Unregulated aggression from the leader is like emotional radiation. It contaminates and poisons everyone in the room, killing their performance over time.

As a leader, is dumping your unresolved anger issues onto your team helping you, or destroying your influence over the long run?

Last week, we talked about dishonesty in the workplace and how it reduces a leader’s influence over time. This week, we’ll talk about bullying, anger and aggressive behavior towards subordinates and how it affects their work.

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This is Part 3 of a 7-part series on how toxic leadership behaviors manifest in the workplace, what is going on emotionally for the leader engaging in the behavior, and how they affect team performance. See the links below for the other sections:

1.      Introduction

2.      Dishonesty

3.      Bullying

4.      Scapegoating

5.      Micromanagement

6.      Conflict Avoidance

7.      Favoritism

I’ve said before that I don’t view emotions as positive or negative. Anger can be constructive as well as destructive. This piece focuses on the negative dimensions of aggression in the workplace.

The Fight or Flight Response

When an animal perceives danger in its environment, it goes into fight-or-flight mode. This is an automatic nervous system response and is probably true for all higher animals (like birds and mammals) and possibly for many lower ones.

Danger is anything that the subconscious nervous system perceives as a threat—the appearance of a predator, a sudden flash or noise, or your boss yelling in the office. “Fight” and “flight” correspond to the emotions of anger and fear, respectively.

My definition of leadership is actions that I undertake to organize and regulate the behaviors of others to achieve some objective. As a leader, if I engage in actions that put people into fight or flight mode, I want to ask myself if those actions help me achieve my objectives.

Let’s see what happens when we put other people into fight-or-flight mode.

When Teams Respond with Anger

In my early years at the Fed, I had a boss who had a “playful” way of asserting dominance.

When he wanted to get the attention of one of his direct reports, he would walk up behind their desk and bounce a ball off of their desk onto the front wall of the cubicle, wherever their attention was focused. (Strangely, he did not do this to his boss when he wanted his boss’s attention.)

The first time he did it to me, I stood up and said “WHAT THE FUCK” loud enough for everyone to hear. Never did it to me again. But I had a colleague who never pushed back, and kept getting the ball thrown on his desk.

Maybe this guy thought this sort of behavior was harmless. Over 10 years later, I still feel intense anger in my body even thinking about it.

He bought a lifetime of enmity from me in exchange for a moment of making himself feel powerful. From a risk-reward standpoint, that’s a terrible trade for any leader.

When Teams Respond with Fear

For the record, I think inspiring fear in others can be useful as a leader (which I will write about some other time). To me, “useful fear” is akin to what we learn when we touch a hot stove—intense pain, followed by an automatic avoidance response. But I also think that leaders way overuse fear. Overuse of fear is like everything in the house being a hot stove, which just leads people to avoid the house entirely.

This manifests most frequently when leaders are unpredictable in their response to their team’s actions. If team members spend a lot of mental energy trying to guess what will make the leader angry, that is mental energy that is not going into work product.

Forcing employees to play that guessing game not only distracts from the organization’s mission, but putting people into a persistent fight-or-flight state also taxes their nervous systems in a “chronic fatigue” way. People will eventually burn out and leave.

Is continually training replacements for your burned-out employees the best way to advance your own business goals?

The Leader’s Reality

Why do leaders engage in aggressive behaviors like yelling or throwing things, dominance games, or even insults?

I think anger can be performative (deliberately constructed to evoke a fear response in others) but I believe this to be rare. I think when leaders yell or slam their fist on the table, they are probably genuinely angry.

Anger is a defensive emotion. It is often triggered by an expectation not being met, like the leader expecting you to deliver work product that looks a certain way, and it doesn’t, so they become angry. Underneath their anger is a fear of what will happen to them if the company or division does bad work (they will be fired, become homeless, starve, spouse will leave, kids won’t have school, etc.) So basically the anger is defending their own survival, and is a sign they care about some outcome.

Insults can also be a release valve for this kind of anger. A person in emotional pain often finds relief in inflicting pain on another person (that’s what an insult is, words designed with the deliberate intent to hurt another person).

Insults and dominance games can also come from insecurity—fear—of a person’s position in the status hierarchy. By cutting someone else’s position down, they build up their own.

My former boss may have subconsciously felt uncertain about his social position vis-à-vis mine, and tested me to see if I would accept a socially submissive role to him. When I responded with my own anger (a defensive emotion!), he realized that I would not accept such a role and would only recognize his formal authority stemming from the organization’s hierarchy.

Regardless, a wise leader recognizes the costs that their unresolved emotional issues impose on the people around them. Then it comes down to, is it more expensive in the long run to continue to impose costs on colleagues and subordinates, or is it more expensive to do the hard work of resolving your issues once and for all?

You can either fix your anger or train your replacements.

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Next week, we’ll dive into our third destructive leadership behavior: scapegoating.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

When have I engaged in aggressive behavior towards others in the workplace, or even in a social setting?

Have I engaged in acts of aggression (slamming fists, throwing things, screaming, outright physical aggression)?

Have I played dominance games with others? Insults? Persistently undermining others in public, social exclusion, or mockery?

2)      Internal Reflection

If I have engaged in these behaviors, what is going on for me emotionally underneath these actions?

Remember, an emotionless robot would never do stuff like this. If you are doing it, it’s because there is an emotion present for you.

3)      External Reflection

What impact do my behaviors have on the people around me?

Do my direct reports view me as a tyrant, or as a just king/queen that dispenses both reward and punishment according to clear expectations?

Remember that anger can be a constructive emotion. In my view, an effective leader must dispense punishment at times. No effective kingdom has ever been run without punishment for lawbreakers.