Assertiveness - What does it mean?
If you are running a growing company in the manufacturing, energy, or construction sectors, you are likely operating in a high-pressure environment. In these arenas, the concept of “assertiveness” is often deeply misunderstood. Too many leaders confuse being assertive with being aggressive, dictatorial, or obnoxiously dominant. They assume that to win, someone else has to lose.
But true assertiveness is not about bulldozing your team to get your way. It is a strategic leadership tool that allows you to protect your own capacity while simultaneously elevating the people around you.
In a recent piece from The Daily Coach, Performance Coach Greg Harden offered a brilliant definition that every leader in the “Squeeze Zone” needs to hear. He wrote: “Being assertive means being able to have your needs met while still interacting with great sensitivity to those around you” 1.
According to Coach Harden, assertiveness is built on a few core pillars:
Valuing yourself: Valuing your own life, goals, and time, while at the same time valuing others 1.
Owning your reality: Taking responsibility for your actions, recognizing your achievements, and owning your mistakes 1.
Protecting your peace: Not allowing others to violate your rights or infringe on your peace of mind 1.
The Four A’s: Giving yourself self-attention, self-affection, self-approval, and self-acceptance 1.
In other words, assertiveness begins with taking care of you. But how does self-preservation translate to building a more resilient, more profitable business? It comes down to two critical shifts in your leadership operating system.
1. You cannot lead others if your own cup is empty.Coach Harden points out that assertiveness is about being less concerned with what others think of you, and more concerned with who you aspire to be 1. As a leader, your emotional state is contagious. If you lead from a place of anxiety, burnout, or frustration, your team feels that urgency and confusion before they hear your logic.
You have to look after yourself first. If you fail to assert your own boundaries—if you don’t protect your time to think, plan, and recharge—you will become trapped in the daily grind of problem-solving rather than leading. Assertiveness is having the courage to state your concerns and feelings without anger or passivity. It is the practice of managing your own energy so that you have the capacity to bring your best self to the people who are counting on you.
2. Make them winners to protect your margins.Once you have secured your own foundation, assertiveness turns outward. Harden notes that being assertive means “knowing that for you to win doesn’t have to mean that someone else must lose” 1.
If you want to transition your company from a top-line obsession to bottom-line mastery, you cannot do it alone. You have to make the people around you winners. When you assertively support your team—giving them clear direction, holding them accountable, and trusting them to execute—you shift from being an “approval bottleneck” to a capability builder.
The Playbook: 3 Assertive Actions for This Week
To put this into practice, here are three ways you can use assertiveness to improve your team this week, aligned directly with our core pillars at The Margin Builders:
1. Mindset: High-Altitude Decision MakingAction: Assertively protect your “Think Time.”Being assertive means valuing your own precious time on this earth 1. As a leader, you cannot make high-altitude decisions if you are constantly buried in the weeds. This week, schedule dedicated “think time” on your calendar and fiercely protect it—get seriously angry if anyone tries to schedule over it 2. Use this time to step back, pull yourself off the firing line, and evaluate your highest priority problems so you can execute them one at a time 3, 4.
2. Culture: Empowering teams to generate the ideas that drive performanceAction: Assertively solicit criticism.Assertiveness isn’t just about telling people what to do; it requires taking responsibility and owning your mistakes 1. This week, sit down with your direct reports and assertively ask them to criticize your performance 5. Do not let them off the hook with a polite answer; embrace the discomfort to show you genuinely want to be challenged 6, 7. When you prove you can take criticism, you build a “psychologically safe” workplace where your team feels free to contribute the ingenuity, half-formed ideas, and concerns necessary to drive innovation 8, 9.
3. Data: Using leading indicators to predict your financial futureAction: Assertively shift your team’s focus to input metrics.It is easy for organizations to obsess over output metrics like revenue, profit, or share price 10, 11. But as a leader, you have very little ability to directly control outputs 10. This week, use your assertiveness to firmly redirect your team’s attention toward controllable input metrics—the specific, day-to-day activities that actually drive your business forward 10, 12. Refuse to let them get distracted by lagging results, and instead focus their energy on the inputs they can directly manipulate to achieve sustainable growth 13.
Your legacy as a leader is not just what you build, but who you lift up while you are here. Look after yourself. Empower your people. Make them winners.
Let’s get to work and start building those margins.
References
Babin, L., & Willink, J. (2015). Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. St. Martin’s Press. (Reference for pulling off the firing line and Prioritize and Execute) 3, 4.
Bryar, C., & Carr, B. (2021). Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. St. Martin’s Press. (Reference for shifting focus from output metrics to controllable input metrics) 10, 12, 13.
Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. John Wiley & Sons. (Reference for building psychological safety so knowledge workers can share ideas) 8, 9.
Harden, G. (n.d.). The Daily Coach email newsletter. (Reference for the definition of assertiveness, valuing yourself, and the Four A’s) 1.
Scott, K. (2017). Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. St. Martin’s Press. (Reference for holding “think time” sacred and actively soliciting criticism from direct reports) 2, 5-7.