Mastering Assertiveness, Careers, and Communication

Posted on Mar 13, 2025 in History

Assertiveness and Its Applications

Assertive behavior means standing up for yourself, but in ways which respect the rights of others. This distinguishes it from aggression (fight), which involves violating the rights of others, and from evasion (flight), which involves respecting the rights of others at the expense of your own.

Assertiveness is useful in the following contexts:

• Stating your own views
• Disagreeing with others’ views
• Making a request
• Refusing a request
• Offering criticism
• Responding to criticism

Scripting an Assertive Response & Limits

An assertive communication is built on:

1. Prepare: Clarify your purpose and ensure that you approach the other person and the situation in a positive frame of mind.
2. Identify the problem and state how you feel and your wants. This involves: observation, feelings, needs, and consequences.
3. Respect the other person: Recognize their needs by showing empathy with their situation.

Limits to assertiveness:

• They take no account of structural and political imbalances in an organization or society at large. (Manager and Clerk)
• Dominant or powerful groups may interpret assertion from members of other groups as aggressive, even if no hostility or offense is intended (Gender, Ethnicity, etc.)
• Individuals may be encouraged to take on responsibility for righting wrongs that are outside their control.
• Assertiveness can ignore collective virtues such as the solidarity of working for a cause.
• Some cultures have more respect for tact than honesty and may expect deference on both sides.

Personal Marketing Plan and Career Goals

Identifying a suitable career opportunity and the right sector is important for a successful career.

Personal Marketing Plan

• One way of considering career development is to think of it in terms of a personal marketing plan. It means adopting a realistic view of yourself as the supplier of a service for which you need to find customers. These customers may be internal – within your own organization, or external – in other organizations. The first step in creating your personal marketing plan is to conduct a career audit. This will allow you to evaluate your own abilities, identify any gaps in your education and experience that need to be addressed, and help you to make decisions about your future aspirations.

Evaluating Abilities

1. Gathering information: Think of all the sources of information that you have about yourself, like performance appraisals, 360-degree feedback, personality tests, and so on.
2. Non-work experiences: Consider social life, club or society memberships, playing a sport, and hobbies.
3. Identify your strengths and weaknesses using the work and non-work sources of information.
4. Finding out what you enjoy, identifying talents, knowledge, and skills.
5. Putting it in context: Bridging where you are now and where you want to be.

Identifying Career Goals

Identifying career goals involves understanding two important things:

1. What do you want?
2. What are your values?
   When it comes to your wants, you need to ask different questions to understand your wants, like:

• How important is family life?
• What kind of lifestyle?
• Could you continue with your current career?
• What are your future prospects with your present company?
• Do you have enough income?
• What sort of trade-off are you prepared to make between your family life and your career?
• Are you prepared to retrain if necessary? Could you live on the reduced income this might entail?

Then you need to consider the values that are important to you, like: Benevolence, Conformity, Independence, Leadership, Recognition, and Support.

Based on the above assessment, you can put together your own personal mission statement.

Primary & Secondary Data

Primary data – is data that you, or the investigator, have collected and which did not exist before.

Secondary data – data that already exists in the form of books, magazines, computer databases, etc.

Survey & Questionnaire

Surveys are a technique in which a sample of the population is asked questions about the issue or issues the investigators are interested in. As far as possible, the sample should be representative of the wider population. Knowledge of sampling techniques and statistics is needed for this purpose.

Questionnaires are the main instrument by which surveys are conducted. Questions asked in surveys are most commonly in the form of closed questions. That is, there is some predefined range of possible answers such as “Yes” or “No” or some scale between 1 to 5. It is possible to include open-ended questions in surveys; the resulting answers have to be grouped into categories that make some sense.

Advantages:

• Surveys are more likely to give results that are representative of the population as a whole than other interviews or observations.
• Data can be compared against expectations and targets.
• When professionally administered – using short, clear questions – surveys can add credibility to your research.
• Postal surveys have a low cost per person.
• Telephone surveys usually get a good response rate and are quicker than postal surveys.

Limitations:

• Response rates to postal questionnaires are nearly always low and therefore probably unrepresentative.
• You get answers only to the questions you have asked.
• Survey results often lack the richness and subtlety it is possible to uncover with other methods.
• Statistical knowledge is often needed to analyze the data.

Interview

Interviews are generally face-to-face encounters between two or more people for the purpose of asking questions about satisfaction with products or services, establishing views, or suitability for employment. Interviews may be formal or informal. Depending on the level of formality, they can be either “structured”, “semi-structured” or “unstructured”.

Formal interviews use a structured questionnaire with set questions. These may use closed questions inviting a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response or brief answers. Informal interviews allow more freedom to the interviewer over the questions which are asked and to the interviewee over the manner in which they answer.

There are a number of types of questions which can be used in interviews:

• Open questions: These begin with phrases such as ‘How do you….? Tell me about….? These will give the interviewee a chance to respond fully and prevent the interviewer from revealing their own views and opinions.
• Closed questions: These demand a very short answer, often ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. For example – do you have a driving license? These are useful for checking facts.
• Hypothetical Questions: They are used to try to uncover attitudes and views about something and may be indicative of future behavior.
• Probing questions: These are asked for exploring statements or facts in greater detail.

