Why Anger Might Start A Business Decision—But Shouldn’t Drive The Plan

This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Larry Bomback is the founder of Strategic Nonprofit Finance.

gettyMost of the damage I have watched leaders do to their own organizations happened while they were angry: the email sent at 11 p.m., the reorganization that was really about one person, the vendor relationship that ended over a slight nobody else noticed, the resignation accepted on the spot when a 20-minute conversation would have fixed it. I know the case against anger. I have billed hours cleaning up after it.

So I was surprised by how much a LinkedIn post stayed with me. An executive coach argued that anger is one of the greatest motivators of success. People who are angry about their financial situation, their career, an injustice they’ve experienced or the way the world works often channel that emotion into extraordinary achievement. The comments went further. Several people argued that revenge, outrage and even megalomania have fueled some of history’s most successful political movements and business leaders.

I have spent a few years now inside Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence work, and I suspect Chamine would likely argue close to the opposite of that coach in the LinkedIn post. In Chamine’s framework, anger is often a consequence of the “Judge Saboteur,” a mental pattern that convinces us we fall short, that someone is wrong or that an outcome is bad. His prescription is to shift into our “Sage Powers,” including empathy and curiosity.

The two positions look incompatible. I don’t think they are. The coach is describing where motivation comes from. Chamine is describing how good decisions get made. I believe leaders get into trouble when they take the answer to one question and apply it to the other.

Chamine doesn’t argue that negative emotions should be eliminated. He’s described them as a warning and used the example of touching a hot stove. The pain gets our attention and tells us something is wrong. Without it, we would leave a hand on the burner and do permanent damage. But once we have pulled our hand away, the pain has done its job.

Anger works about the same way. In my experience, it is often the first honest signal that something in the environment has to change: an unhealthy workplace, a partnership that stopped being a partnership, a business model that quit working three years before anyone said so, an injustice that shouldn’t be tolerated. Ignoring that signal is a form of denial. Living permanently inside it is a more expensive one.

This brings me to the piece of Chamine’s work I hear people argue with most.

Chamine has explained that in conflict, the other side is at least 10% right. I’ve noticed people love to wave this away with absurd examples. What if someone believes the earth is flat? He is not making a claim about factual assertions. He is saying that when another human being believes something passionately, there is usually an experience, a fear, an assumption or a value underneath it that is worth understanding.

When I stop and ask what the 10% is, my anger stops driving and curiosity gets a hearing. I usually find out that the person I was angry at is working around a constraint I knew nothing about. I make better decisions in that state. I also make slower ones, which is the real cost of the practice.

I have worked with organizations that desperately needed change, and in most cases, the catalyst was frustration rather than optimism. A board member who could not approve the same deficit one more time, a president who could not sit through another meeting where everyone agreed the model was broken and nobody moved—that emotion of anger at the situation itself created the energy to act. Without it, those organizations probably would have kept accepting a reality that was eating the mission.

Then, the same emotion tries to write the plan, and that is where it tends to go wrong. Anger wants a villain: the predecessor who left the mess, the department that overspends, the dean who won’t cut, the funder who walked. Some of that is usually true. None of it is a plan though. The decisions that hold up come after somebody asks what the people on the other side of the problem were seeing when they made the choices that got us here.

I am not describing other people. I do my positive intelligence reps every morning in part because I am fully capable of walking into a client’s finance committee meeting already irritated about something that happened at a different client two hours earlier. The frustration is often correct. It is not qualified to run the meeting.

I have landed on three simple rules for myself, and any leader can use them in the moment to ensure anger doesn’t dictate a plan.

1. Write down what the anger is telling you in one sentence. That sentence is the information, and it will still be true after the emotion burns off.

2. Make nothing irreversible in the same meeting where the anger showed up. That means no termination, no note to the board chair and no ultimatum to a funder.

3. Before the next conversation, write the strongest version of the other side’s argument. Do so in their words, not in the straw-man version you find satisfying.

If you can’t produce that version, you don’t understand the problem well enough to decide anything yet.​

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