When Someone Else's Mood Sets Your Day

I'd been with the same organization for almost ten years, and I'd run that particular store for almost three of them, when it was sold. A few weeks after the sale, the new owner held an operations meeting in my lobby. Him, me, and a couple of the other store managers at a table in the middle of the dining room. My crew was working the line behind us. I had my phone out, and I was typing.

I was taking notes. Every time he raised something, I added it to a punch list for my own crew, the things I needed to work through with them once the meeting broke up.

He didn't see a punch list. He saw a manager he didn't know yet, on his phone. So he stopped the meeting and screamed at me across the table that I wasn't paying attention. Not a sharp word or a pointed look. Screamed, loud enough to carry across half the restaurant. Customers turned and stared. My crew was there for every word of it.

I'd run that store for almost three years. He'd owned it for a few weeks.

It couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds. I can still tell you which table we were sitting at.

Most of what gets written about a difficult boss is about handling the boss. Learn his moods. Stay out of the blast radius. Figure out what sets him off and don't do it. Some of that is useful. But it treats his temper as the main problem, and I've come to think it usually isn't. The bigger danger is what his temper turns into once you start working around it: the judge of whether you're any good at your job.

Christine Porath and Christine Pearson have spent years studying what rudeness at work does to the people on the receiving end. In a poll of 800 managers and employees across 17 industries, which they wrote up for Harvard Business Review as "The Price of Incivility," 80% of the people who'd been treated rudely said they lost work time worrying about the incident afterward. 63% lost time avoiding the person who did it. A quarter admitted they'd taken their frustration out on customers.

That last number is the one I keep coming back to. When the meeting broke up, I still had that punch list, and the people it was for had just watched the manager they'd worked for these past three years get screamed at in their own lobby by an owner they'd barely met. I was supposed to walk over and lead them through it. Whatever else I was carrying from that table, they were going to get some of it.

The incident takes a few seconds. The worrying, the avoiding, and the leaking onto everyone downstream can take weeks.

A book written from the throne

It's easy to miss that most of Proverbs was written from the top. Solomon was a king. A later collection was, in the book's own words, "copied out" by "the men of Hezekiah king of Judah" (25:1). The last chapter is advice a king's mother gave her son. These are people who could end a career, or a life, with a sentence.

And they're candid about what their own anger does to the people standing in front of them.

"The wrath of a king is as messengers of death: but a wise man will pacify it" (16:14).

"The king's wrath is as the roaring of a lion; but his favour is as dew upon the grass" (19:12).

There's some comfort in that. Proverbs never tells the servant he's being dramatic. It never suggests the boss's anger is all in your head, or that a grown man should be able to shrug it off. A lion's roar is a fair description of a man yelling across a restaurant lobby. The book written by kings admits that a king's temper is dangerous, and it doesn't ask the people under him to pretend otherwise.

That first verse has a second half, about the wise man who pacifies the king's wrath. I'm leaving it alone for now. It's where the next two posts in this series are headed. Before you can do anything wise about a boss's anger, you have to notice what it's already doing to you.

The snare

Near the end of the book there's this: "The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe" (29:25).

A snare isn't a cage. Nothing slams shut. You just find that your movements keep getting smaller.

That's what fear of a volatile boss tends to do. Most people don't quit over it, and most don't confront anybody. They adjust. You stop doing the thing that set him off, even when it was the right way to do the job. You say a little less in meetings. You start reading his face before you read the agenda. You plan your week around his moods instead of around what your people need from you. None of it feels like fear. It feels like being professional.

Somewhere in there, without anyone deciding it, his mood becomes the standard you measure your work against. The question in your head moves from "did I do this well?" to "will he be angry about it?" Those are different questions. They produce different work, and different workers.

I think this is why the snare image fits better than a lot of the language we usually reach for. "Toxic boss" makes the whole thing about him. "Fear of man" puts the attention somewhere you can actually do something about. You can't change his temper. You can notice who you've started working for.

Porath and Pearson's quarter who took it out on customers is the other half of this. A snared worker rarely stays snared alone. The fear that makes you smaller in front of the boss tends to make you sharper with the people under you, or with whoever's standing at your counter. The shrinking and the snapping usually come from the same place.

The next verse

The verse right after the snare is the one I wish I'd had in that lobby.

"Many seek the ruler's favour; but every man's judgment cometh from the LORD" (29:26).

Read the two verses together. Proverbs doesn't say the ruler's opinion is meaningless. People seek his favour for real reasons. He signs the checks. He decides who runs which store. His read on you shows up in your life whether it's fair or not. A man who wrote proverbs from a throne knew exactly how much his favour mattered to the people around him.

But the judgment that settles whether you were faithful doesn't come from him.

Everyone at that table saw a manager on his phone. God saw the punch list.

That doesn't mean the owner's read on me didn't count. It counted toward my paycheck. That afternoon also turned out to be one of the key reasons I left for another organization. But it wasn't the final word on whether I was doing my job well, and the snare works by convincing you that it is. Once the loudest person in the room becomes your judge, you'll keep shrinking to fit his verdict long after he's forgotten he gave one.

Trusting the LORD in 29:25 isn't a vague spiritual mood, then. It's practical. It means letting the right Judge set the standard, so you can do your work by that standard even while somebody else is yelling.

There's a kind of freedom in that. If his verdict isn't the last one, I don't need him to be right about me. I can let him be wrong. A boss who's known me for a few weeks can decide, in front of half a restaurant, that I'm the guy who doesn't pay attention, and I can still walk behind my own counter, in front of the crew who just watched it happen, and work that punch list like it matters. It did. It mattered to the people waiting on the other end of it.

What this doesn't settle

None of this tells you what to do about a boss like that. It doesn't tell you whether to stay, or whether to explain yourself, or when, or how. I left. That was my call, and it won't be everyone's. It doesn't make the next meeting with him any less tense. Proverbs has a lot to say about those questions, and that's where this series goes next: how to speak to someone with power over you without flattering him or going quiet, and what to carry into the next hard conversation with him.

The last post this month turns the book around. I run a store now. There are about fifty people who walk in on some mornings trying to read my face before they read the schedule. Proverbs was written from my side of the desk too, and it has some hard things to say to the person holding the keys. I'll get to those.

But all of that comes later. First there's the question this whole series rests on. When someone above you loses their temper, whose verdict do you carry out of the room?

I didn't have 29:26 in mind that day. I'm not sure I'd have believed it if I had.

Whose verdict are you still carrying from the last time someone above you lost it?

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