How open and direct are you in your interactions with others?
Do you avoid telling people things you think they won’t want to hear?
Have you considered the high cost of being indirect?

Assertiveness is not a skill to take lightly. It is critically important to the outcome of many situations at work and at home.

I can remember one time when my failure to speak up cost me $80,000. This could have easily been avoided had I been more assertive when I had the chance.

In 1991, my husband at the time and I had sold our home in Colorado and we were looking for ways to invest the profit we’d made.

We were approached by a ‘financial advisor’, then our ‘friend’, who introduced us to a man who wanted to borrow $80,000 to invest in his bagel-making business.  The return on our investment would be 15% interest, and the bagel maker would start paying us back within a couple months.  The deal looked secure on paper, but when I met the bagel maker himself, I had an intuition that something was ‘off’.  I didn’t speak up because I felt pressure from my advisor and husband to sign the loan papers.

In the end, we did not get back a single cent of the $80,000 and learned an expensive lesson. As a result I have learned to risk being more assertive where I sense a problem, even if it is inconvenient and uncomfortable for others.

The cost of not speaking up can be even more dramatic: it can mean the difference between life and death. Take the example of the three plane crashes cited by Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book, “Outliers: The Story of Success”.

Gladwell cites three examples of how failure to communicate assertively cost hundreds of people their lives. You don’t have to be a pilot or copilot to get the point that it is critical for us to pay more attention to the clarity and directness of our communication.

The plane crash incidents involved three airlines:  Avianca Airlines (from Colombia), Korean Air, and Air Florida. All of these tragedies could have been prevented had the co-pilot been more assertive with the Captain and/or the Air Traffic Controller.  In all of these incidents, the co-pilot only hinted that there is a major problem, hoping that the Captain would understand what he meant.  All three crashes were due largely to someone’s hesitancy to speak strongly to a superior.

Jeffrey S. Nielsen, former executive consultant for Fortune 100 companies, in his book ‘The Myth of Leadership’, cites research demonstrating people’s tendency to ‘soften the truth’ when delivering ‘bad’ news to anyone they perceive as a ‘superior’.

Let’s take a look at an actual dialogue of one of the crashes recorded on the ‘black box’ or recording device recovered after the plane crash.
In 1982, Air Florida, crashed into the icy Potomac River right outside Washington, DC shortly after take-off. The co-pilot tried three times to tell the captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on the wings, but unfortunately he only hinted at the issue and did not highlight his concerns with assertiveness.