A Recommendation for Angry Behavior

How to assist habitually angry people in making wiser decisions

“…angry people tend to rely on cognitive shortcuts—easy rules of thumb—rather than on more systematic reasoning. They’re also quick to blame individuals, rather than aspects of a situation, for problems.”

How Anger Poisons Decision Making
by Jennifer S. Lerner and Katherine Shonk
Harvard Business Review

Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that anytime anyone is angry that they are succumbing to emotions over reason and a less-than-ideal-and-helpful understanding of a situation, and reacting irrationally and selfishly.

Jennifer S. Lerner and Katherine Shonk, I speculate, are instead referring to people who are habitually quick to anger, overly intense in that state of emotional arousal and whose anger is longer lasting and more damaging.

That’s what today’s newsletter issue is about.

There is helpful guidance, the authors contend, for lessening troubles with such bull-in-a-china-shop behavior from people with more intense and likely frequent anger.

“Companies can effectively work around this human tendency and mitigate the impact of anger-fueled actions in the workplace by introducing accountability,” Lerner and Shonk write.

They talk about how people who resort to unhealthy anger can be encouraged and led to regulate their emotions more successfully.

“If you expect that your decisions will be evaluated by someone whose opinions you don’t know, you’ll unconsciously curb the effects of anger on those decisions,” Lerner and Shonk write.

“When you can’t be sure how your evaluator will judge your behavior, you’ll pay more attention to the key facts of a situation, which will then crowd out the (unwanted) influence of your own feelings from past events.”

A study conducted by Lerner with Julie H. Goldberg of the University of Illinois and Philip E. Tetlock of UC Berkeley resulted in findings about the psychological effects of residual anger.

“Accountability appears not to change what decision makers feel; rather, it changes how they use their feelings—a much more manageable objective for the workplace,” Lerner and Shonk write.

As you can see, the object is not to turn human beings and their emotional wiring into robots at all. No, it’s to help people predisposed to misusing anger to adjust and show more discipline in how they express themselves with words and other actions.

So within the workplace, how can colleagues or management help anyone, “subordinates” or executives with their dysfunctional anger?

“…(they) should inform employees that they will be expected to justify their decisions on certain projects—not just the outcomes—after the fact. By improving accountability, managers can steer employees toward decisions free from the negative effects of anger,” Lerner and Shonk say.

“Justify” might come across as a negative connotation — being interpreted as disrespect and lack of compassion — when talking about people’s emotions and feelings. Yet if we focus on the context that the authors are referring to, we can see what they are really communicating is that if people with anger as a driving force in their thinking, reactions and more calculated responses can learn clearly that they will have to explain their decisions within their angry states, they will be much more likely to pull back on the reigns of their worst impulses.

And maybe, at least sometimes, that’s a win not only for the team mission and other people around them, but also themselves, when it comes to strengthening their focus, forward thinking, discipline, self-control, relationship health and reputation.

Michael Toebe is the creator of Reputation Notes and founder and reputation specialist at Reputation Quality, a practice that serves and helps successful individuals and organizations in further building reputation as an asset and when necessary, ethically and successfully protecting, restoring and reconstructing it.