There are several types of questions to avoid:

• Leading questions: These impress the views of the interviewer on the interviewee.
• Trick questions: These are bad practice and generally unethical.
• Complex questions: These add too many factors in one question and the interviewee gets confused about how to answer.

Uses & advantages

• There is a good response rate
• They are good for handling complex issues.
• They can provide a cross-section of relevant stakeholder perspectives.
• They can be informative, yielding much more qualitative data.

Problems & limitations

• The average cost of an interview is high.
• They are time-consuming and costly to analyze.
• They are difficult to analyze without some bias.
• It can be hard to get honest answers.

Observation

Observation, or ‘naturalistic observation’, is a way of collecting information without any form of intervention or manipulation. An example of this would be making a video recording of customers visiting a retail store layout to see how they moved around the displays. The researcher then records all they can recollect about the group activities, together with their impressions. Stated in this way the method sounds simple and straightforward. However, it raises some complex issues concerning ethics. An example of this method is: mystery shoppers.

Uses & advantages

• It can be the only way to see things as they are.
• It can reveal realities and ways forward that are not evident to those intimately involved on a day-to-day basis.

Problems & limitations:

• It is time-consuming
• It can be potentially intrusive and ethically problematic.
• It can be stressful
• It can be subjective.
• The observer can influence events.

Active Listening for Successful Communication

Listening is essential to communication. We often tend to make judgments before the other person finishes what they are saying. When working in groups, we are often so concerned with getting our own views across that we do not make the space to hear what others are saying.

Examples include situations where you are: giving or receiving instructions; disagreeing with a colleague; discussing a problem; coaching or mentoring a new colleague; conducting an appraisal interview.

Active listening means:

• Giving whole-hearted attention to the person speaking.
• Demonstrating, or checking, that you have understood.
• Not doing anything else!

Reasons for using active listening are:

• To avoid misunderstandings.
• To build relationships by giving respect to the other person.
• To encourage people to say more and to speak frankly
• To enable people to become clearer in their own thoughts and minds.

Guidelines for Active Listening

• Give people your attention: Face them and make eye contact.
• Be ready to paraphrase or ‘play back’ what they have said.
• Use questions if you do not understand: Do not ignore things you do not understand.
• Acknowledge the other person’s feelings: Acknowledging feelings can be a way of demonstrating your understanding of the situation.
• Encourage if the other person appears uncertain: Ask open-ended questions.
• Do not react or respond in other ways until it is clear that the other person has finished.

Qualitative and Quantitative Data

Quantitative data

• It describes measurable or countable features of whatever has been investigated

Qualitative data

• Refers to intangible qualities or features.

Feedback

Feedback is information on other people’s performance of various activities who work with you or for you.

• Give praise where it is deserved: People are willing to hear justifiable negative feedback if they are confident that you will also praise them when they have done a good job.
• Be positive about yourself: Develop support mechanisms
• Give compliments: Look for opportunities to praise a person’s work

Giving Feedback:

• Give positive feedback first
• Say things in a supportive way. Soften the negatives
• Criticize only behavior that can be changed
• Suggest ways in which performance might be improved
• Place the feedback in the context of the relationship
• Make your feedback well-timed, clear, and direct.

Receiving Feedback:

Feedback is a rich source of learning

• Listen actively
• Ask for precision
• Agree/disagree with criticism: Acknowledge what is true. State your disagreement if anything is not true.
• State what you have learned for future action and behavior from your feedback.
• Give information to correct misunderstandings
• Set limits: Tell the critic how you want to receive feedback if you have been criticized inappropriately.

Sample

Sampling is helpful to us because we can investigate a sample of a larger population in order to learn not just about the sample but about the population from which it was drawn. There are two methods of drawing a sample:

• Random sampling: The individuals to be interviewed are selected at random from a list of the population. The sample must be representative. Suppose that you want to talk to a random sample of the staff in an organization that was operating three shifts over 24 hours. A member of staff, whatever the shift, must have an equal chance of being selected. It would be appropriate to select one-third sample from each of the shifts.
• Quota sampling: Specifies how many of various kinds of people are to be questioned. If you decide to interview 20 managers in a company then you must specify the quota:
  • 7 from among junior managers and supervisors.
  • 13 from middle managers.
  or
  • 9 from under 45 years of age.
  • 11 from over 45 years of age.

Win-Win Negotiation Tactics

A successful negotiator tries to find a win-win solution in which both sides benefit.

4 things that assist negotiation

• Separate the people from the problem: Tease out the relationship issues from the substantive issue to be negotiated.
  • Focus on interest, not positions: Try to identify the more general interests and concerns of the parties involved rather than specifics.
  • Generate options for mutual gain: If there is no right solution, then search for alternative and mutually advantageous outcomes.
  • Agree on criteria for solutions: Try to establish a set of essential and desirable criteria that the outcome of the negotiation should meet.

