Yesterday was a breezy day, sun was poking through the trees, and the fish swimming around the pond. I was having a coffee with a colleague, and we were discussing how to be more assertive as a woman in the workplace without coming across as angry and aggressive. A few years ago, I was told that my leadership style was too collaborative, and not assertive enough. I found this feedback confusing at the time. I had always had pride in my ability to bring a group together and collaboratively make decisions, give constructive feedback to one another, and to move forward. However, in the eyes of this colleague that was not seen as a positive trait. 

In previous roles, I would employ all sorts of tactics to bring a group of people together. Having concrete meeting agendas and outcomes to encourage attendance and make each person feel needed, going ahead of time to collect content, sending feedback forms regularly, individually making connections with all of those that you need on board to get to know them. It could be said that my approach is laborious, long-winded, overly focused on others’ feelings, and at times, slow. However, I didn’t see this as part of the job, I saw it as a way to connect with others and make interesting technology together. 

In the project the colleague and I were working on, I found myself bending to be more assertive, which worked in part. My goal was to create an outcome-based roadmap for the product, which spanned many workstreams, which made collaboration hard. My initial approach had been as I described, to go around all the individual teams, gather data for what they were doing, create the customer outcomes, and encourage them to put together the master epics, the work they were going to deliver for the project. Given I was one person, and the collaborative effort was slow because of other mitigating factors, I found myself getting into endless discussions around development delivery, exposure of the roadmap to the wider team, how can we speed up. My response was to get into a room with my peer product manager and write the product scope and strategy together, a three-hour session that involved a lot of whiteboarding. The outcome was that I could write the entire list of product outcomes without the input of the technical team and present them to the wider audience – I felt I was being more aggressive in my approach – if my previous approach meant I was too slow, this would be a clear fix.

The reaction to the work was mixed. The development team were impressed, I had taken all the previous input and distilled it into the top priorities for the entire team to focus on. Like my previous blog about creating a strategy, 90% of the work we’re doing should fall into one of the product outcomes.  The colleague was confused, had a lot of questions, and I sensed I had gone rogue, not taken all the advice. Feeling like I had crossed an invisible line from collaborative to assertive, I went back to my old ways. The colleague I was recalling this to made a sigh to suggest she had received the same, going from being incredibly nice to a summer intern in the team, to overly aggressive when for the fifth time that week he had gone to an over-extended coffee break she had to firmly say no, he needed to finish the work that he had started.

Here are three things that I have done to help combat the collaborative versus aggressive narrative:

• Being explicit about decisions versus discussions,
• Setting boundaries earlier with those around you,
• Separating ‘listening’ from ‘agreeing’.

The irony is that when uploading this blog through AI, the feedback I got was that I was too narrative-driven, flowing, and I needed to tighten the structure… Perhaps even AI is trying to tell me I’m too collaborative and not aggressive enough. What’s the age-old advice we always tell women? What would a man do?