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Willing to Fight (at Work)
Why a culture where people shouldn’t be angry does more harm than good.
For all of my career, I’ve been told that I shouldn’t be angry at work.
It is unprofessional. It is immature. It is unacceptable — the sort of thing that leads to closed door meetings with your boss. Anger is something to be suppressed, hidden, and ashamed of.
And for all of my career, I’ve been angry at work. Which means I’ve spent most of my career with constant, low levels of stress as I hid that fact from my coworkers. Much like imposter syndrome, I was afraid people would find out. Of course I had imposter syndrome at times too, so the fear would multiply. Not pleasant.
Early in my career was worse. I worked at some terrible jobs. Lousy pay, incompetent management, only slightly less incompetent coworkers. The sort of places where we stored SSNs and credit card numbers in plain text, and then put them into the same database for convenience. The sort of places that would give a kid with no degree and no experience (read: me) a programming job. But even at that point in my career I knew that it was a dumpster fire. I would look around, see that I was surrounded by shit yet somehow I was the one at fault for being angry about it. I didn’t understand the incongruity. Why wouldn’t I be angry about that? Why is nobody else angry about that? … it just made me angrier.
Now, I’m not going to argue that you should go full Steve Jobs on people. Anger is scary. Particularly if you’re a man due to all of the cultural and instinctual baggage that comes with angry men. Psychological safety certainly won’t exist when physical safety is in question. Our instincts will tell us to fight or to flee. And since fighting is entirely unprofessional, immature, and unacceptable — people choose the only option left. They flee. They disengage. They avoid you. It doesn’t even take Jobs’ yelling at people. Quiet, seething anger is just as dangerous, and people react the same way.
But some times it is okay to be angry at work.
One of those times is when we want people to be scared. There is one key scenario when you actually want to reduce psychological safety: when someone is reducing many others’ psychological safety. Think of it as…
