The case of anger deserves a special place in The Emotionally Intelligent Manager. So in this section, we focus particularly on the management of angry feelings.
Aggression and Anger
When people are in a confrontational situation with another person that results in angry feelings, many feel like becoming verbally aggressive. Many people want to be physically aggressive. In fact, a full 82 percent feel like being verbally aggressive, and 40 percent feel like punching the other person.
However, some people seem to just think about being aggressive. The actual behaviors they engage in look quite different.
We’ll help you manage intelligently with anger. This means that your feeling of anger is a signal that an injustice has been committed, that a wrong needs to be addressed.
Constructive Use of Anger
Feeling angry and acting out of anger are different. Anger can be a powerful and constructive emotion or a powerful and destructive emotion. We’ll first deal with the destructive, emotionally unintelligent side of anger.
We start at the beginning, which, in our emotional intelligence model means we start with accurately identifying feelings. If anger doesn’t work, then it is likely there was some problem with identifying the feeling. You need to identify carefully what event or action made you feel angry to begin with. This is when your mood and emotion filters are most clear and can be examined. If you have a tendency to be easily irritated or frustrated, you must come up with alternative explanations as to why the person who made you angry did what he or she did. Ask yourself whether it is reasonable to be angry. Consider how another person would view the situation. Next, question your own perceptions of the situation, for instance, ask yourself whether your boss is really out to get you.
You might find that you have incorrectly attributed the cause of your feeling of anger to the acts of another person when, in reality, you were just in a bad mood. You might discover that the smirk you saw on your colleague’s face was not a smirk at all, but a look of thoughtfulness. Anger is always destructive and always leads to a negative outcome when we act on a feeling of anger that has no basis in the external world.
If you incorrectly identify the cause of your angry feelings, and you don’t stop to question your perceptions, then it is likely you are already hurtling down a destructive path. Your focus narrows; you perceive the other person as a threat. You begin a chain of reasoning that finds other examples of anger-producing actions. Then you either act on the anger in a direct way, or you keep it inside, hiding it from view. Or so you think. Remember our discussion of the difficulties of hiding one’s feelings? And how we use vital thinking power when we actively try to suppress our experience of emotion? We might think we’re hiding, but a perceptive colleague will know better. And we might believe we are still paying attention to what is going on during the rest of the meeting, but in reality, we are missing critical information as we seethe inside.
How to Disengage from Anger
Here is an example of how an emotionally intelligent manager disengaged from anger by following the four steps of our model. First, here’s a description of the situation:
You are making a presentation to the team. One of the team members asks a question that challenges some of your basic points. You answer the question and move to the next slide in your presentation. The same person interrupts and again asks a question that directly challenges your basic assumptions. The questions he is asking are repetitive and do not seem relevant to your discussion. You are feeling quite irritated.
And here’s how the manager followed the four steps:
Identify emotion: It’s clear that you’re getting frustrated. It also seems from the nature of the questions and the way the questions are being asked that the person does not have a hostile intent. This is the key: a threat does not exist. However, a problem does exist, and it’s a problem that you must solve efficiently and quickly.
Use emotion: Taking his perspective for a moment, you try to see his point of view (use your emotion to help you think). The questions concern the remote possibility of failing to gain timely regulatory approvals.
The approval process is straightforward, and ample time has been allotted to this phase of the product launch plan. But he is still concerned about this issue, and for him, your entire product presentation is about the approvals process.
Understand emotion: At this point, you understand that your answers have only made his worries intensify. If you do not address his underlying concerns right now, he will become anxious and fearful. Then things will really start to unravel on you. It’s not just that this one person will have an emotional meltdown. You realize that negative emotional contagion can infect the entire team unless you take action.
Manage emotion: Because his questions are generated by his anxious-mood rather than an accurate gut feel for a problem, you are safe to ignore this team member’s emotional signals but you do address his unstated question.
What can you do? It depends in large part on your personal style. Here is one way an emotionally intelligent manager might handle the situation.
