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MOTIVATIONAL ASSERTIVENESS

Be sure you're right, then go ahead.
-- Davy Crockett

Listening is essential to communicating well with anybody, and because listening is frequently slighted by would-be motivators, I've talked about it first. But listening is only the first half of the good motivator's communication skill set. The other half is, naturally enough, talking. It's speaking to the people you want to turn on in such a way that they will listen to you, and be willing to change their Behaviors in ways that you want them to change.

You might think that this would be the simpler half of the skill set to learn: since most of us get so much more practice in talking than in listening, it might seem that coming out and asking for what we want would be an awful lot simpler than hearing what other people want. But it doesn't work that way.  Instead of asking, your average manager/motivator resorts to telling, or selling, or yelling - and as a result runs into stone walls.

The problem is basically one of tone. In order to get your people to really listen, and respond, to what you say, you have to be assertive but not aggressive, and few of us know how to draw that balance. Hence this chapter.

It is a strange irony that, in a country so enamored of "rugged individualism" and personal initiative, many of us have to be taught to ask for what we want. Yet it's a fact. We're pretty good at demanding, and we're not too bad at backing off if somebody responds to our demands in a louder, more threatening voice than our own. We're not so good at stating, simply and straight to the point, "This is what I expect you to do."  Very few of us are as adept as my old coach Bud Grant was in Pinpointing what needs to be done, asking for it, and then promising, "And if you do that, we'll win the ball game."

About ten years ago, a whole cottage industry got built up teaching people how to ask for what they want. This industry was created by popular psychologists who were convinced that the inability to be direct about what you want was a symptom of "ego problems" - of insecurity about identity. In a book typical of much work in this field, Drs. Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons identify a sense of "personal powerlessness" as the root of nonassertive behavior. They encourage their readers to experience their "personhood" in a "positive way," to "radically change" their "self-concept" and their sense of "self-esteem."  "Poor self-concept," say the authors of  Stand Up, Speak Out, Talk Back, is nearly always the villain in the piece, and learning how to change that concept from the inside is the "key to self-assertive behavior."

There's nothing wrong with this psychological analysis of non-assertiveness, and it's certainly true that changing your self-concept can have a dramatic effect on your behavior. But you know by now that my bias is away from theory and toward results, away from metaphysical speculation on the "real" meaning of a given Behavior, and toward a system that uses the manipulation of Antecedents and Consequences as the proven way to alter Behaviors, that is, to motivate others.

In teaching people in our client companies to become more effectively self-assertive - in other words, to get what they want out of others by asking for it directly - we've always favored a straight-on and, I believe, an eminently practical approach. First, we get our clients to measure how assertive or nonassertive they already are; in this we are applying the Recording element of the P.R.I.C.E. motivation model. Then we teach a set of simple, learnable Assertion Skills with which anyone - whatever the extent of his "unresolved superego conflicts" - can behave in a more assertive manner. And we show our clients how to apply these skills in real-life situations where the goal is to influence and change others.

We're going to do the same thing in this chapter. By the end of the chapter you will have been introduced to the "other half" of the communication skill package that you need to motivate people effectively and generate good team solutions. First, however, a couple of definitions, presented up front so you will know exactly what I mean by "assertiveness" and why I feel it is just as important a component of sound communication as Reflective Listening.

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