This week I was in San Francisco, and while I was there I took my grandmother to a hair salon that had just opened in her town.  We’d made an appointment for 10:30, and we waited and waited until 10:45 and then 11:00 had come and gone.  There was only one stylist working, and he had spent over an hour fussing over this extremely high-maintenance woman’s updo.  As my grandmother and I watched the scene, we couldn’t believe how sweetly the stylist was still behaving to this woman, who’d made him take out her decorative comb and put it back in five times!

When the woman was finally satisfied, the stylist charged her a paltry $45.  When he called the next customer, a guy who’d had an appointment before us, I asked him if another stylist would be coming in.  My grandmother and I had already waited 45 minutes beyond our appointment and only had time to stay an additional half hour or so.

I probably sounded a bit annoyed, and I was.  After all, this place was already failing at a basic tenet of salon operation – having enough professionals to service the day’s clientele.  But this guy bit my head off and snapped that if I was going to be rude and uncooperative, I could just leave.  Obviously still upset from his encounter with the updo-from-hell, the stylist took his frustration out on me.  My grandmother and I walked out, never to return.  This is too bad for the salon, because my grandmother gets her hair done every month.

How many times have we seen this happen in the workplace?  A manager gets berated by an executive for something beyond his control, and then turns around and unleashes on an employee who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Anger and frustration aren’t emotions that appreciate being bottled up.  They enjoy an audience, and when it’s impossible to demonstrate them in front of the rightful target, they’ll simply move on to someone safer. 

We all feel negative emotions on the job, but it’s up to us to find constructive ways to cope with them, whether that’s sitting down with a problem colleague and proactively addressing a conflict, or assertively responding to an unfair situation.  It’s the only way to ensure that the cycle of unpleasantness stops with you.