I was home over the Memorial Day weekend, bored and not feeling well, so I found myself flipping around the TV and doing something I never, ever do: settling in to watch the Indianapolis 500. The race also reminded me of a management lesson well worth remembering—sometimes, it’s OK to blow your cool.

What kept me involved was the jockeying for the lead position, the occasional crash and the ongoing saga of Danica Patrick as she battled to stay near the race leaders. Patrick gets a lot of press because A) she’s a moderately successful woman competing in a sport that is overwhelmingly dominated (and populated) by men, and B) she’s pretty hot.

Patrick kept battling and stayed around eighth or ninth position until disaster hit with less than 30 laps to go—her car got clipped coming out of the pits by another car, driven by Ryan Briscoe, when he tried to get going again after his pit stop. I felt bad for Patrick because I had been rooting for her to finish the race (a big accomplishment in and of itself), but what amazed me was her reaction to the crash—she got mad and wanted a piece of the guy who carelessly knocked her out of the race.

“Briscoe clipped Patrick’s car as she was leaving pit road with 29 laps left last Sunday, inflicting enough damage to take both drivers out of the race,” wrote columnist Richard Durrett in the Dallas Morning News. “A frustrated Patrick jumped out of her car and briskly walked toward Briscoe’s pit stall, taking her gloves off as she went as if planning to send a stern message when she arrived. But security steered her clear.”

It was a pretty riveting scene because, clearly, Patrick wanted to do a lot more than just thank Briscoe for being a competitor in the race. As the Morning News columnist noted, “Patrick’s 80 or so steps down pit road are the lasting image of Sunday’s race, no offense to winner Scott Dixon. Imagine the memories if she’d actually reached Briscoe. … Regardless, the incident has fans split into two camps when it comes to Patrick: She’s either a chronic complainer or a consummate competitor.”

Or, it could be something else—that Patrick consciously and deliberately used her anger as a management tool to send a message to Briscoe, and everyone else in the race world, that she is not just a hot babe who can drive a little, but a tough, skilled competitor who wants to win just as badly as anyone else.

I’ve written before about unorthodox management practices such as “Verbal Abuse as a Workforce Strategy” and getting rid of your best and most productive workers to save money, but this is very different from that. Blowing your cool and getting angry, on occasion, especially if it is done in a very focused and specific way, can pay big benefits for a manager. To wit:

1. It gets everyone’s immediate attention;
2. It crystalizes an issue in people’s minds as something of unique significance and great importance;
3. It draws a line in the sand about what you will tolerate, and what you won’t; and,
4. It sends long-lasting ripples through the workforce about how deeply you care about the work at hand.

I’ve used this technique on occasion, and I have to say, it made my point to the workforce far better than a memo or a meeting ever could have done. My guess is that is what Danica Patrick had in mind as well. Although she may have been frustrated at being knocked out of the Indy 500 by a careless competitor, her angry walk down pit row was more about sending a larger message than it was about getting in Ryan Briscoe’s face. And from my perspective, blowing her cool was a useful and worthwhile management tool.