Avoiding Anger: A Leadership Habit to Steer Clear Of

UpTrajectory Review

Howard Tullman, writing in Inc., delivers a blunt thesis: anger has become the fashionable shortcut in modern management, and smart leaders should refuse it. The excerpt available to us runs one sentence deep, so the full article almost certainly supplies case studies, research, and Tullman's trademark Chicago-blunt reasoning. Even stripped to its core, the argument carries weight. Anger produces immediate compliance. People scatter, tasks get done, meetings end. The leader who yells gets the sensation of control, and that sensation is addictive precisely because it arrives so fast and costs so little in the moment.

Small-business operators face this temptation hourly, not weekly. A supplier misses a delivery window, a customer disputes an invoice, an employee no-shows on a Saturday shift — each incident presses the same button. Owners of lean teams lack the managerial buffer that absorbs tantrums at large corporations. When the boss explodes, every person in the room absorbs the blast, and nobody forgets it. Tullman's warning lands with special force here because the damage compounds quietly: retention drops, candor disappears, and the quality of decisions degrades when staff start managing the owner's temper instead of managing the actual problem.

Tullman is right, and the point needs repetition because the behavior persists across industries and decades of management literature. Anger masquerades as decisiveness. It borrows authority the leader has not earned and cannot sustain. Skeptics will point to high-profile executives who built reputations on volcanic tempers and still posted strong results. Those cases are survivorship bias. The leader who yells and succeeds succeeds despite the yelling, not because of it. Tullman's framing of anger as a shortcut is surgically accurate: shortcuts save time now and charge compounding interest later, usually in the currency of trust.

The second-order effects cut unevenly across the team. New employees absorb the lesson fastest and censor themselves earliest, which means the owner loses fresh eyes precisely when fresh eyes matter most. Quiet, competent staff stop raising problems, cutting off early warning on the exact issues that need attention before they become expensive. Customers feel the residue when a rattled employee fumbles a call or a demoralized supervisor cuts a corner on quality. Anger also replicates downward: a leader who models it grants every shift supervisor permission to copy the style, and the culture hardens around fear instead of accountability.

Watch for the inevitable counter-article that tries to rehabilitate anger as passion, intensity, or authenticity. The distinction matters and is worth internalizing: intensity is sustained focus on the problem; anger is emotional discharge aimed at a person. One builds, the other burns. Operators should audit their own calendar this week. Count the times frustration drove a decision, a tone, or a meeting outcome. Then replace one outburst with a direct, calm, specific request and measure the difference in response quality. Tullman's advice is simple to state and brutally hard to practice, which is exactly why it belongs on every owner's reading list.

“Anger is the new management shortcut. Smart leaders should avoid it.” — Inc. Magazine

Takeaway: Audit your week for frustration-driven decisions; replace one outburst with a calm, direct request and measure the result.