Realationship at work 2 - Essay Example

In the role play, I am the junior colleague who is talking with my Boss, who is also the EDM’s boss. My strategy had been to be assertive since I expected that my boss would be aggressive and would not understand what I had to say. I also wanted to be assertive so as to convince my boss to meet with the EDM. However, during the role play, she was quite accommodating. She let me explain everything that I needed to say and she asked the right questions. She was also confident and this helped me to remember all through the role play that I was addressing the boss.

My boss was very considerate and she helped me get my point across every now and then (Scarnatti, 1998). Although she asked a lot of questions, she was not aggressive while asking them. This is the main reason that made me change my communication strategy to being less assertive. At the start of the role play, I was quite nervous since I did not know how my boss would react. This affected my confidence and my voice was low at the beginning. However, when I realized that the boss was not as aggressive as I had thought she would be, I grew more confident.

I even managed to maintain good eye contact throughout the role play. Since my strategy was to use assertiveness from the beginning, I used my hands for emphasis (Armstrong, 1999). