Healthy Assertiveness – Pushy or Passionate?
By Daniel Robin
Leadership that’s born of passion – blending skill and intensity with well-orchestrated flurries of activity – can be inspiring to others as a sign of commitment and strength. But when that leadership is tinged with hostility, becomes passive-aggressive, or relies on heavy-handedness … there’s a price. What was a positive intention is no longer sustainable – even if it appears to get near-term results. This article is about ways to “get there from here” with far less interpersonal wear and tear.
Have you been around someone whose goal wasn’t merely the organization’s agenda, but it became their own personal mission? Like a fire lit deep inside, they take the “hunt” so seriously they are a force to be reckoned with. Were they easy to work with or did they cross over a line with you?
Politely Aggressive vs. Obnoxiously Assertive
What are the signals of assertiveness versus aggressiveness? The line between “strongly assertive” and “mildly aggressive” is as gray as Donald Trump’s real hair color. The difference can be as subtle as the look in someone’s eyes, the rate or rhythm of gestures, their tone of voice or choice of words …. Polite but aggressive is status quo in many organizations.
Individual perceptions, tastes, and workstyles differ sharply (if “raising your voice” was accepted in your family of origin, it probably remains so today), but let’s not dance around this: when someone is being pushy, demanding, forceful and rude … it isn’t hard to tell. The only “grayness” about it is whether that behavior is acceptable to you and those around you.
Extremely pushy people expect those who get stepped on or brushed off to “deal with it.” However, resentment builds slowly, and then they retaliate (“hostile work environment” lawsuits, or they take it underground and complain to others). Overly aggressive leaders are sometimes ignored or laughed at (if they’re lucky); either way, this racks up quite a bill in the aggressor’s credibility and emotional bank account.
There’s often an unfair double-standard for male and female leaders: what in men may be seen as healthy assertiveness, in women may be interpreted as being overly aggressive.
Triggers of Mistrust
Studies have shown that consistency is what’s most important in forming perceptions about a healthy work climate. If someone is usually calm and assertive, but occasionally lashes out or gets edgy, we can probably learn to live with it. If they’re consistently and fiercely pursuing their goals, we can read their signals, and even if we don’t like being around it, we can at least trust where they’re coming from (obsessive-compulsive behavior is highly predictable).
But if someone is quiet and seemingly docile one minute, then some invisible trigger causes them to act like a saber-toothed tiger – and only much later does the pussycat return – then this unpredictable shift between fanged beast and normal human causes the worst kind of fear and mistrust – the kind where you cannot exactly pinpoint the threat. Made worse when the person has positional power, the ambiguity itself, and how it keeps people guessing, causes a cycle of mistrust that soon becomes sealed and undiscussable.
Let’s say, for example, that the boss has yelling fits, and like a well-tuned immune system, tends to yell whenever that subject dares to come up. Thus begins a cloaked pattern of abuse, adding up to an insidious code of silence that usually requires intervention from someone outside the system.
To avoid all this, it is essential that leaders stay well inside the bounds of “healthy assertiveness,” as defined by their peers and subordinates. If they can cross over the line into aggressiveness with awareness (even if the spasms cannot be “controlled” in the moment), they can remain conscious of the line itself, demonstrating a willingness to receive feedback about how it affects people.
