STEVE SPICER was determined to focus on the needs of his customers. Even when negotiations were difficult, the 31-year-old customer-delivery manager at an American engineering group would remain outwardly calm. None-theless, Spicer admitted that he would sometimes get stressed and “take it out on the staff”.

Last year, during his annual appraisal, his boss suggested he should go on an anger-management course. Spicer was taken aback. “It’s quite an embarrassing area of personal development,” he said. “I was also nervous that I would be joining a bunch of nutters but, in fact, it was brilliant.”

The two-day course, run by Reed Learning last June, gave Spicer an insight into how he might channel his emotions in more productive ways. “I got all these different techniques to stop me biting someone’s head off, stop me from reacting to situations in the wrong way,” he said.

“I can now step back, look at what I’m doing and not get stressed – I have become very methodical when trying to work out how to solve situations.”

Spice had a better appraisal this year and there has been talk of him taking on greater responsibility.

As many professionals progress up the career ladder, they become more stressed. Some respond with anger, others anxiety – reactions that can stand in the way of ambition regardless of an individual’s technical abilities.

Wendy Brooks, a director of the training firm Hemsley Fraser, said that the realities of management and leadership required people to be able to manage ever greater scale, complexity and uncertainty. This often threw up emotional challenges.

“When people are making career transitions, seeking promotions and moving into middle and senior management, underlying aspects of you are going to come to the fore,” she said. “It will hold you back if you cannot grow in terms of leadership resilience.”

But training and coaching can make a difference. At Hemsley Fraser, Brooks said the focus was not so much on tackling personal issues as on building on an individual’s strengths in leadership resilience. One-on-one counselling and courses could reveal why individuals were becoming stressed and help them to take the emotion out of the situations that could trigger problems.

The upshot of this is that managers can become better at dealing with bigger problems and achieve results faster. This can improve their career prospects.

Nevertheless, discussing such issues remains taboo, with many of the professionals who spoke to The Sunday Times about their experiences requesting anonymity. Paul Smith (not his real name) is the operations director of a security firm that will turn over between £8m and £10m this year. Smith draws a salary of £100,000. He attended a two-day course organised by Hemsley Fraser to help him deal with stress.

“Before, I wouldn’t take other people’s feelings or the impact of my actions into account,” he said. “I returned from the course really excited and regretful that I had not taken it years ago.” Smith’s colleagues have noticed the difference, and the atmosphere at work has improved. His staff trust him more and seem better motivated. They even involve him in their jokes.

“When things get particularly stressful, they say I remain calm now,” he said.

Another man who was prone to flying off the handle was John Roberts (not his real name), managing director of the British subsidiary of a European construction company. “I could take things very personally, get angry and then deal with problems in ways that were not appropriate and measured. Later, I would realise that I had upset and hurt people,” said Roberts. “I didn’t want to go into the office and the staff didn’t want me to either. It was all getting too much and I knew it had to stop.”

In January, Roberts signed up for a three-day course run by the British Association of Anger Management. Despite his cynicism, he described the training as “inspirational”. He learnt how and why he became angry as well as how to channel his feelings so that he did not hurt people. “The most important thing I learnt was not to take things so personally,” he said.

Roberts then promoted several colleagues so they could take more responsibility, spreading the burden of much of the work-related stress. As his attitude changed, staff morale rose and people asked what had changed him – Roberts has told only a couple of his colleagues about the course.

“Without it, I would have probably damaged my career, possibly even quit,” he said. “Now I’m really enthusiastic again.” Cary Cooper, professor of organisa-tional psychology and health at Lancas-ter University, agreed that training could help but argued that usually learning how to channel anger more effectively offered only a short-term solution.

“It’s important that any kind of anger-management programme should also explore why you have the anger and try to deal with that,” he said.

Cooper said anger was usually a sign of workplace stress, which was often caused by too few people doing too much work, an imbalance between home and work and the impact of changing performance targets.

Cooper suggested that, rather than sending individuals for counselling, it might be more effective for an organisation to carry out a stress audit to find out what was causing the anger.

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