Robert I. Sutton on the delicate art of being perfectly assertive

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Robert I. Sutton for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe [Click here.]. Now I’m following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the fourth belief: “One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.”
The upshot of my earlier post called Some Bosses Live in a Fool’s Paradise [click here] is that the best bosses stay in tune with how their words and deeds are construed by their followers, but there is a lot about being a human being and wielding power over others that makes such perspective-taking difficult.

One area where self-awareness is particularly hard to gain has to do with one’s level of assertiveness. Bosses often can’t tell when they’re pushing people too hard versus not challenging them sufficiently. But as research conducted at Columbia University by Daniel Ames and Frank Flynn suggests, striking the right balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough is immensely important to being (and being perceived as) a great boss.

Ames and Flynn began with the observation that managers who are too assertive are seen as overbearing and that damages their relationships with others; but managers who are not assertive enough don’t end up achieving much with their teams that they — and their peers and superiors — can take real satisfaction in. With this in mind, they hypothesized that the best bosses would be rated roughly average on terms like “competitive,” “aggressive,” “passive,” and “submissive” by their direct reports. Indeed, this is what they found when they asked 213 MBA students to assess their most recent bosses on various dimensions. There was tremendous overlap between the bosses rated as moderately assertive and the bosses rated most effective overall. The MBAs also deemed those moderately assertive bosses to be most likely to succeed in the future, and to be people they would be happy to work with again.

And what of the bosses judged to be ineffective overall? Ames and Flynn found that lapses in assertiveness (whether by being too assertive or not assertive enough) were mentioned as hallmarks of these weak leaders far more often than deficits in “other commonly studied attributes, including intelligence, conscientiousness, and charisma.”

When I heard about this research, I couldn’t help but think of a quote from Tommy Lasorda, who has worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers for almost 50 years, including a 20-year stint as the team’s manager. The first day he took charge of the team, Tommy said to the press: “I believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.”

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Robert I. Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. He is the coauthor with Jeffrey Pfeffer of The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. His last book was The New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. His next book, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst by Robert I. Sutton will be published by Business Plus/Hatchette Book Group in September (2010).

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