Assertive or Aggressive: Which behaviour best suits the workplace?

Have you ever admired your co-worker for having a Teflon-like ability to navigate through challenging situations with ease and professionalism, irrespective of the situation, politics or difficult personalities involved? 

Everybody reacts to difficult situations in their own way. While some might avoid it like the plague, others would charge at it like a bull at a wounded gate. This may not seem such an important factor when it comes to our own lives but we don’t realize that this can affect our behaviour in other environments. 

Concerning work, our behaviour can affect the people we work with and in turn affect our productivity in the business. This being an underlying situation, the COO and VP-HR of Nordic Intent held an enlightening session on the right kind of behaviour to adopt in challenging situations at the workplace.

The highlighted principle of the session was ‘Listen, if you want to be heard’. This kind of behaviour could result in mutual collaboration and inturn reduce all the confusion and hypertension. As a part of this interactive activity, a couple of real-life scenarios were put forward to the attending members and each of them had to collectively come up with reasonable solutions. This offered them all an insight into understanding what actions caused reactions and in turn what reactions caused results. 

Any work environment can sometimes turn into a frying pan when things go a little side-track. While passive people tend to approach the situation in a way that affects their ego, aggressive people will voice themselves and tolerate no blame whatsoever. Assertive people, on the other hand, take a much more calm approach to the situation. Their behaviour lies amidst that of the passive and aggressive types. 

Assertive behaviour is the key approach to not only producing results in any business but also building good and understanding relationships between co-workers. Ego should never be something that triggers wrong emotions. The session spoke about adopting an assertive approach to a situation, tackling heated situations calmly. 

Nordic Intent has constantly held growth-enabling activities and sessions within the organisation in the past. Click here to know more!