Why workplace anger is misunderstood

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I’ve found it hard to get stuck into a good book in recent weeks — perhaps we’ve all been guilty of late-night doomscrolling? I am hoping there’ll be an “it” novel this summer, a word-of-mouth hit that will transport readers away from the bleak news agenda. Last year, that title was All Fours by Miranda July, about an artist blowing up her life for something more exciting. I loved it. (It’s just out in paperback.)

Please send your summer recommendations: “it” novels, podcasts, TV series — or Working It-adjacent leadership and self-development books. What are you taking on holiday? We’ll print readers’ choices over the summer. In the meantime, check out FT experts’ picks in our summer books special.

PS I am off for two weeks, making FT videos and also achieving a long-held ambition to attend the Do Lectures in Wales. (Message me if you are going!) My colleague Bethan Staton will be writing the newsletter.

As always, I’ll be on [email protected] (my boundaries are poor) 😳.

Everyone is angry. And that’s a good thing 🙌🏻

Anger at work can be corrosive. We know that just one overtly angry person on a team can derail the group’s cohesion and effectiveness, cowing everyone else into silence and resentment 🤬. But that team dynamic is now relatively rare, according to Sam Parker, author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change our Lives. “The obnoxious bully has been culturally disapproved of for a long time. The much more common anger dysfunction I see in the workplace is passive aggressiveness. If you’re in a meeting and someone makes you angry, you don’t say anything to them but you go straight to your friend on Slack to slag them off 👀.”

Sam’s book asks us to look at anger differently — to embrace it, not suppress it. First, we have to understand that its purpose is “to direct us towards a change we need to make in our lives”. I had never framed it like that before. Sam, a journalist at GQ, wrote the book after finding his own life hijacked by anxiety and (as he discovered) repressed anger. When we talked, one of the key insights he offered was that anger isn’t necessarily a “masking” emotion. It’s valid in itself — it’s a response to something.

Few of us are comfortable with anger — we are conditioned out of it in childhood — and we also may not realise that anger often does not manifest as shouting and bad temper. By not acknowledging its often-quiet presence, in ourselves and in others, we can’t move on. Workplaces are especially prone to people embracing denial, Sam told me: “Becoming comfortable with anger in yourself and then having conversations with people about something that has angered you, I think, is something that can put you at a massive advantage in the workplace today, because so few people have that skill. In fact, most people have the opposite. They can’t do it at all 🫥.”

Before we can bring some clarity to workplace anger, Sam suggests that we need to understand our own responses. “We conflate anger with aggression or violence. It’s neither of those things, it’s a neutral emotion that is there to protect us, inform us and energise us. It’s always an alert against one of three things: a boundary violation, an unmet need, or a wound. And when you start thinking about the information that anger has to tell you about yourself, rather than the person who’s upset you, then you can get a lot of wisdom from it.” You don’t have to act on it — just reflect. (Never send that angry email written in the heat of the moment 😱.)

Also, and this is potentially NSFW, Sam suggests we get behind the energy burst that comes with anger. “You might call it the ‘f**k you’ energy — the idea that success is the best revenge, and in a work context, if someone attacks you and there isn’t a diplomatic route to resolving it, then getting past them, doing something else that allows you to shine ✨— you can channel the energy.” Sam reckons he’s succeeded this way at times. “It’s cold revenge and I’ve done that in my career.”

Meantime, he suggests getting comfortable with confronting how we feel at work. “We’ve overcorrected in a lot of sectors and we are now in a place where people don’t feel challenged a lot of the time.” Being “underchallenged” can involve not being managed well, and the avoidance of good feedback. “Your boss may be afraid to challenge you directly because they are afraid of upsetting you.” (It all sounds deeply British).

Sam’s book will be especially helpful for people who struggle with anger, and who may not even be aware of its existence in their lives 🫣. He makes an interesting link with the current prevalence of anxiety and depression. “The opposite of anxiety, the opposite of worrying, is relaxation. So I tried every relaxation — wellness, gratitude, journaling, yoga, jogging. And it didn’t work for me. When I started getting angry, the anxiety fell. And if you are someone like me who has had to learn that ability, it can be life changing.”

