Business Management ABCs

Assertiveness Goals

In order to be maximally successful, you need superb assertiveness skills. What are your goals when you are being assertive? You need strategic and tactical goals.

Strategic goals include getting something you really want and value. You need to know what that is before you start a crucial conversation. As negotiators insist, you must know your bottom line. I have addressed this in several articles.

Secondly, you need to seek a win/win outcome. Adopt a win/win attitude and be clear to the other person or group that you seek a win/win. When they perceive that you are not just out to get your own way, but also seek for them to get what they want, they become more cooperative. In a spirit of collaboration, you have the best chance of finding solutions that offer you both a win/win.

Tactical goals include how you handle yourself. You must avoid being too aggressive or too passive. We all know that people get defensive when someone is aggressive toward them. They back away and put up their guard. Some people will push back with their own aggressiveness. Others will avoid you as much as possible.

Neither response will not be good for you in seeking a successful outcome.

On the other hand, if you are too passive, seeking too much to avoid conflict, you will also engender negative results. People will tend to respond weakly with little commitment because you are not stating your case well. And conflicts will remain buried instead of getting ironed out. Buried conflicts lead to people withholding their best efforts from your project.

So tactically, you must aim for the middle ground between aggressiveness and avoiding. This parallels what I have written in other articles about avoiding the fight/flight syndrome. We are programmed by our human biology to respond to threats with either fighting of fleeing. In the office that means being aggressive or avoiding. We have to stay calm and centered in order to avoid this biological response. And we have to treat the other person with assertiveness that does not trigger them into fight or flight.

In summary, in order to be maximally successful, you need superb assertiveness skills that include the above strategic and tactical goals and the ability to implement them.

Copyright 2010, by William R. Murray, President of Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching, LLC. Reprint rights granted to all venues so long as this article and by-line are printed intact with all links made live.

William R. Murray, MBA (Harvard), M.Div. (Yale), Master Certified Coach, is the founder of Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching, LLC in 1993, http://www.EagleAlliance.com, offering Virtual Workshops, Self-Study Programs, Leadership Coaching.