Your customers are making what you feel are unfair demands of you, yet you smile, acknowledge their complaint but do nothing about it. At least not immediately. While telling them that everything will be fine, you will fix whatever is wrong, you really have no intention in changing a thing.
You wonder why they’re so upset, over what seems such a trivial matter, and sometimes even tell them, (in a very nice way of course), to settle down, they are overreacting.
Passive aggressive business owners are as common as passive aggressive people. You go out of your way to resist the demands or requests of others. You procrastinate, complain, sulk and purposely avoid doing what needs to be done.
How does this affect your business?
Passive aggressive behaviour comes into play when your negative feelings about someone or something build to the point that it impacts your life and because you’re holding these feelings in, some outward display of destructive behaviour shows up instead.
A business, just like life, always has problems intermittently and a business owner has to be able to handle whatever crops up. If you tend toward being passive aggressive, there will always be an excuse to avoid problems or just not deal with them at all. Whatever happens will always be the fault of others, not you. Competition will be another issue as you will refuse to involve yourself in it or will create some type of scenario where you have been victimized in one way or another.
A business owner needs to be able to communicate, honestly, with his or her customers, clients and others involved in the running of their business. Avoiding the truth, putting off payments, turning a blind eye to what needs to be done will eventually create confusion and resentment in all of the involved parties.
Learning to take responsibility for your actions is the first thing a passive aggressive business owner needs to do. The best way to do this is by looking at how your behaviour affects not only yourself but your business and others around you. Take the time to think before you respond to others and decide why you wish to respond in a certain way or not respond at all! Your reactions should tell you a lot about yourself, and your feelings to your outside circumstances.
Be aware that others may eventually have to set boundaries to control how your behaviour affects their lives. Just like you, their responses and reactions have a reason behind them. You are aiming for consistency, in a good way, and you will need to learn how the outcome of certain behaviours will mean success or not in your business.
© Chris Draper, DemGen Inc. 2015
