What I did next when I exploded on a valuable colleague

A few days ago, I took my rage out on someone because of my shortcoming to see their true character for operating like my right-hand man on a critical business.

It was ugly!
Brutal!
And rejuvenating for the both of us!

What happened next was the key to building a deeper bond with this person.

Something ironic has happened to me all my life. The more I feel like getting lost in the crowd and taking somebody else’s lead, the more I find myself being thrust into the leader’s spot.

The teams look at the leader on how to navigate through the daily action plans and they’ve learned to look at me in a very peculiar way especially when someone is needed for damage control.

The tactic that’s helped me for more than a decade is to enable the team to think of the quickest way to get things moving without involving their own likes and dislikes into the mix.

But here’s the catch, I have to truly trust them to lead the way however they see fit and in doing so, they’re going to make some business critical mistakes and are gonna need a safety net, which I have to provide.

Some of these mistakes are made because my team is too stuck, too tired, too lazy or just too unaware of their ownership of the domain!

Some of the team will own up to their mistakes.
Some of them will simply hide behind my back.
Some of them won’t even bother showing up.

A few moments later, I’m always called into the Judge’s court with a requirement to present a clarification for all the “What’s” and “Why’s”
The very next moment, I’m bombarded by freshly baked right out of the oven hot ego!

When that happens, I’m gonna have to absorb it all, stay as quiet as possible, smile, nod, and take an exit.

Now here’s when the damage happens.
In all my time absorbing, and brutally suppressing the unwarranted egotistical heat, I’ve grown to be a ticking time bomb.

Over the years, I’ve simply stacked up my rageful moments behind a calm face that I play in my head over and over again.

This calmness has turned into resentful anger making it impossible for me to mellow it down until I’m left with no choice but to let it out!

And when the time is wrong…
The situation is wrong…
The person is wrong…
IT GETS OUT!

The very moment it’s out, I realize how it was absolutely wrong of me to do so, plunging me into another turmoil of silently absorbing the repercussions of the rage I tried to contain when it was never meant to be seeded to grow in the first place.

When the seed of anger is planted in me, the only logical go to person for me is the father of the company. I’ll address the things they need to tweak in order to correct the course and unfortunately, them being them, leading a business, have fallen a victim to a red hot ego problem, bound to never be able to accept a lesson from somebody who’s their employee.

I’ve helped a very important person in my life build their dream business while working to maintain their current business like a partner, getting paid like an employee only to be told how it was all their brilliance that made everything happen.

This has stinged me for life, yet I deploy the same ownership again and again, despite knowing how it’s at the mercy of one person’s acknowledgment that I’ve sadly trained myself to look for.

And when I don’t get it, I become angry!
I become resentful.

When I don’t show ownership, the business suffers and I’m again at the mercy of one person’s rage to hold me accountable and force me to show some ownership and when I do, I’m bound to find myself in the same cycle of being delivered a statement ready at will to break my heart, my motivation.

So what do I do!
WHAT THE HELL DO I DO!

I unintentionally take it out on the teammate I’ve grown to trust who is more than capable enough to experience my rage and yet, stay in front of me until I let it all out!

The tricky part is to make sure it’s all out and the trickier part is what happens next!

I call them out in a private space and make sure they understand what very few people can understand. If we decide to still work with each other, we’ll be setting ourselves up to be an indestructible team which cannot be explained by any one person’s bullsh*t theory on why we never were or never can be a team.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure to build an unbreakable understanding with my teams around the globe and I’m happy to know that I can be as angry as hell with them and yet, trust them to stand with me when the storm comes, settles down and be on top of the mountain once the victory comes calling.

And when the victory comes calling, I make sure my team members are at the forefront of the story that the headline so boldly tells.

So this is me acknowledging all the people I’ve worked with to make me angrier and calmer in the story I’ve been trying to tell for a very long time.

This is Mr. Zeecon, in the making of a great story!