Recognizing the Root of Anger

Transcript: On Friday, I found out we had missed a major deadline on a product release.

And I spent the entire weekend furious—pissed off, wanting to fire the lot of them.

Then on Sunday afternoon, I remembered something you taught us: anger is often a secondary emotion, and underneath it is usually either fear or hurt. That’s when I realized—oh yeah, I’m actually feeling pretty scared that nobody else is as worried about this as I am.

So on Monday morning, instead of blasting them like I had planned, I got up and said, “Gang, I am deeply worried and afraid that I might be the only one as concerned about this missed deadline and what it means for our customers.”

And I have never seen my team rally to fix something faster.