Five Steps to Curb Workplace Anger

Gregory Kyles, at the Anger Management Institute of Texas wrote an article about workplace anger recently. he distilled a list of five steps to curb workplace anger:

Steps to curb Workplace Anger: Managers should be cognizant of the first signs of aggression. Absenteeism, late-coming, tardiness and deterioration in performance are some warning signals.
• Organizations should invest in Anger Management Programs at regular intervals to enable employees to express feelings and release pent-up emotions.
• One-to-one sessions with employees should take place regularly even when no problems are apparent. This helps prevent any lurking anger issues that may blow up later.
• Active listening and conversations in informal settings should be encouraged to make people feel at ease and open up.
• Proper systems for complaints and grievances must be established. Every complaint must be dealt with within a specified time frame.
• If an employee has to be terminated, it has to be done as civilly as possible. They should not be made to feel small and humiliated.

Let's consider these steps:

1. Invest in Anger Management: The skills of anger management, emotional intelligence, assertive communication, and stress management will help any employee to work more productively. Adding anger awareness for employees whose attitude or behavior is getting out of line is also useful. Large corporations may want to train their human resources or employee assistance professionals to provide these trainings in regular workplace classes or workshops.



2. One-on-one Sessions: Ideally, supervisors and management would have developed emotional intelligence and communications skills to be a helping person for their direct reports. Unfortunately, however, management is often a serious contributor to morale and anger problems. Bringing in an outside professional to assess work units, teams, and project groups can go a long way towards helping companies avoid not just violent outbursts of rage, but also passive-aggressive slow-downs by aggrieved employees.


3. Active Listening: According to a Kaiser Permanente internal document, employees are most motivated by a) being appreciated, b) feeling like they're active participants in the process, and c) management sympathy for their problems. These three highest priorities of employees can be met readily by a manager trained in emotional intelligence using active listening. Such an approach will draw management and labor closer together.


4. Feedback: All too often, American corporations ignore employee feedback. W. Edwards Deming identified employee feedback about work process and work conditions as essential to a corporations success. Companies need to ensure that management culture can effectively receive feedback from employees and help them feel safe in providing that feedback.


5. Treat Employees with Civility and Dignity: It doesn't take a graduate degree in organizational psychology to realize that workers who are treated with contempt and hostility, will be resentful workers. Anger management training within corporations will not work until any corporate culture of management's hostility towards workers has been transformed.

How can a corporation's culture be transformed? One person at a time. Implicit in assertive communication is respect for the other individual. Teaching collaborative and cooperative methods of work, implementing consensus processes, and encouraging employee leadership and expertise can go a long way towards creating a workplace liberated from anger.

workplace, anger, workplace rage, desk rage, management skills, managerial skills, TQM, power, power structures, anger management in the workplace

Road Rage: Car vs. Bicycle

This image was snapped by a witness to a road rage incident where the driver of the car became enraged after the bicyclist shouted for him to slow down. The driver is being charged with 2nd degree kidnapping. The (literal) insanity that people can be "driven" to is amazing. I'm certain that sitting on his couch at home, James Millican (who drove the car) would have told anybody who cared to ask that he would never deliberately ram a bicyclist. But after being shouted at to slow down (and possibly having a few drinks), Millican allowed his reaction to drive him into some serious legal trouble. Fortunately, the cyclist was unharmed, and was able to get off the car when Millican slowed for an intersection.

Why would an otherwise sane human being do this? Once can only speculate ... but we know that anger does not come from external events, but rather from how we (choose) to think about those events. Millican must have felt some threat ... probably to his ego by the shouting cyclist. And once a person feels a threat, even just a psychic one, all bets are off unless they immediately use the tools of emotional intelligence and anger management to rein themselves in.

Self-knowledge and self-control, major components of emotional intelligence, would have helped Millican to not simply react, but to notice his thinking and his reactions and to contain them. Anger management skills could have helped him to de-escalate and behave in a rational manner. If emotional intelligence were considered as important as IQ, if it were taught in schools, Millican would likely not be facing charges and the incident would never have been newsworthy. After all, who can imagine a headline that reads Local Man Practices Anger Management and Avoids Committing Mayhem by Using Emotional Intelligence Skills Gained in Grammar School!

Anger management classes based on stress management help students realize that alcohol is a bad way to relieve stress. Emotional intelligence components help students to understand themselves and their triggers as well as to coach themselves through frustration. These techniques form part of the core curriculum of Anderson & Anderson's Anger Management and Executive Coaching curricula.

Proactive Anger Management

While anger management is not a cure for psychopathology nor mental illness, it can serve to separate at-risk students from those who exhibit deficits in managing stress, anger, assertive communication and empathy/emotional intelligence.

The United States Postal Service has demonstrated the effectively of anger management as a violence prevention strategy. "Going Postal" is becoming a rarity media reports of workplace violence as it has become a rarity in the real world of the Postal Services.

— George Anderson, LCSW, BCD, CAMF

The Postal Service has demonstrated the real-life benefits of proactive anger management, consisting of understanding and recognizing anger and its causes, stress management, assertive communication, and empathy or emotional intelligence.

Rather than being psychotherapy, this approach to anger management is psycho-educational: it helps students gain life skills. By applying even a few of these skills to life, rage, anger, frustration, and stress are reduced. When this happens in the workplace, workplace efficiency often climbs, there are fewer days of sick leave taken, fewer call-offs, and fewer workplace accidents.

This proactive approach can be used with higher levels of management and administration as well. Generally it is done in a one-to-one setting and referred to as executive coaching.

