How Assertive Are You?

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I probably should not admit to this character flaw in a blog post where other people may read it, but this is the era of vulnerability, so here goes: I’m a pushover. If you ask me to do something, I immediately start thinking about how I might be able to do it. I was raised in a chaotic family environment, and I compensated by trying to fix, smooth, handle, change, explain, heal, or, at the very least, contribute in a positive way to any situation.

How bad is this habit of mine? I actually apologized—in French—to the two pickpockets who stole my wallet and passport in the Paris Metro. In my defense, I wasn’t immediately aware that they were pickpockets, but nonetheless, it was not my proudest hour. (They had bumped into me deliberately; it was that I was apologizing for.) And the lesson was brought fully home during the day I spent at the American embassy in Paris getting a new passport when I could have been looking at modern art at the Pompidou.

So, on the scale of pushy vs. pushover, I end up on the far left of the scale, at “extreme pushover.” Now, there are exceptions. I’ve learned to say "no" to cold callers, real estate agents who want to sell my house out from under me, and, of course, pickpockets I see coming. But on the whole, I’m a pushover.

The good news? Some research suggests that I’m not alone. The world is divided into the pushovers and the pushy ones. The numbers of the two parties seem to be about equal. But more importantly, most people are bad at determining which camp they belong to. So, at least in that regard, I’m ahead of the pack.

And what’s more, we are relatively poor, according to the study, at determining how assertive we should be in, for example, a negotiation. Just under two-thirds of us pushovers think we are actually assertive enough. And 56 percent of us who are too pushy believe we are either being assertive enough or even less-than-ideally assertive. In other words, whether we are too pushy or too pushed around, more than half of us are wrong about our levels of assertiveness.

Why is it important to get this characteristic right? It turns out that negotiators who strike the right balance of pushy vs. pushover get better deals for both parties. There is something to this idea of win-win! On the other hand, if you think you’ve gone over the line at one end or another, you are likely to try to repair the damage either by becoming too aggressive or too passive. And going to one extreme or the other will then cause you to make a worse deal for both sides.

So, smart negotiators think about both sides and appropriate levels of pressure in order to drive a good deal for all parties to a negotiation. And coming up in the rear, I need to learn to kick a little.