He’s right: I have been very surprised by how much I enjoy boxing and weightlifting with a personal trainer. Channelling anger can be fun 😉.

• Want more? Read this HBR article on “how leaders can get the feedback they need to grow”, by three experts on embracing “big” emotions and discomfort, Kim Scott, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy.

This week in AI at work 📝

This week’s most useful report (IMO) is a hot-off-the-virtual-press survey of AI at Work 2025, from Boston Consulting Group, spanning 10,600 leaders and staff in 11 countries and regions. It’s BCG’s third AI report, and the share of employees who feel positive about GenAI “rises from 15 per cent to 55 per cent with strong leadership support”. Most strikingly, though, when employees aren’t provided with the AI tools they need, more than half said “they will find alternatives and use them anyway”.

This “bring your own AI to work” phenomenon is big — and damaging. As BCG says, in its measured way: “This is a recipe for frustration, security risks, and fragmentation of efforts.” I’ll say 🤯.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. The joy of the office packed lunch: Mouth-watering Tupperware-filling tips from a range of foodies, and also from FT journalist Hannah Rock, who has eaten the same lunch every day for decades. And has saved £20,000.

2. Why the serial CEO has fallen out of fashion: It may be the stress of the job, or it may be simply that “one and done” is enough for more business leaders, but companies are increasingly having to appoint first-timers to the top job, as Anjli Raval reports.

3. How to make an early exit: Donald Trump leaving the G7 meeting early spurred Emma Jacobs to write about how to leave a meeting. Many power plays on display in workplaces are reminiscent of the US president’s tactics.

4. The Genius Myth, or why it’s wrong to lionise the likes of Elon Musk: The idea of genius has been with us for centuries, but Helen Lewis has written a book interrogating the term — and discussing the role of “scenius” — people and ideas that can help boost creativity. Review by Lucasta Miller.

5. In pictures: St Paul’s marks 350th anniversary with rare glimpse of its inner sanctum: The FT’s chief photographer, Charlie Bibby, spent a year following the cathedral’s clergy, staff and volunteers. It’s a beautiful reminder of what a vast operation it is, costing £16mn a year to run.

One more thing . . . 

In his NYT essay, “Where have all my deep male friendships gone?”, Sam Graham-Felsen explores his own friendship deficit — and why this happens to so many men. Sam didn’t struggle with connections in his early life, but marriage, fatherhood and work created distance, and men don’t have the same ease that many women do in asking friends out and navigating groups. There is often a kind of inherent awkwardness 🤷🏽‍♂️, which Sam works to overcome. We are a long way from earlier centuries, when male friends openly professed admiration and love: “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to his friend Joshua Speed, “that I will never cease while I know how to do anything”.

A view from the Working It community 📸

Deborah Wilson writes that “the view from my office in Devon generally includes our four guinea fowl and a very territorial white pheasant, just visible behind the wall 🕵🏻‍♀️.” It’s lovely. Deborah and her avian colleagues will receive as many Working It-adjacent books as I can stuff into a large envelope ✉️. Send your workplace views, whether bucolic or busy, to [email protected].

Before you go . . . 

If you fancy a blast of workplace audio (or video), I’ve guested on two podcasts out this week. At Investors’ Chronicle (an FT publication), I talked about how to get a pay rise on the new Women and Wealth podcast, hosted by IC journalists Val Cipriani and Madelaine Apthorpe. I slipped in a favourite acronym, “Fobsag” (fear of being seen as greedy), a concept afflicting too many women at work, and coined by Professor Grace Lordan, who leads LSE’s The Inclusion Initiative 🙏.

Over on Deloitte’s The Green Room podcast, I joined Deloitte UK market chair Kirsty Newman and hosts Ollie Carpenter and Lizzie Elston to talk about networking (and why it doesn’t have to be painful). One tip? Update your LinkedIn profile, so people can find you. You don’t even have to leave your chair for that one🪑.