So, you did it.  Like Maestro Papadopoulos (see Lost your temper with your staff?  You may have lost more besides), you spoke sharply with a member or members of your staff.  Time has elapsed.  You realise you made a mistake in speaking in the way you did.  You’ve taken time to process your anger.  You’ve learnt from the experience.  What next?

You may be hoping that it’s enough to show up differently next time.  If you do, you’ll be joining the legions of bosses who, having lost their temper, are “extra nice” next time round – but it’s not enough.  Why?  After all, surely your staff can tell that you’re sorry from your behaviour?  Well, yes, and still, knowing this alone is not enough.

What more do your staff want?  They want understanding for the experience they had on the receiving end of your anger.  They want to know that you understand the impact it had on them – some call this empathy.  They want to know that you’re ready to take responsibility for your actions and eager to learn to handle things differently in future.  This helps them to feel safe.  They also want judgement – discernment, acceptance:  even if (especially if) you have to deal with performance that is below par, they need to know that you can separate them – the person, the people – from their behaviour.  These needs may be hidden from your staff behind their own “righteous anger” towards you – unless they have high levels of emotional maturity they won’t forgive you until you’ve expressed your regret.

Now, I do want to differentiate between expressing your regret and saying sorry.  This isn’t about beating yourself up or putting yourself in the wrong.  Nor is it about the kind of insincere apology that London commuters make even as they push you to one side to get to where they want to go.  This is about connecting with, and expressing, your sincere regret.  For Maestro Papadopoulos, such an expression might have gone something like this:

“I said a couple of things I regretted at our rehearsal on Tuesday.  I said it wasn’t acceptable to me that members of the choir were missing from our rehearsal and I said it in a way which put those of you who’d made the effort to get here on time in the wrong.  And I also compared the children’s choir with the ‘famous London Symphony Chorus’ in a way that put your choir in a bad light.  Afterwards I felt bad about this because I realised it was my nerves talking – I wanted to offer our audience a great performance and I felt anxious about the concert.  I also realise that, as amateur singers many of you came to sing at the end of a hard days work in preparation for a concert and the last thing you needed was to be on the receiving end of my anger.  I wish I had handled the situation with more grace”.


There is at least one paradox at play here, as there often is in life.  The first is this:  that beating ourselves up (“I made a right mess of that rehearsal… I shouldn’t have said what I did…” etc.) somehow doesn’t lead us to take responsibility for our actions.  Rather, it takes courage and self compassion to really step up to the plate.  A second paradox is this:  as leaders, it is our very ability to express our sincere regret about actions which fell below our aspirations that make our staff think highly of us.  We need to accept ourselves as human, just like everybody else, before we can make the kind of expression of regret that staff can receive.


So, I have said about as much as I want to say right now on the subject of losing your temper with your staff.  I wonder, what has been your experience?  And what have you found in these postings that has enabled you to do things differently?  I’d love to hear about your experiences via the comments section of this blog.