It’s About Making Babies!

Seth Godin observes that to communicate, we have to recognize the difference that anger makes.

I encountered this phenomenon in the classroom. Fred Jones wrote about anger in “Tools for Teaching.” Anger involves adrenaline. Mr. Jones writes about keeping classroom discipline, and getting angry isn’t a good thing for the teacher. It takes 28 minutes for adrenaline to affect the body, and then to dissipate. During that 28 minutes your judgement will be affected. The article in Tools for Teaching recommends taking a calming breath as soon as you feel the anger stir. It can take a couple of minutes for the level of adrenaline to peak - you cannot avoid the half hour that your judgement will be affected, but with luck you can defuse the total amount of adrenaline that is released. A ’smaller anger’ is much less disruptive than a full-blown rage.

What Seth Godin notices is that you have to address the anger of angry people. I think the point he misses is the level of anger. Keep the annoyances in play, and you make the anger more intense, and the possibility of communicating or persuading just keeps getting worse. Seth gives a couple of examples of corporate and individual responses to customer anger that don’t help. Trying to promote the company ‘line’ or story with an angry customer is unproductive; you have to ‘fix’ the anger, first. It isn’t likely that many customers will agree to wait 28 minutes and try again (hint: more likely to make the anger worse). So the next best counter-anger strategy has to be to remove the stimulus that angered the customer, or at least let the customer believe you will work to solve the problem.

Another lesson to be learned from teachers learning and maintaining classroom discipline is to reduce the likelihood of anger, or other signs you lost control of communication. Communicate clearly, keep the story simple, be truthful, respect your partner in communication and understand (as well as possible) her/his engagement in the conversation.

In a recent job interview I was asked, “How did you handle the latest angry customer you encountered?” I think of this as having a couple of conversation ’switches’. One switch is to change from serving customers to solving an immediate problem (whatever is bothering the customer). Another switch is to handling my assigned task, to calling for experienced assistance (this lets the customer understand I cannot solve the problem, that I recognize that the problem is important, and that I want to solve the problem rather than make the customer go away). By making a switch early, I believe I can help the customer manage to keep the tension level lower - making a better solution easier to achieve.

Seth mentions that you can sometimes avoid angry people - choose to not to work with someone that is angry. This makes sense at work. But people that spend time being angry show poor self-control - and sometimes their friends and loved ones suffer. Employers should take responsibility for angry workers. Tempting as it might be to fire someone with an anger problem, the right response for the community is to direct the employee into assistance. The company needs to know if policies are causing problems and fix them, and also to understand how morale affects business efforts. An employer that cannot handle an angry employee, without trying, won’t be any good at taking care of other employees. Seth’s strategy of leaving rather than work with an angry co-worker might work as a warning signal to management - and to other workers.

Anger, a tough subject. For me the important thing is that adrenaline, the ‘engine’ behind anger, is a hormone, affects the body, and has to be dealt with.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 9:44 am and is filed under General, Society, health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.