What You Will Learn in this Chapter

• To define what constitutes assertiveness.

• To distinguish between passivity, aggressiveness, and passive-aggressiveness.

• To explain the consequences of passivity and aggression.

• To list the benefits you can accrue by being assertive in your personal and occupational spheres.

• To describe how assertiveness relates to stress reduction.

• To explain why many people fail to behave assertively.

• To practice using the four-step framework for assertiveness at work or in your personal life.

• To practice refining this framework by using empathic assertion or escalating assertion.

• To elucidate the role of congruent nonverbal behavior in bolstering the assertive response.

• To explain how the use of timing and tact facilitate being persuasive.

For many people the main source of workplace stress is not the work or workload itself, but strained relationships with co-workers, supervisors, subordinates, bosses, or customers. The hardest tasks we face are often about giving or receiving negative feedback. Learning to be appropriately assertive goes a long way toward easing such situations and significantly decreasing your stress level.

Consider the following scenarios, which may resemble situations that you or someone you know has had to face. These scenes were derived from stressful work situations presented by participants in our Stress Mastery workshops.

• Scenario 1: You are a school administrator in charge of supervising a number of office personnel who have direct contact with students. You notice that one of your subordinates has been rather sarcastic, impatient, and inconsiderate toward several students. You are hesitant to fire her, knowing she needs the job desperately, so you decide to give her feedback and hope she will improve. You meet with her, give her feedback, and assume her attitude will improve. Several days later you observe her engaging in the same old behaviors. Meanwhile the parent of a student calls you to complain that her son was mistreated by that office worker.

• Scenario 2: You have developed a reputation at your company for being an excellent worker. As a result of your competence your boss keeps adding to your responsibilities. Although your workload has increased significantly, your boss has not offered you a raise. In order to keep up with your rising workload you have to work overtime several times a week. Since you are a salaried employee, you do not get paid for overtime. You are growing increasingly resentful and stressed out. You worry constantly about keeping up with your work, but you are afraid to turn down new assignments and disappoint your boss.

• Scenario 3: You work in the clerical division of a large company. One co-worker and friend is having a lot of personal problems, and as a result she is often absent from work or too distressed to be productive when at work. At first you offer to help her with some of her work as a way of easing her load. Also, you fear she will be fired if she continues on this path. You expect that she will pull it together and function normally again soon, so you pitch in and help in the interim. Unfortunately, she does not pull her act together and she begins to expect and regularly ask you to do her work or help her. You are falling increasingly behind in your own work, and you are starting to resent her. The friendship is suffering.

• Scenario 4: You are a legal secretary working for a high-powered attorney in a large law firm. Your boss, Mr. Reynolds, has a habit of strolling into work late in the morning and wasting time until the afternoon, when he goes into high gear and is quite productive. But because of his chronic lateness in getting down to work, paperwork that needs to be finished and filed that day is often not completed at the end of the workday at 5:00 P.M. You routinely work overtime for up to one full hour on almost a daily basis in order to complete paperwork that must be filed that day. Although it is inconvenient for you to stay late, the extra money you earn from overtime pay comes in handy and makes it worth your while. One day the firm's top managers announce that due to dwindling profits, all overtime work and pay will be indefinitely suspended. Your boss is not in agreement with this new policy, but has no power to change the mandate. You are very worried that you will be put in the uncomfortable position of having to work overtime for free in order to complete necessary tasks.

• Scenario 5: You are a woman who has just been promoted to a management position in a large corporation that has only recently allowed women to rise in the ranks. You are confident in your knowledge base and managerial skills; in fact, you feel that your expertise actually exceeds that of many of your male superiors, who appear somewhat threatened by you. You notice that at meetings your comments often seem to be disregarded and dismissed with some teasing remarks. Although you are not being sexually harassed as such, it is obvious to you that if you were male your contributions would be taken more seriously. You are then put in charge of a big project along with another male manager, who is in a position parallel to yours. You discover that your colleague is consistently undermining your decisions and taking over aspects of the project that you had thought were assigned to you.