People Have A Right to Be Angry:
How Truly-Competent Leaders React
Everybody experiences anger. Most anger is healthy. For example, it is a normal stage in how we grieve. It can a symptom of ordinary stress caused by lack of sleep or working too hard . Or, it may be the result of pent-up frustration, feeling a loss of control – or stemming from a sense of betrayal.
Anger can be momentary and easily let go of, or can become the essence of your disposition. Some people seem to only be happy when they are angry – and some people refuse to show their anger even when they are seething inside.
Anger is a deeply personal experience that can quickly become very public.
There is no eliminating anger. The best we can do is learn to manage it.
One critical competency of leadership is how you react to anger; specifically how you manage your own anger and how you respond to the anger of others. Anger is a powerful emotion that can bring people to great resolve – or disable their ability to think rationally. Anger can be leveraged to collectively to root out evil (as the American public reacted to the attacks on 9-11) or to stir that evil (as terrorist jihadists have successfully done in recruiting their suicide bombers).
Understanding and responding appropriately to all emotions – both yours and others is essential to your being an effective communicator. And managing emotions is essential to being an effective leader.
The ability to express empathy is essential for effectively influencing others.
As a leader it is what enables you to attract people who will follow you. President Bill Clinton was wildly famous for telling people, “I feel your pain,” in ways that people tended to believe him. Ronald Reagan’s words and gestures embraced the families of nearly 250 soldiers killed in a tragic plane crash; his job to express the grief of the nation. ”I know that there are no words that can make your pain less,” he told the families. ”How I wish there were…” Our words are powerful, but it’s not our words that make the difference, it is how others interpret your words, and as Maya Angelou noted, “people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Dealing with your own emotions usually requires practice. Some people seem to naturally manage themselves fairly effortlessly and remain in control of themselves in even highly stressful or difficult circumstances. Others, who we tend to regard as “highly emotional” have a difficult time keeping their emotions from interfering with their performance. There is also a small portion of the population who have emotional issues that prevent them from functioning effectively or at all.
Effective leaders learn to control their emotions in ways that enhance their performance.
They tamp-down their emotional tendencies when they are called to be extremely rational, and elevate their emotions when they need to express themselves in ways to help inspire others.
Powerful leaders influence the emotions of others. They soothe peoples grief and help calm people’s worries. They embrace people’s fears and share their hopes and dreams. Great leaders excite people’s passions and help them to be ignited by a shared sense of purpose. In the face of exceptional leadership, people are inspired to elevate their performance and accomplish what matters most.
To be an effective leader, you must understand how to work with emotions in order to improve results. When you see too much jubilance you have to help people stay focused. When people are feeling overwhelmed you help them to become determined. And when people are sad or grieving – you show them purpose that might help them get beyond where they are in the moment and search for a brighter future.
The problem with dealing with anger is that it makes people extremely volatile.
Angry people are predictably unpredictable, because anger undermines our ability to think rationally.
Mark Twain wrote, “anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Anger corrodes the internal harness that enables self-control. It eats at you and eventually consumes you.
Groucho Marx, offering advice to a contestant on his television show “You Bet Your Life” observed: “If you speak when angry you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret.” Anger is a debilitating state of mind. Your adrenals are firing, and it’s hard to think clearly. In fact, it can seem hard to think at all. You make choices based on a more limited range of options than you otherwise would, and may fail to fully recognize the consequences that would be obvious when you were in a more resourceful mental state.
Most people are good at dealing with happy people and more-often are awkward and struggle with people who are sad. Compassionate, well-intentioned people will generally try to cheer-up sad people – and are often unsuccessful. But the gesture is generally appreciated regardless.
Anger is a natural human emotion. It is completely normal and mostly healthy. Anger can be channeled into a sense of purpose – and leveraged to motivate action. Anger becomes a problem when you lose control of proportionality and your emotions turn to rage and your choices are self-destructive.
Whether anger is used productively or destructively is most often a matter of choice. As with any choice, the more you understand the situation and the possible consequences of your actions, the better the chance you will act most appropriately.
It is far easier to make an angry person angrier than it is to calm them down.
Anger is incendiary; and angry people, because they are not thinking rationally, are more easily manipulated. This is how riots grow. It isn’t just that people are out of control, it’s that they are often being controlled who see benefit in the riot. Instigators routinely fan the flame of peoples anger to organize movements.
People can be led by inspiration or manipulation. A good leader inspires people to perform.
A highly competent leader acting with a noble purpose can help people channel their anger into productive and positive things.
The real basis for joy in our lives is the deep satisfaction we feel when we accomplish things that are meaningful and significant. We might sense we are happy when we indulge in healthy distractions; experiences that contrast the normal routines of our lives. But real Moments of Overwhelming Joy – or MoJo, is the result of preparing ourselves to be competent, meaning able to accomplish things and then actually doing so.
Virtuosos are people who elevate their performance to an extreme whereby they accomplish things that few if any others can.
A virtuoso is generally thought of as a highly accomplished musician or some similar artistic pursuit. But it actually applies to any endeavor.
Virtuoso’s are necessarily rare. This is because they are the people that push the boundaries. They defy the status quo – and expand our understanding of what it possible.
The common thread of all highly accomplished people is their dissatisfaction with their own performance. They feel pressure to improve even when there is no evidence that they can – or external suggestion that they must. It is an intrinsic drive that pushes them where no one else has been – and therefor they must improvise their own instruction for advancement. Virtuoso’s are never fully satisfied with their own performance.
At its core, all anger stems from dissatisfaction.
Most people simply shrug-off mild dissatisfaction; when things aren’t quite perfect, or going the way we want. Life is full of such problems and your instincts for connection with others is what drives the basic emotional intelligence that helps keep anger in check. People are sometimes and rightfully fearful of expressing their anger over concerns for the greater discomfort of feeling isolated – or worse, doing actual harm to others. It is that same need for human connection that can whip the discomfort into a frenzy when group think short-circuits your decision-making and emotions spiral out of control.
For leaders, managing emotions, their own, and helping others do the same, is a matter of connecting anger to more rational impulses. This is how people channel their anger. When you separate the source of your anger from the actual emotion you feel, you can us the dissatisfaction to motivate change.
This is how anger ties people to a noble and compelling purpose. It is how, as Viktor Frankl, in “Man’s Search For Meaning,” describes the way holocaust victims became holocaust survivors – and found their purpose in making sure such atrocities would never happen again. They focused their anger towards a purpose that not only caused them to endure – but also to bond with each other over a common cause.
To be highly effective as a leader you must be able to embrace anger in productive ways.
You need to learn to remain rational while being empathetic and compassionate. You also must define the purpose that allows people to channel their emotions towards a shared sense of destiny. This includes all emotions – but none more important than people’s anger. Most emotions cause relatively predictable behavior, but anger, left to its own impact is a wildcard that can take individuals and groups wildly off-course.
If your desire and aim is to be a fully-competent, highly effectual leader, you must be unafraid to lean into anger. First and foremost you must curb your own – and make it work for you and not against you. More importantly, you must be able to reach out to others and help pull them up – and empower them to ultimately use their dissatisfaction as a force for good.
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