Your Leadership Style is Basically Road Rage in a Suit (And It's Killing Your Company)

Cracks knuckles

You know that executive at your company who runs meetings like they're conducting a military tribunal? The one whose "leadership style" is basically just weaponized anger with a LinkedIn profile?

Yeah. That might be you.

I just sat down with Andy Grant—the King of Authenticity, suicide prevention activist, and host of the award-winning Real Men Feel podcast—and he absolutely torched the idea that angry, hungry, and horny are adequate emotional states for running a business in 2025.

Spoiler alert: They're not.

The Clenched Fist Problem

Andy started our conversation with this gut-punch of an exercise: Clench your fists as tight as you possibly can. Both hands. Hold it for 30 seconds.

That's what most leaders think life is. Constant defense. Ready to attack. Always in fight mode. Always clenched.

Now try to open your hands.

Feels like work, right? Even after just 30 seconds?

That's your entire leadership team right now. Clenched so tight they can't think, can't innovate, can't share bold ideas because they're too busy bracing for the next verbal beatdown in the boardroom.

The Three Emotions Your Dad Gave You Permission to Feel (And Why That's Destroying Innovation)

Here's the uncomfortable truth Andy dropped: From the moment boys are born, they're taught that emotions are "for girls only."

Big boys don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about. Man up.

So men grow up with exactly three sanctioned emotional states:

• Angry

• Hungry

• Horny

And you know what doesn't come from that emotional palette? Farcking innovation.

You can't create breakthrough ideas in an environment where the dominant emotion is rage. You can't build trust with clients when your team is terrified to speak up. You can't scale a company when everyone's walking on eggshells around the leader who thinks vulnerability is weakness.

The Leadership Move That Changes Everything

Want to know the fastest way to transform your company culture?

One leader goes first. One person gets vulnerable. One executive admits they don't have all the answers, shares their actual thoughts about what's happening, and—here's the kicker—the world doesn't end.

Men are innately competitive. So when that first leader shows vulnerability, every other guy in the room thinks, "Oh, we're doing this now? Game on."

It's like permission to be human spreads through the org chart like wildfire.

Andy talked about working with leaders who carried around buried emotions for YEARS. And when they finally blow—road rage, screaming at employees, battles with family—it's never about the "last straw" that triggered it. It's about all that suppressed shaet they've been white-knuckling since childhood.

Choose Joy Over Being Right (Or Die Trying)

Here's where Andy really got me:

What's more important to you—being right or being happy?

Because if "being right" is winning that battle, you're building a company culture that's fundamentally incompatible with growth.

The most successful companies? They're led by people willing to be wrong. To make mistakes. To celebrate failure as a learning opportunity instead of treating it like a capital offense.

Andy used to believe "life sucks, then you die." When he realized he was wrong about that, everything changed. Now he LOVES being wrong because it means there's something better waiting.

Think about that for a second. When was the last time you celebrated being wrong about something? When did you look at a massive failure and go, "Hell yes, we learned something valuable"?

If your answer is "never," you're building a company where people would rather hide mistakes than fix them. Where innovation dies in PowerPoint decks that never get presented. Where your best people are updating their LinkedIn profiles.

The AI Era Doesn't Give a Shaet About Your Need to Be Right

Andy nailed something crucial: The pace of change is the only constant, and that pace keeps accelerating exponentially.

AI is disrupting everything. Markets are chaos. Your playbook from 2020 is already ancient history.

There's no possible way a single leader can know enough to be "right" about everything anymore. You NEED your team to bring ideas. You NEED people to challenge assumptions. You NEED an environment where feeling, listening, and vulnerability aren't signs of weakness—they're competitive advantages.

The leaders clinging to "my way or the highway"? They're building highways to irrelevance.

Here's Your Actual Takeaway

Energy and emotion are meant to pass through us. Be felt. Be recognized. Move on.

When you refuse to feel, those emotions don't disappear. They build up until they explode—usually at the worst possible moment, aimed at the wrong target.

But when you create space for real human connection? When you build a culture where people can be authentic, share concerns, admit fears, and still feel safe?

That's when magic happens. That's when the clenched fists open. That's when your team stops defending and starts creating.

That's when you stop being a leader who inspires road rage and start being one who inspires loyalty, innovation, and actual goddamn joy.

Watch the full episode. Andy Grant doesn't just talk about this stuff—he lives it as a suicide attempt survivor who turned his pain into purpose. His insights on choosing happiness over being right, creating psychological safety, and leading with vulnerability aren't just feel-good concepts. They're survival strategies for building companies that actually last in an era that chews up rigid leaders and spits them out.

Because at the end of the day, whether your business is B2B or B2C, it's really H2H: Human to Human.

And humans do their best work when they're allowed to feel like humans.

P.S. — If you're reading this thinking "well MY team needs to hear this but I'M fine," congratulations, you just identified yourself as the problem. The first step to building unshakeable business relationships starts with unclenching your own fists. Andy and I talked about exactly how to do that—including why your buried emotions are probably the real reason you lost your shaet in that last stakeholder meeting. You might want to listen to this one alone first. Just saying.

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H, human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.