How to communicate when upset or angry

Or annoyed or just outright stressed

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More than a decade ago I was managing a team that was running a popular service with millions of users. The service was not very well designed and we had regular outages and traffic storms. This greatly annoyed the team that was running the company’s network infrastructure. The manager of that network team was a very smart and equally intense individual who didn’t like me very much.

To my credit I would say that I think he didn’t like anyone outside of his team very much, but it might have just been me. To his credit, I have been called an “unbeatable asshole” by someone on LinkedIn the other day, so maybe he had a point. Then again, that was in a discussion on the hot-button item of EU farm policy, so tempers were justifiably running high.

Anyway, at one point, an email discussion got out of hand a bit and both he and I started getting a bit testy. Before long, tempers were running high and insults started flying. I might have fired the first shot there, but I can't quite remember. After a few back and forths, he called my manager and demanded that I be fired. When my manager refused, he called our director and demanded that my manager and I be fired. When that didn’t have the expected result, corporate mythology has it that he called our VP and demanded that said director, my manager, and I, be fired. The VP called us all in a room and settled the matter by explaining that nobody was going to get fired, but he also proposed we split off our traffic infrastructure from the shared pools managed by the networking team. Henceforth, we would be in charge of running our own reverse proxies and related infrastructure, thereby reducing the need for communication between our teams. 

This is easily one of my least professional episodes and it brings me to the topic of this Wednesday Wisdom: How to communicate effectively when tempers are running high. They might run high because of a particularly annoying email, because of an irritating LinkedIn post, or maybe because someone says something upsetting to you in your face. What to do in these cases?

Let’s start by acknowledging that most of us are not working with our friends and family. This is fundamentally weird and a deviation of millenia of established practice, but that’s post-industrial revolution life for you. Your colleagues might like you, you might like them, and I hope all y’all do, but in essence you are in an instrumental relationship. The modern workplace brings people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different countries, different religions, and different whatever together in order to get something done and not to have a good time. That insight should drive our communication patterns.

You might be familiar with the fact that families can have epic fights and then get back together because, well, they’re family. That is not the case with most friends and definitely not with colleagues. For that reason I recommend everyone to always communicate strategically, meaning that you always say and write whatever is necessary to get done what you need to get done.

This advice does not only cover communication when angry or upset, it should govern all of your communication at work: You are there to get something done, so say and write whatever you need to to get that done, and do not say or write anything that gets in the way of that. Simple advice, but hard to follow, especially when you feel under attack.

Often when you get that annoying email or read that upsetting LinkedIn post, you experience a sudden flush of irritation and it is not uncommon for you to immediately feel the urge to write a very strongly worded response. When this happens you are suffering from a fight response triggered by an amygdala hijack. Lots has been written about the amygdala and its effect on our behavior and I am not going to repeat it here; if you have never heard about it, please use the link provided two sentences ago to start a fascinating journey in brain physiology and the impact of that on our psychology.

The essence of all the knowledge we have about the amygdala and its impact on our responses to events triggering strong negative emotions is that our first emotional response is pretty much never the smart or strategic one. I have a bit of a sharp tongue and am very capable of acerbic wit, and when I lash out to hurt, bad things are bound to happen. The least bad of which would be that the other person now feels triggered (if they weren’t already) and might respond in kind. This then leads to a ladder of escalation that might end with people calling your manager and demanding you be fired, as the example I opened this article with shows.

So, what to do? How to communicate effectively and strategically while under the influence of a hijacked amygdala?

The answer, fortunately, is very simple: Don’t! Or at least, not right away.

That’s right, the answer to how to communicate effectively and strategically while under the influence of strong negative emotions is not to communicate at all. Just wait a bit. What’s the hurry? The immediate anger will subside, your frontal cortex with all of its excellent abilities for logical reasoning will establish itself again, and you will be able to write a strategic reply that gets you what you want or need to achieve. Maybe in the extra time you gain the ability to see matters from your communication partner’s point of view, and you might even start to empathize with them!

I do just that these days. Mostly, that is. Whenever I get some communication that makes me angry or upset, I do not respond, but instead just get up and walk away, waiting to cool down before I respond. It might be an hour. It might need a day. It might even need a weekend. If the situation is particularly hairy, I talk it over with someone in order to help me get some perspective on the situation.

The next level of that approach is to predict that you are going to read something annoying and hold off on opening that email or post until you are in the right mindset. This is especially important if you are in the terrible habit of reading work emails at home and late at night. If you then read something upsetting you are at increased danger of not responding strategically and you might even have a sleepless night to boot! I wholly recommend not working from home at night, but I also know that sometimes this is indicated by the circumstances. If that turns out to be necessary, at least have the smarts not to open emails that you know will upset you. They can wait until the morning, when you are fresh and rested, and not already tired and annoyed from a hard day’s work. 

This approach also holds for in-person communication. I have gotten myself in trouble more times than I care to remember by getting audibly annoyed and short with people during conference calls where there was more idiocy going on than I could comfortably deal with. What was I thinking?

Answer of course: I was not thinking, that’s what the amygdala hijack does, it short-circuits your thinking out of the process.

There is almost never any value in reacting badly, even when confronted with negativity. What is the strategic goal of that? To see who can escalate the fastest? To make people feel bad about themselves? Remember that negative emotions never inspire or impress anyone. If anything, a measured logical response to a bad situation is way more impressive. 

The alternative to having a fight response, is having a flight response. When that happens, instead of immediately getting the finely honed and recently sharpened fountain pen out for a fiery response, you withdraw from the communication and park it behind an internal barrier where it can slowly be forgotten. That sounds soothing, but again, are you going to get what you want by dealing with upsetting communication this way? What’s the strategy here?

As is the case with the fight response, the immediate response is not the right one and you should do quite the opposite. So instead of withdrawing completely, you will have to engage, but in an assertive way. I know this is easier said than done, but you need to get back to this communication once you have collected your thoughts and gathered some courage. The fight response people need to learn to let go and then assert themselves in a measured way, whereas the flight response people need to learn to re-engage in an assertive way instead of letting go of the upsetting communication altogether. 

Whenever you are in a communication that is not going the way you want it, you need to remember the following: What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve and what is the best way to achieve it? No matter what your working situation is, you will always run into things that upset you. Deal well with that and don’t get caught up in a ladder of escalation where there are no winners.