EXERCISE 5.1

Assertiveness

Developing Appropriate Assertiveness Within Your Team

Purpose

To help teams and individuals use the appropriate level of assertiveness.

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30 minutes

Participants will discuss the interrelationships in the way that several emotional effectiveness skills can contribute to the successful use of assertiveness. They will then have an opportunity to explore ways to improve their assertiveness skills by increasing or decreasing their assertiveness as needed.

Outcomes

• To understand that several emotional effectiveness skills co-influence assertiveness.
• To help team members and individuals who tend to overdo their assertiveness to restrain it and those who tend to underplay their assertiveness to build it up.

Audience

• Intact teams
• Unaffiliated group
• Individual working with a coach

Facilitator Competencies

Advanced

Materials

• Developing Appropriate Assertiveness Within Your Team Handout

Time Matrix

Activity	Estimated Time
Discuss the concepts and practices in handout	10 minutes
In pairs, discuss applying one of the practices	10 minutes
Debrief as a full team/group	10 minutes
Total Time	30 minutes

Instructions

1. Explain that assertiveness is one of those skills that people are either good at or not so good at. Within the team environment this can have a high impact on team performance. Assertiveness is not a stand-alone emotional effectiveness skill, although none of the EQ-i or TESI skills really are. Assertiveness requires flexibility, impulse control, independence, empathy, interpersonal relationships, and self-regard to be functioning optimally for assertiveness to reach its full potential. Let your group or team know that they will begin by discussing the interrelationships between several emotional effectiveness skills, then have an opportunity to explore ways to improve their assertiveness skills.

2. Distribute the handout and go over the concepts described. Review the practices for improving assertiveness when it’s too high and too low and ask for examples of how participants have seen both forms of assertiveness demonstrated. Ask them to discuss using the practices—who has used the ideas and how they have worked for them?

3. Have participants form pairs and ask them to identify a specific part of their lives where they could use one of the practices and create a plan to do so.

4. Bring the full team or group together to debrief. You might:

• Ask for some examples of what practices they thought of using.
• Ask whether anyone wants help in brainstorming how to develop his or her plan to make changes.
• Ask for any “a-ha’s” as they considered their own assertiveness. Would they be better off increasing or decreasing their assertiveness, or does it depend on the context?
• Ask how much they need to gauge their assertiveness based on the culture they are working with.

DEVELOPING APPROPRIATE ASSERTIVENESS WITHIN YOUR TEAM HANDOUT

Assertiveness and Its Relationships to Other EI Skills

When you want to adjust your assertiveness, it is helpful to first consider the relationship between the skill of assertiveness and other EI skills, especially the following:

• Self-Regard gives one a belief in one’s worth and the worth of what he or she has to say. It also gives people the confidence to say it.
• Independence gives one the courage to act independently with or without the support of others’ opinions.
• Assertiveness motivates one to be sure that others know what one likes and wants more of and what one dislikes and wants less of or none at all.
• Interpersonal Relationships gauge the amount of our energy that we like to spend developing and maintaining social friendships. It has somewhat of a biological set point. To the extent that it correlates with extroversion and introversion in the MBTI , we will tend to see less extroverted members of the team reflecting more and commenting less often. As a result, they will tend to have more carefully prepared remarks to contribute. While these people, with practice, can learn to be more assertive, it is also the shared responsibility of the leader and other team members to invite the comments and observations of the quieter team members when their contributions are noticeably absent.
• Impulse Control gives one the restraint to be able to suppress or delay one’s reactions and diminish their intensity, even when one is under emotional pressure.
• Flexibility enables one to recognize and engage the full range of one’s effective choices so that one does not feel constrained to choose the most obvious course of action.
• Empathy allows one to feel how one’s actions affect others emotionally and to communicate more effectively with others. Are we intimidating, or interrupting, or supporting others?
• Social Responsibility empowers the generosity one needs to be able to recognize and support the needs and best efforts of others.

Practices to Improve One’s Use of Assertiveness

When Assertiveness Is High

When a team member’s scores in assertiveness (and perhaps independence as well) are high, but his or her scores in empathy and impulse control are significantly lower, practicing to improve the lower skills will help balance this person’s expression of assertiveness. Improving in social responsibility and flexibility can also help offset the tendency to dominate in discussions. Slowing everything down will be one of the first steps to take in building effectiveness, remembering that good impulse control is the ability to increase the amount of time between stimulus and response.

To build social responsibility and flexibility while being assertive, ask yourself to answer the following two questions before speaking:

• “How will I look to others if I make this statement?”
• “How will others feel if I reply in this way?”

To grow flexibility while being assertive, use this challenge:

• “Instead of this obvious reply, what is another way to make my point?”

Using social responsibility while being assertive might require considering:

• “Is this course of action going to provide the best result for the greatest number of people?”

When Assertiveness Is Low

When a person’s assertiveness is lower than scores in flexibility and impulse control, he or she may need to offset those strengths by strengthening behaviors in independence and assertiveness to increase his or her influence in the team’s decision-making process.

Increase assertiveness and decrease impulse control by:

• Speeding things up by being less deliberative
• Trusting your intuition and speaking up much earlier in the conversation Increase assertiveness and decrease flexibility by:
• Forgetting the other options for a moment and stating your thoughts about the one under consideration

Other Assertiveness Tips

• A great way to start practicing assertiveness is to start telling everybody what you like about inconsequential matters. For instance, “I really like it when it rains late in the afternoon” or “I really like lots of oregano in my spaghetti sauce” or “I just love it when the bad guys in the movie get caught in the act!” So what?! No one is going to take issue with these preferences any more than they’re going to get upset when you say, “I hate it when the ice cream in my cone is all soft and runny!” or when you declare, “I can’t stand a bouquet that’s mostly lilies.” Again, who cares? But for someone who has never spoken up before and told other people what he or she likes and dislikes, practicing making these kinds of strong pronouncements can be great exercise!
• This kind of practice lays a strong foundation for then being able to say, “I really prefer that you call me instead of reply with an e-mail when I leave you a voice message” or “I really don’t like it when I have to remind you that your weekly report is due by 3:00 on Thursday.” An empathy challenge might simply phrase it a different way: “How do you think I feel when I have to hunt you down to get a report that’s due every week at the same time?”

Assertiveness and the TESI

The Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey (TESI) uses concepts like, “Our team is more important than its members” and “We are honest with one another” to help teams move past the self-importance and turf protection mentality that undermine effective team performance and that are frequently expressed with inappropriate assertiveness. It takes every member’s courage, honesty, and commitment to belong to a highly effective team. . . . But boy does it feel good to go to work when you do!