"Like salt in a sauce, too much overwhelms the dish; too little is similarly distracting; but just the right amount allows the other flavors to dominate our experience. Just as food is rarely praised for being perfectly salted, leaders may somewhat infrequently be praised for being perfectly assertive."
What Breaks a Leader: The Curvilinear Relation Between Assertiveness and Leadership, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007
When it comes to leadership effectiveness, how others perceive you is everything. If you want to influence them — to move them from point A to point B without using force — then it’s imperative that you understand how they perceive effective leadership and how they perceive you.
In the article cited in the above quote, researchers Daniel Ames and Francis Flynn focused on what causes the perception of ineffective leadership. They found that either too much assertiveness (aggressiveness and dominance) or too little assertiveness (passiveness, lack of initiative and conviction) hurt the perception of effective leadership in equal measure. The right degree of assertiveness was — just like salt in a sauce — present in people who were perceived as strong leaders, but largely unidentified as a leadership strength.
The message for anyone who wants to become a more effective leader? Assertiveness counts. While assertiveness might not come up on most people’s list of leadership qualities, behaving with too much or too little assertiveness can break you as a leader.
Where do you fall on the continuum between being aggressive on one extreme and passive on the other? What’s more important to you: getting your way or getting along?
