Don’t crush the bird, hold it firmly but gently

Every good boss seeks the delicate balance between managing too much and too little.

Managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.

Managers who are too assertive will damage relationships with superiors, peers, and followers, but managers who are not assertive enough won’t press followers to achieve sufficiently tough goals.

I speculated that the best bosses would be rated roughly average on terms like competitive, aggressive, passive, submissive by followers. I asked 213 participants to my seminars to rate their current or most recent boss’s assertiveness.

As predicted, moderately assertive bosses were rated as most effective overall, most likely to succeed in the future and as someone the participants would work long term.

I imply that a sign of “perfectly assertive” boss is that followers may notice that they don’t notice their boss’s aggressiveness, competitiveness, passiveness, and submissiveness.

Like a 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.

Don’t crush the bird, hold it firmly but gently.