We can all identify with experiences of being yelled at or being on the receiving end of a really unexpected, strong reaction from someone at work. None of us wants to experience that.

You might first think about someone’s strong, unexpected reaction to receiving feedback.

Look at nearly any leadership or manager training curriculum and you’ll see a module on giving feedback. That module will focus on principles of good feedback when we’re giving formal feedback in a one on one or during a review.

But in reality, everyone - leader or not - can experience someone lashing out at them at work.

It could be when you're in the middle of a brainstorming conversation—where the atmosphere is collaborative and everyone seems to be participating. And then all of a sudden, someone completely shuts down. Someone has an outburst, they may have directly put down an idea, which shuts down the whole conversation.

Why does this happen?

And how should a sensitive, deliberate leader respond?

It’s easy to jump to a set of plays or responses to try out. But it’s not enough to just know how to respond. You might just go through the motions of using a response that is recommended by somebody else.

A phrase or an action won’t come across as genuine unless we have a deeper understanding of what the reaction is, why it has happened, and what that brings up for you as an individual.

Let’s return to the brainstorming conversation for a moment.

Everything was going along fine, and then suddenly someone lashes out. From the outside, you’ve experienced what feels like a sudden turn around to a different emotional state. First thing to know: it is not sudden for the person who lashed out.

Frequently, that person has spent time during the conversation attempting to communicate that a boundary has been crossed, or that they have had enough and have reached their fill in participating in the conversation. To this individual, it can feel like they have not been heard or listened to for quite some time, which explains why their reaction is so heightened.

So we just uncovered a couple possible reasons that the person might lash out: a boundary has been crossed, they have not been heard in their requests to set a boundary, or they may be overstimulated and have reached their capacity for the current conversation.

Each of those represent the trigger point for that person lashing out at work. But these are all in the moment examples: highly localized to this brainstorming conversation.

When something happens like this at work, we’re frequently looking to learn from it, so we can prevent this type of lashing out from happening.

Our brains like to make any situation as simple as possible.

What is the cause? What is the effect? How can I control the situation differently in the future?

Remember: we’re talking about humans. We are deeply complex, emotional beings. And what happens at work, isn’t just about work.

The fallacy that we want to believe is that work and personal life are completely separate. In reality, someone's reaction at work is likely a mixture of their personal life, their immediate work circumstances, and their entire relationship with you or the people in that conversation. Plus, all of the baggage and past experiences that they have had in the workplace.

People might think it's not fair for someone to bring in past bad experiences into the workplace, but that is the reality. Our experiences in the workplace are not in a vacuum. They are built upon our years of experience working with good and bad leaders and our positive and negative experiences in the workplace.

Someone’s individual reaction is frequently composed of multiple layers—their personal life, their work history or background with you at this current workplace, and their history of being an employee in any workplace.

This is what can make relationships at work challenging because we might be looking for that reason why someone blows up. It may not be anything that you or someone else at your current workplace have experienced. That can be frustrating.

This is why it is so important that we get to know and understand different layers to someone’s experience at work. The more that we can find compassion for an individual and the complexity of their experience, the more likely we are to create a safe space for our teams and ourselves.

Our History in the Workplace

Whether it was before this person started working with you, or at your current company, every individual has expectations of what roles we play, how autonomous they feel, how enabled and supported they feel, and how much we get to utilize their skills and do things that we enjoy or find interesting.

Let’s not forget the undercurrents of societal and cultural oppressions like racism, sexism, and gender inequality. All these societal and cultural undercurrents are also going to play a part at work. The largest source of our personal biases, assumptions, and expectations that we have in the workplace come from these undercurrents.

We may have had expectations in past workplaces put on us because of our age, gender, race, sexuality that are limiting. Those expectations are degrading and exhausting to overcome.

No matter how good of a leader you are, you will always be battling someone's past history, patterns and experience of having bad leaders before you.

Your team members are always going to be comparing you and your leadership to past leaders they’ve had, whether they’re good or bad.

We don’t realize we’re comparing because this is a subconscious process influencing our behaviors at work.

Even in a situation where we have had the most amazing manager in the past, we might be scrutinizing and be critical of our current manager who isn't doing anything wrong.

That source of comparison becomes very challenging to reconcile and to measure up to because we are not conscious of the comparison and that causes our relationships to degrade.

When you’re dealing with someone who’s new to the workplace, they don’t have a point of comparison. That means your role as a manager is to lay the foundation for what it means to be managed in the workplace.

So what is the significance of all of this?

Your Actions as a Leader

Each moment to moment interaction that you have with your employees, their reactions, their surprises, their fears and frustration—it’s not all about you. It's not all about that moment.

The way that you react and the way that you take in someone else's reaction and emotions in the workplace is just as important as what's going on for them.

When we experience a sudden emotional reaction from somebody else in the workplace, it can feel frightening to us and our own kind of emotional triggers can be stirred up. And if we’re not careful, can lead us to lashing out or shutting down.

So that you don’t lash out back at your team member, you need to take a pause.

Without the pause, you’ll react habitually. Our instinctual responses are frequently not the most intentional responses. Our instinctual, habitual responses are designed to protect us. When someone lashes out, it can hurt and we can also feel attacked. And if we feel attacked, then we’ll frequently attack back or shut down.

Start with getting familiar with two things: your own reaction and having an in-the-moment awareness that something has happened.

This awareness helps create that pause so that you can choose an intentional, deliberate response instead of letting the habitual response play out.

Deliberate, intentional leaders pause, choose their reaction, and in the case of someone lashing out, give the individual an opportunity to return to the conversation at another time.