This usually starts with an evidence-based assessment, individual recommendations, and a personalized curriculum. A post-test helps the student see how much they've learned and been able to apply. Often this can be done in as few as a dozen sessions.

Anger Management for Doctors

One of the first questions posed by physicians inquiring about resources for abusive physicians is “Do I have to undergo a psychiatric assessment”. This question is extremely important to any practicing physician as it will almost certainly affect his or her entire career if there is anything in any file suggesting impairment or even an assessment. Therefore, if the goal of a program is to help abusive physicians who are not addicted to drugs/alcohol or psychiatrically disturbed, it must not include a mandatory psychiatric assessment.

— Carlos Todd, Anger Hurts blog

Since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders (DSM-IVtr) does not classify anger as a mental disorder (other than Impulsive Explosive Disorder, which is not common anger), a psychiatric evaluation is not indicated for physicians, police officers, executives, or anybody else who has an anger problem.

It is important to screen for other mental disorders. Doing anger management with a person suffering from untreated schizophrenia or bipolar disorder will rarely work until the underlying disorder has been treated. Frequently, screenings reveal dysthymia, depression, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which had previously gone undetected. This, however, is not a psychiatric assessment, but a mental health screening which can be done by any licensed and qualified psychotherapist. It need not become a part of anybody's record.

Anger management classes or executive coaching sessions are psycho-educational. They are interventions to train the recipients in skills to help recognize, contain, and defuse anger, to help prevent aggressive or hostile situations for ever occurring, to develop emotional intelligence, to gain skills in stress management and stress prevention, and to communicate in assertive, rather than pathological manners.

None of these fall under the province of psychiatric or psychological treatment. While some cognitive behavioral interventions are taught to anger management students, this is not cognitive behavioral therapy. Participants are students, not patients.

Often, physicians, attorneys, executives, and other professionals need discretion. They fear taking an anger management class where others will know about their shortcomings. Additionally, law-enforcement officers who need anger management training fear both the stigma of an "anger management" label as well as being in a group with those whom they may have to police.

The solution for these reservations is to offer one-on-one executive coaching or professional development. Additionally, a "Law Enforcement Interaction Skills" group may be the perfect venue for helping police officers who cannot afford to pay for one-on-one sessions.

Executive coaching is inevitably more costly than tuition for an anger management class, but professionals should be able to afford this. Anderson & Anderson offers training and certification in the additional skills needed for executive coaching, above and beyond what are required for teaching anger management classes.

An interesting suggestion for anger management facilitators is to offer Law Enforcement classes at a drastically reduced rate ... nearly free! Why? Because the people who are required to take these classes put their lives on the line every day to promote civil order. This is one way of showing gratitude to police officers for their thankless job. A weekly class for police officers only may not generate much income, but it will generate good will, and can be used to generate favorable publicity.

Anger Hurts

Most of the accepted clinical data on anger management suggest that the most effective intervention is not counseling or psychotherapy but psycho-educational interventions. We accept this philosophy; see our model below. Therefore AngerHurts.com will also focus on providing as much information as possible to our visitors on all aspects of anger mangement. We encourage our readers to stop by our discussion board and share your experiences. This will help to strenghten others. As members of the American Association of Anger Management providers we are active in our support of new and innovative interventions that can be used to reduce the painful consequences that so often result from the inappropriate expression of anger.

I got to meet Carlos Todd today during our Executive Coaching workshop, led by George Anderson. Carlos is an intelligent, constantly thinking, energetic Certified Anger Management Facilitator from North Carolina. He is also a professional counselor there. During breaks, Carlos was constantly sharing innovative approaches to thinking about anger and anger management. He also took a bunch of pictures, which I hope to see up on flickr real soon.

A Day of Executive Coaching

The Anderson & Anderson model of anger management is the most effective and widely-recognized curriculum in the world. This model, which has been featured in Los Angeles Times Magazine, focuses on enhancing emotional intelligence and assertive communication while introducing behavior strategies for identifying and managing anger and stress. Our certification training and approved provider list are the industry standards and dominate the internet.

The Third day of Training is Executive Coaching. This training will include a demonstration of the contents and presentation of a ten hour Executive Coaching class along with assessment and Post Test.

I've had the pleasure of knowing and being mentored by George Anderson for over four years. Today I got to attend his famous executive coaching training. Executive coaching provides business and community leaders; professionals, such as lawyers and doctors; and law enforcement and criminal justice personnel with skills to avoid outrageous outbursts, to communicate more effectively and assertively, to manage their stress, and to increase their emotional intelligence and overall effectiveness.

Often executives are referred for coaching because of an angry outburst that creates a hostile work environment. Human resources departments frequently refer problem employees for anger management, but open classes are rarely appropriate for executives and managers with the same difficulties. Even professional partners in law firms and medical practices have been required to receive anger management.

Executive coaching allows this training to be done at a one to one level. It begins with an in-depth assessment procedure, using validated assessment tools, such as the Connover instrument and the EQ-Map. An individualized strategy is then mapped out with the client based on the results of the assessment. The client is expected to complete various practical assignments to help them strengthen personal deficits. This work is done one-on-one. After 10 to 20 hours of contact, a post-test is used to evaluate progress along with the client's anectdotal reporting.

This model has proven extremely effective for talent agents, corporate executives, physicians, judges, police officers, and even psychotherapists. I was very enriched by George's careful explanation of the material and getting the opportunity to see how the material is broken down for individual clients.

I look forward to beginning this work in my own practice.