're feeling something so uncomfortable, we're not super worried that, Oh my God, they're going to know I'm angry.
This is going to be terrible. But actually, okay, they feel it. They'll know that something's wrong. And if I start behaving in a way that is counterproductive, someone might just let me know.
You know, I mean, we all know that it's very difficult to tell managers something like this. But if we can just get to a point where in some ways we've developed that kind of feedback, ongoing feedback, then it gives us a little bit of leeway and actually means that we can get some feedback if this happens. It's, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And it's one of those, like, it's one of the things you know, people look at high trust and psychological safety and those things.
So this is a prime example, I think, of being able to express anger and have other people express their anger to us. And anyways, we're both able to deal with is a delicate dance. And it's something that we have to work out over time. And like you say, I think if you're able to turn towards the person, you know, even in the example, I get what you say, Oh, look, I've got to take it.
You know, we're going to take a break. We're going to stop. You can say the person understands is really important. And I really, really do want to talk about it.
And I can see that you're upset and I understand that you're right. You're right to be upset. I just need, you know, 10 minutes to go and compose myself or you know, I just, I can't have this conversation right now. It's getting to me.
You know, there are ways to give yourself some space without totally turning away from the other person. Yeah, I like that. And I think this is a wonderful place to start finishing our coffees. Because I mean, this is probably going to be having like the longest of our chats around emotions, because there's so much.
And as you said, because it's I'm asking or because it's secondary, because it points to so many other things that could be going on. And because it's such an uncomfortable emotion for everyone involved, then it's given us loads to think about. So listeners would be delighted if you wanted to share anything we can keep it anonymous, if you want, we can keep it to ourselves if you want, but it would be wonderful to hear from you. So you can email us over at managementcafepodcast at gmail.com or you can go to managementcafepodcast.com and use the contact form there anything else you want to ask the listeners, Tim or say before?
Thanks for staying with us. I'm finding it helpful to better our mission. I tell you're finding it helpful to listen in. So coffee's over from us.
Now it's so bad to you.