You stop your presentation and walk closer to the questioner. You pause and then look at him. In a quiet, calm, and reassuring tone, you tell him, “I hear your concern about the regulatory approvals. We already have preliminary approvals in place, but of course that is no guarantee. It would be a shame if we were delayed by an approvals issue, and so I agree with you that we must deal with that possibility. I’d like to hear more about your concerns and ask you to help us find a way to avoid those problems. I would like to share the rest of the plan with the group right now so that you have the complete picture. That should help you develop a more effective approvals strategy. Will that work for you?”
He may back down and calm down. But he may not. If this approach does not work, then it is time to take more direct emotion management action. He’ll need to be emotionally isolated so he does not infect the rest of the group. You might, depending on your leadership style, indicate that the issue has been addressed in the full plan and that you need to move on.
Our four-step approach does not dictate either how to feel or how to act. How you disengage from these feelings of frustration and annoyance will be up to you, but we believe that you’ll find the model a helpful tool.
When to Get Angry
There are lots of self-help articles, workshops, and seminars on anger management, and many of these articles and programs are helpful. There are thousands of managers who certainly need these services; many ruin their careers and the lives of their employees because of their uncontrolled anger.
We’re going to talk about a different side of anger management— teaching people how to get angry, not how to rid themselves of anger. We admit that it’s a tricky subject, and we’ll be careful to go easy on the recommendations. There will be no boxing lessons. But if you have ever experienced a situation in which someone’s rights were trampled on, unfair advantage was taken of someone, or a corporate bully verbally beat up on a weaker foe, then you may see the need to get angry at times.
If you’ve felt anger and tried your best to ignore the feeling, you’re not alone. Remember that 19 percent of people in an anger-causing situation act extra nice to the other person, and 60 percent try to calm down (our guess is they try to calm down and forget about the anger-causing incident and person).
Anger can be justified, and it can be intelligent. The way to determine whether it’s smart to be angry is to use our emotionally intelligent approach. Here is how we suggest you manage with anger.
How to Manage with Anger
Constructively managing with anger is an extremely difficult task. It requires highly developed emotional skills and is based on a complete and accurate emotional identification. We’ll use the complete, four-step model of emotional intelligence again.
Identify emotion: You have used your mood and emotion filter analyses and discovered that these are not giving rise to your growing frustration. Now you can ask whether there exists an injustice, an issue of integrity, or honesty. Is this a case of bias, bigotry, or prejudice?
Even though you can get easily frustrated at times, you are very clear about how you feel, and you are clear about how typical this feeling is. You determine that other people in the same situation would also perceive it as anger-provoking.
Use emotion: This ability will help to make sure that acting with anger is a constructive, not a destructive, process. If you feel what the other person feels, it will not be possible to act in a way that is unduly harsh. Feeling from the other person’s perspective also gives you a deeper level of insight into her world, allowing you to devise a plan of effective action that will make a difference to her.
You should also ask, “Am I too focused on looking for problems, injustice, feelings of being wronged or hurt? If I expand my view, what else might I discover about the person and the situation?”
Understand emotion: You’ll next want to pinpoint the underlying cause for the feeling of anger. “When did it start, and how did I feel just a short time ago? Will the feelings intensify or gradually pass and subside?”
It is important to use your what-if analyses to evaluate alternative courses of action. And you’ll certainly want to ask what the outcome will be if you take no action.
Manage emotion: If my feeling of anger is justified, that is, there has indeed been an act of injustice, then what do I do with this feeling? It will all depend on your desired outcome. What do you want to happen? What is the desired feeling-based outcome? Do you want the other person to recognize his mistake? Do you want him to change his behavior or to simply stop what he is doing?
For each of the possible strategies you come up with, you’ll evaluate them by using your emotional what-if planning skill to try to predict the possible result. Feeling empowered by your anger, you may now be ready to act out of anger but not act angrily. You can’t fall asleep at the wheel. You must continually monitor the environment, both how you feel and how the other person feels. Your focus of attention has to constantly shift, and you need to switch perspectives to truly understand the situation. As the situation changes, so must your actions.
Learning to manage your feelings and the feelings of others first requires some insight about the characteristic ways in which you experience your emotions. Once you master this step, you are ready to learn and use emotion management strategies. We hope that the discussion and exercises in this chapter will help you begin the process of being more open to feelings, getting to know them even better, and learning ways to effectively and intelligently manage with emotions.