I had an administrative assistant who once resorted to passive-aggressive behavior toward me. She was in another room when I gave her some directions about a task to do when she returned to my room. She called back that she had already done that task in a better way than mine. I had my back turned, was absorbed in something, and did not hear her reply around the corner.

After she returned, she was working on the computer on a different task. I noticed that and assumed she had not heard me the first time. I repeated my instructions and walked away.

She assumed that I had heard her the first time and that I was not happy that she had already done the task differently than how I had instructed her. This made her furious. After all, she knew best how to do this task. She thought to herself, “Why didn’t I trust her judgment? Why was I making her redo the task in an inferior fashion? What a waste.”

With furor she dismantled what she had done and followed my instructions to the T. I came back in the room and noticed her being upset. I asked her what was wrong. She poured out her indignation. It took a good bit of question asking to piece together what had actually happened. Then we both had a good laugh.

This misunderstanding wasted time and energy. Poor communication costs us. If either of us had checked out our assumptions, we could have avoided this unpleasant scene.

Passive-aggressive behavior costs us. Let’s have a look at what she did. She became angry because she thought I was disregarding her intelligence and making her do it my way for some dumb reason. If she had expressed her annoyance, the miscommunication would have been discovered. Instead she chose to passively follow my instructions. And she had an aggressive intention, to make me pay for disregarding her intelligence.

She would make me pay literally for the wasted time and also by doing the task in a manner inferior to what she had originally chosen to do. We call this type of behavior, passive-aggressive. It looks passive, but it is also aggressive.

Assertive behavior would have been for her to express her anger verbally. She expressed the anger non-verbally with her obedient actions. In this way, she got even.

When we were finished patching up our relationship, I made a request. “Please always use your own intelligence and creativity. Tell me when you have a better way of doing things. When I give you an instruction, always assume that I would like to hear from you if you have a better way. If I am away, just do it your way and tell me later. When you are angry about something, please tell me.”

What steps can you take to avoid passive-aggressive behavior?
1. Alert people to the cost of passive-aggressive behavior.
2. Make a request like mine above.
3. Don’t assume – communicate.
4. Express your annoyance and encourage others to do the same to iron things out.

You can get many more practical suggestions like this in our Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™, which is described at www.EmotionallyIntelligentLeadership.com, scroll down.

Listen to our sample Audio Recordings of live sessions of our Virtual-Workshops.