Directing Anger to Build an Advantage
it’s the last time
you were angry in the workplace
my most prominent
memory of anger in the workplace comes
at the end of an all hands meeting
now an all hands meeting is an
opportunity of course for the company to
roll out any
new initiatives to let the workforce
know what’s coming up and in this
particular all hands meeting
the company was rolling out some
initiatives that
some of us employees really weren’t
happy with
the initiative that was being rolled out
really put us at a disadvantage
and we wanted to speak up against that
and when the opportunity came we did
just that
we spoke up and we gave our concerns and
we
asked for some other options to be
considered
like any dynamic leader um
our voices were heard and our leadership
thanked us for our input and
um and the meeting ended just fine
it wasn’t until after that meeting that
it occurred to me or became evident to
me
that the culture we were working in
doesn’t actually
match the message that was given in that
all hands meeting
it was after this all hands meeting that
i was
pulled aside and i was asked
never to speak up in a meeting again
i was told that if i had concerns
i should bring them to my manager
privately
and beyond that i shouldn’t even speak
about it
at my desk in front of my co-workers
the concern was that has us older
engineers
were speaking with each other the
younger engineers would hear
our concerns and have the same concerns
and that was not wanted by
management now in that moment
um i was shocked once i got over
the initial shock of it that’s when the
anger set
in because how dare you have us in this
culture where you make us feel
comfortable
that we can speak up but then privately
you tell us we have no place
we have no voice and
in that moment even though i started to
feel anger i did what i
always did when i felt strong emotions
in the workplace
i suppressed it and i walked away
and as i started to think about this i
realized
we really do learn to suppress our
emotions
at a very young age it was recently
that i heard a friend of mine being
interviewed for a podcast
and in this interview she relayed
being molested in the church at a young
age
when she told her parents what had
happened to her
they corrected her behavior they sat her
down and they gave her instructions
don’t go in his presence alone take
someone with you
if you see him smile and kind of walk
away
she was taught to suppress what she was
feeling
and to placate the aggressor
and this is what we are often taught
as we are growing up none of the the
emotion and the anger that should have
been
directed towards this gentleman that
touched her inappropriately
it wasn’t directed towards him her
behavior was corrected
and in that
she learned anger has no value
my anger has no place in this my anger
will not help the situation
and so many of us learned that at a
young age
we learned that in church we learned
that in school as we’re growing up and
eventually we take this into the
workplace
and a lot of times our workplaces are
places where we want to be positive we
want to bring solutions to the tables
we don’t want problems and and when you
bring your
emotions our workplace cultures don’t
know how to deal with it
now i know many of you will hear this
and you’ll think
that’s really not a big deal i i can
show my emotions at work
it’s not going to result in anything
and for a while in my career i thought
the same thing
even though i did suppress what i was
feeling quite often
i thought it wouldn’t be a big deal
if i showed it
there was a time when when that was
tested and i was proven wrong
um after a long day of work the the work
day was still going
a 5 30 meeting was called 5 30 pm
i still had a couple of hours of work to
do
during the day but we were called into a
meeting
and an hour later of after sitting in
this meeting that really should have
been
an email i left visibly annoyed
i was so annoyed at this meeting i still
had a lot of work to do
and i immediately got back to my desk
picked up the phone
and called a co-worker that i needed to
coordinate with
unbeknownst to me i was followed
back to my desk and as i finished my
phone call
my manager informed me that he followed
me because he didn’t believe
that i would do what i was asked to do
because he could see that i was visibly
annoyed
at that end of that meeting he assumed
i wouldn’t follow through on my actions
in him seeing an emotion that he felt
was
negative immediately everything about me
went out the window
all of my past performance all of my
work history all of my experience went
out the window
and because i showed an emotion
he assumed i would do nothing i wouldn’t
follow through
that conversation quickly took my
annoyance
up to anger and that was the point where
i knew suppressing our emotions
is really detrimental to us
we have got to get to a point where
we’re normalizing
our emotions and and bringing all of who
we
are to the table when we
continue or as we continue to suppress
what we’re feeling suppress who we
are people don’t know how to take
us and they don’t know that even in our
bad days
we’re still going to perform we’re still
going to follow through on our actions
but because they never see it they don’t
know how to deal with it
so what did i do after all this
as i’m going through this anger and
because i’m deciding that
i am no longer going to hide my emotions
in the workplace
i decided to do a little bit of
self-assessment
every time we feel anger we have these
pain points in the workplace it’s an
indication
that something is missing or something
needs to change
and so i took that opportunity to do a
little belly button gazing
and figure out for myself where i needed
to be
what i needed to do what was a value to
me
and doing that assessment i realized
that
my voice is important to me
i have many skills and talents that i
bring to the table
that are never used in my workforce in
my workplace often suppresses
those talents and skills and so i
decided to
take all of who i am and figure out the
best
place to use it that self-assessment is
what led me
to coaching
outside of the workplace coaching
younger engineers it led me to coaching
people to build their business it led me
to building my own business
and ultimately it’s led me to this stage
because my voice is important and my
voice has
value and so because of my
anger and and what my anger prompted me
to do
i put myself
in a better advantage
it was years ago that i heard a
statistic
that said for every layoff we have
in life our chances of having a heart
attack
increases and recently i went back and
found this yale study
that confirmed that and said that after
the age of 40
when you have major disruptions in the
workplace
you’re doubling your chances of a heart
attack
and it doesn’t start at the moment of
the disruption it starts
years before months before that anxiety
that builds up
it’s there and it’s ever present so one
of the things that i found out
as i started to use my talents and my
skills in other places
as i built my own business and as i
started to speak and use my voice
my anxiety in the workplace went down
i no longer got as angry
when things started to happen in the
workplace
because i no longer felt
fully invested in that workplace such
that if something were to happen
if i were to be laid off if something
went wrong where a manager
felt like i wasn’t going to perform
because i had an emotion because i
showed i was human
because i have been doing all of these
things
the the anxiety lessened
and this is what i want for all of us i
want for all of us to get to that point
where we’re prepared where we’re ready
where we
are advantage so that when something
happens
in the workplace when we need to leave
when we need to have that breakup
it does not take everything away from us
and at the end of the day that’s
really what makes us advantaged
and so this is just the start of the
conversation
where will you take it from here