Positive and Negative Behavior in Negotiation

Skilled negotiators avoid the following negative behavior:

• Defense/attack spirals: Sequences of attacking statements and aggressive defenses are unhelpful.
• Irritators: Words and phrases which add nothing to the content and serve to irritate the other parties should not be used.
• Argument dilution: Don’t clutter your argument by including too many points or digressions. Identify and adhere to the main, strong points of your case.
• Behavior chains: In behavior chains, someone asks a question, summarizes, and puts some information into the proceedings, all in one statement. Others do not know which bit of the input to respond to and get confused.
• Counter-proposal: When one party immediately responds to a proposal from the other side with a proposal of their own, little is achieved. The effect is to signal that ‘I haven’t listened to a word you have said.’

Skilled negotiators demonstrate the following positive behavior:

• Test understanding and summarize: Check that everyone understands things in the same way and clarify the structure of any agreement. Helps build relationships.
• Flag or signal: Tell people what sort of behavior. Example: Could I ask you to make a suggestion?
• Ask lots of questions: For a deeper understanding of the other party, arrive at a win-win situation.
• Explain how they feel: Openness helps in creating trust and enhances relationships.
• Review their performance: Reflection helps in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.

Dealing with difficulties:

If your negotiation seems to be failing because someone else is being difficult:

• Do not react: Deal with your behavior, not your opponent’s. Keep focused on the desired outcomes and concentrate on securing agreement.
• Look at the situation from the other person’s viewpoint: It is harder for a person to be hostile if you are listening to them and acknowledging what they say and feel.
• Do not reject – reframe: Offer new ways of looking at the problem.
• Make it easy to say ‘yes’: Involve the other party in crafting an agreement. Help them save face and find ways of presenting the solution as a victory.
• Make it hard to say ‘no’: Educate the other party on the costs of saying ‘no’. Warn, do not threaten. Exercise restraint.

Systems Thinking

‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’ is a good place to start thinking about systems. A car is more than its individual components. We can think of a football team as being more than a collection of individual players or a family as being more than a group of people who share the same name. Each of these examples – the car, the football team, and the family – can be seen as systems. Individual parts of a system are connected in some way for a purpose.

Five Key Ideas:

• Everything in a system is connected: The elements of a system are interconnected. The members of a department or a voluntary group constitute a system. The idea of a system emphasizes the interconnections between the elements.
• A system does something: A system is defined by what it produces. Every system has an output. The outputs may be tangible or intangible. The only valid components of a particular system are those that contribute to the specified output.
• Systems have a boundary and an environment: The boundary of a system will separate the elements that make up the system and interact with each other, from the elements that are outside the boundary. The elements that are outside the boundary constitute the environment in which the system operates.
• The system is defined by your interest: Your system may differ from someone else’s if they feel something is essential or something is not necessary.
• Systems and subsystems: A system may have one or more sub-systems within it. The sub-system may be a tangible subsystem or an intangible subsystem.

Diagrams for Managers

• Force-field diagram shows the opposing pressures (or forces) that are bearing on a situation. Within the context of planning and managing change, the diagram shows the forces which are supportive of change (the driving forces) and the forces which are likely to be unhelpful or resistant (the restraining forces).
• Input-output diagram shows the inputs to a system or to an operation and the outputs from it.
• Pie chart is a way of presenting proportional data in the form of a circle – the pie. Each slice shows its proportion to the whole. The whole itself must be finite and known, for example, the total number of staff in the organization.
• Line graph is a method of showing a relationship between two variables, such as the output of an organization and the associated costs.
• Bar chart is another way of presenting data. It is designed to show frequency distribution, for example, the number of staff in each of the categories in an organization.
• System map shows the boundary of the system and the different subsystems inside the boundary. It may also show important influences outside the boundary, that is, in the external environment. A map is a map. It does not have arrows showing relationships or influences between the subsystems. The scale and the detail depend on the purpose of the system map. Keep the map as simple as possible to aid clarity. Ensure the map is clearly labeled. All boundaries and subsystems need to be clearly identified.
• Multiple-cause diagram will enable you to show the causes and the ways in which they are connected. Suppose, for example, that you were asked to explain why a workgroup was under-performing. You could use a multiple-cause diagram both to help you to construct the explanation and to present it.

Brainstorming

Two principles apply to the process:

• The separation between being creative and being judgmental.
• Quantity breeds quality: one idea stimulates another; good ideas are rare, so generate as many as possible.

These principles lead to 4 practical rules:

• No criticism: postponement of judgment, both by words and gestures.
• Freewheel: Expression of ideas must be uninhibited; encourage random thoughts, ideas, images, possibilities, etc.
• The more ideas, the better.
• Hitch-hike: building and improving the quality of ideas and contributing to a sense of teamwork.

Brainstorming: A helpful process:

• Enjoyable and productive
• Approach to proposals and ideas
• There should not be any barriers to the process of generation
• The purpose of the session is to generate ideas

Running a brainstorming session

• Draft a statement of the problem
• 5-10 people
• Note on running the session
• A facilitator and a recorder
• Review the brainstorming process
• Follow the rules
• Close the session when the ideas cease to flow
• Collate, sort, and evaluate the ideas
• Provide the participants with copies of the results

Conventional Mentoring vs. Peer Relationships