“You need to be more aggressive.” is an advice I often receive at work from the people who want the best for me. It is also the advice that frustrates me the most. I don’t know what to do with it or how to act upon it. Other people’s aggressiveness often works as a repellent on me.
I know that what people mean by aggressive in this context is assertive, but these two words are often used inter-changeably at work, and sometimes boundaries aren’t very clear. I also have to confess that I am a person who often feels anger and rage. I love and welcome these emotions as a compass in life, but I don’t like acting on them with an outward aggression.
When I was a PhD student, I thought I should quit my job several times after receiving the “be more aggressive/assertive” advice. If the only way to exist in this profession was through being aggressive, I didn’t think there was a place for me in it.
Progressing in my career made it clear to me that one doesn’t always have to be aggressive to survive in our profession. But, more importantly, I realized that surviving all these aggression dynamics doesn’t have to be the responsibility of the non-aggressive side. I wish people advised the other parties to be “less aggressive” as much as they advised me to be “more aggressive.” This isn’t a one-sided interaction, and I don’t always have to be the one bearing the responsibility for the lack of constructive conversation. For example, my first manager at IBM Almaden, Guy Lohmann, made a real effort in team meetings to avoid cases where one person is dominating the discussion by being aggressive and shutting everyone else down. When Guy realized such a dynamic, he politely told the dominating person to wrap up and gave a chance to the people who couldn’t speak up as aggressively to express their opinion.
My relationship with aggression took a slightly different turn after I moved to Denmark, though.
In my first few months in Denmark, I often felt like the aggressive one among a group of people. People I interacted with were the calmest I have ever met, and that level of calmness made me want to be more aggressive. It was almost like their version of calmness was a chain over my emotions preventing me from showing the full range of them, which in turn made me want to burst.
Over time, I found my tribe in Denmark and also realized that the aggression in Scandinavia comes more often in a passive aggressive form. Realizing and reacting to direct and loud aggression is relatively easy assuming the aggression isn’t physical. (I may be saying this since this is the aggression type I am more used to thanks to my Black Sea upbringing.) Passive aggression is a psychological warfare that can leave you with scars that are invisible. In fact, I realized how violent passive aggression could be while sitting at a meeting being completely ignored by a colleague as if I didn’t exist. This was a painful realization and made me self-analyze my own possibly passive aggressive behavior at times. I decided that I despise this form of aggression and do my best to avoid it.
Today, overall, I have a slightly less negative view on being directly but not physically aggressive. While in Denmark, I learned to be more aggressive without feeling bad about it, mainly to self-protect or take up space unapologetically. In the end, it didn’t develop as a response to the repeated advice I kept receiving, but more naturally out of necessity and getting older (or more mature / senior if you prefer these words better).
I still don’t like hearing “be more aggressive” advice, though, either given to me or to another colleague or to a student. I have managed not to give this advice to anyone as a supervisor and professor so far, and I intend to keep it that way. Let’s see how it goes.
