He took the folder and threw it on the desk. The typed contents scattered all over. “This is poor work,” he screamed in anger. “We hired you for your brains – not for you to produce this kind of shit!” This incident took place 26 years ago in a foreign country. To this day, I can describe to you my ex-boss’s office, the shirt he was wearing and the cigarette brand he was smoking. I can still hear his angry English accent and see the fury in his eyes.

What place has anger in business? What should happen when, like my previous boss, we get angry at work? Should we bottle it up or vent it out freely? Which is better? How can we express our anger most effectively? Ask any new or seasoned manager – and the feedback will always be the same: managing anger in the workplace in an appropriate and constructive manner is indeed something that we all grapple simply because we all have the capacity to feel and express anger. We all experience that tight knot in our stomach, our blood pressure rising, our clenched jaw, tensed muscles, sweating, and even shallow breathing.

Anger Management is big business in developed countries such as the USA or UK. Their courts of law often resort to sentencing a particular individual to attending an anger management workshop or a series of counselling sessions in an attempt to control his or her violent tendencies or express them more effectively. “Anger is only one letter away from Danger” is a strongly held belief in these countries and appears to be their courts’ main motivation.

Handling anger

I believe that handling anger is an interpersonal skill that can be developed – but it requires, for the chronic sufferer, a tremendous amount of energy. For those of us who tend to constantly bottle things up, we need to be exposed to and master skills such as behaving assertively, speaking out, setting boundaries, and standing up for our rights and needs without hurting others. These can all be learnt. We teach them regularly at the Business School and marvel as delegates succeed in learning how to acknowledge anger’s presence, experience its bodily sensations such as tense muscles and warmth, and verbalize their angry feelings.

But what about those of us who express their anger too freely and frequently – the very same people who are often earmarked for anger management interventions? It’s this second category of people which usually gives the most trouble as they tend to express their anger both frequently and in a manner that is out of proportion with the event (e.g. “exploding”with an employee for a minor misdemeanour). Here, those affected need to involve their mind, body, and behavioural habits developed from their childhood days.

Cognitively, they would need to identify in them the assumptions, perceptions and beliefs they hold and which lead them to become angry regularly and inappropriately (e.g. “I am an important person”, “Employees are basically lazy”, “Secretaries are all inefficient”). Keeping an “anger diary” which records each angry explosion is a useful technique here.

Physically, they would need to learn how to learn stress-management techniques that would help them relax or cooling-off techniques such as counting to 10, taking a deep breath, and changing “hot thoughts” to “cool thoughts”, and so on.

Behaviourally, they could learn new habits and skills such as self-awareness, empathy, negotiation and assertiveness. They all can help to reduce anger by changing behaviours.

It’s okay to be angry – we all have to express our disappointments. The key is to do it in a way that doesn’t shut down communication and even more importantly, to learn from it and become more aware of ourselves.

Prof E Charoux <I>Feedback: [email protected]