Staying composed at work is harder than it sounds, and it’s occasionally very tempting to tell someone exactly what you think.
I’ve made most of these mistakes myself, some of them cringe-worthy in retrospect. Here’s what I’d pass on.
1. Nothing needs answering instantly
Email, voicemail, texts and messages are not instant communication, whatever they feel like. Most things can wait, and a difficult reply frequently benefits from being written and then left overnight.
I turn off notifications and check at set times. On one account alone I get over two hundred emails a day — you can spend your entire working life managing the inbox if you allow it.
The composure benefit is the point here: the reply you send after a night’s sleep is almost always better than the one you’d have sent immediately.
2. Ask for time to think
When someone wants an answer on the spot, it’s entirely reasonable to say you’ll come back to them — and to name when.
I’ve felt pressured into agreeing to things that weren’t in my interest or the company’s, simply because the question arrived and an answer seemed required. Almost nothing genuinely needs deciding in the room. Taking a day to look at the numbers has saved me a great deal of aggravation.
3. Bite your tongue, then decide
If someone says something outrageous, letting it pass in the moment and returning to it calmly is usually the stronger move.
Note that’s return to it, not forget it. Composure isn’t the same as acceptance. What you’re buying is the chance to respond deliberately rather than reactively, which means you’ll be taken more seriously when you do.
4. Physical intimidation is not a style difference
There’s no place for aggression at work, and that includes the kind that never touches anybody.
I once sat in a politically charged meeting where a man — six foot five, around 250 pounds — spent it smacking a golf club into his palm, over and over. Nobody was struck. It was unmistakably intimidating and completely inappropriate.
In the moment: don’t engage, and leave at the first opportunity. Your safety is the priority and composure is what gets you out of the room.
Afterwards is different. Write down what happened, when, and who else was present, while you remember it clearly. Behaviour like that is reportable, and a contemporaneous note is worth far more than a recollection six months later — whether or not you decide to use it.
5. Look after the basics
Eat before a long meeting. Use the bathroom. Get enough sleep.
This sounds trivial and it’s responsible for a remarkable proportion of workplace meltdowns. It is genuinely harder to respond well when you’re tired, hungry and uncomfortable, and all three are fixable in advance.
6. Knowing what to escalate
I’ll be honest about something I got wrong when I first wrote this.
I used to advise letting most things slide, on the basis that raising issues creates a reputation. The reputation effect is real — people who escalate everything do get labelled, and that label does follow them. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
But that isn’t a reason to stay quiet about everything, and the distinction matters enormously.
Things worth letting go: one-off friction, a colleague being short with you on a bad day, a clumsy remark that clearly wasn’t meant as it landed, differences in working style.
Things to document and report: harassment or discrimination of any kind. Anything involving a protected characteristic. Threats, intimidation, or physical aggression. Safety issues. Anything illegal. And any pattern — behaviour that has repeated after being raised, or that’s happening to more than one person.
That last one is the important test. A single incident might be a bad day. A pattern is a situation, and patterns don’t resolve by being tolerated — they tend to escalate, and they tend to move on to whoever is least able to push back.
If you’re weighing it up, document it either way. Dates, what was said, who was there. You can decide later what to do with a record. You can’t create one retrospectively.
7. Assume good intent — with limits
A great deal of workplace friction is genuinely unintentional. People are busy, they type quickly, and tone is much harder to convey than anyone believes. Asking “did you mean that as it sounded?” resolves most of it in a sentence.
So: assume good intent as your default, because it’s usually correct and it saves enormous amounts of energy.
But it’s a default, not a rule. If the same person keeps producing the same “misunderstanding,” or it only ever happens to certain people, that’s information rather than coincidence. Intent stops being the relevant question once there’s a pattern — effect and repetition matter more.
Charitable reading is a tool for getting through ordinary friction. It isn’t an obligation to explain away everything that happens to you.
The underlying thing
Professionalism isn’t the same as being agreeable, and it isn’t about absorbing whatever arrives.
It’s about choosing your response rather than reacting — which makes you more effective, and considerably harder to dismiss when you do decide something needs saying.
More on staying professional when other people aren’t.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
