Is it ever good for leaders to get angry?

As leaders, we can often recall moments where we’ve been angry with others, or experienced anger from someone we work with. Often our jobs are an important part of our identity, so when things go wrong, it hits us hard. This can mean we fly off the handle, damaging those around us and causing us feelings of guilt or even shame.

As a result, many of us have spent much of our careers learning to hide our anger under the guise of improving our ‘emotional intelligence’. There’s a lot to be said for this – research shows that leaders who are generally calm, predictable and not prone to emotional outbursts are more motivating to work for and nurture higher psychological safety within their teams.

The question is, can expressing anger be a useful thing for leaders? We’re all human, and our emotions are an important part of our characters. They provide us with cues and motivate us to take action, they express our thoughts and feelings to others, and connect us to the people we lead. In their book ‘Inspiring Leaders’ Zenger, Folkman, and Edinger present data gathered from 25,000 leaders that show the most inspiring had something unique in common: their ability to establish a strong emotional connection with their employees. What we’re talking about here is being honest and transparent about how they were feeling. 

This isn’t oversharing, which could be uncomfortable or stressful for our teams. It’s about connecting with others with emotions rather than tasks. And the first step of this is to be able to identify our own emotions – which may be more difficult than it seems! Many of us can only identify three emotions: angry, sad and happy.

In her book ‘Atlas of the Heart’ (a great emotional reference tool), Brené Brown says ‘without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviours work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disembodied from our own experiences and disconnect from each other’. If we can increase our emotional granularity (the ability to accurately recognise and label emotions), we can better communicate our needs and get the results from those around us that are important in our role as a leader, while also improving our own psychological wellbeing.

Often as leaders, knowing when and where to show emotion is a difficult thing. This is particularly true with anger, which is often misused and ineffective. In his HBR article ‘Motivating People Starts with Building Emotional Connections’, Scott Edinger says that rather than expressing anger by raising your voice, cutting people off, or speaking aggressively (which could be met with defensiveness or shut down), it’s more effective to do so by expressing the concern behind the anger. Edinger says that anger is often a front for worry or concern, or also shielding the fear of a bad result. If we feel angry, he advises us to ask ourselves three things:

·      Am I angry, or is there something else I’m feeling?

·      If you answer “I’m just angry”, try coming up with a couple of options. Am I afraid, distressed, worried – and about what?

·      How can I express myself in a composed way so it motivates productive action?

Anger is unavoidable for most of us, but by identifying our real emotions and expressing them in a way that is measured and calm, can build trust, foster teamwork, and motivate those around you while protecting psychological safety. We’re all human, we just need to remember to show it sometimes.