There is an old story about the Buddha. While resting in a village with his monks, he was confronted by an angry young man who accused him of exploiting the villagers. The Buddha listened quietly and then asked him a question: if you bought someone a gift and they refused to accept it, to whom would the gift belong?
“To me,” the young man replied.
The Buddha suggested that the same was true of the man’s insult. If he refused to accept it, the insult remained with the person who offered it.
It is a wonderful story. But there are few Buddhas in corner offices and boardrooms.
We all get angry. A colleague challenges us publicly, someone takes credit for our work, a decision feels unfair or a team member repeatedly lets us down. These situations are real and our reactions to them are human. But what happens next is influenced not only by the event, but also by the meaning we give to it.
Anger often gathers intensity through the conversation taking place inside our own head. He should not have done that. She does not respect me. This is unfair. They are taking me for granted. The more certain we become about these interpretations, the more justified our anger begins to feel.
Fairness is a particularly interesting trigger. Most of us have a strong sense of what is fair when we are the person affected by a decision. Yet what appears unquestionably unfair from our perspective may look quite different from another person’s. This does not mean that unfairness is imaginary. It means that our interpretation deserves examination before it becomes a verdict.
Nor does this mean that leaders should suppress anger. Anger can be useful. It can alert us that a boundary has been crossed, that something unethical has happened or that someone is being treated badly. There are moments when a team may rightly expect its leader to make it unmistakably clear that something is simply not acceptable.
The issue, therefore, is not whether a leader should ever become angry. It is what happens between feeling the anger and acting on it.
When anger immediately decides our response, we surrender some of our choices. We say more than we intended, attack the person rather than the problem, send the email we later regret or turn a disagreement into something personal. Once that happens, the original issue can quickly become secondary to the damage caused by our reaction.
But if we can create even a small distance between the emotion and the response, something changes. We can decide what needs to be said, how strongly it needs to be said and, most importantly, what we want our response to accomplish. Sometimes the right response may still be forceful. The difference is that the force now has a purpose.
This is why I would not argue that good leaders rarely get angry. That sets an unrealistic standard and may even encourage people to disguise what they genuinely feel. The more useful discipline is to recognise anger without automatically handing it control.
You can be angry without becoming toxic. The real challenge is not eliminating anger, but learning to use it without allowing it to use you.
Perhaps the question to ask at the moment of anger is a simple one: Who is making the decision, my anger or me?
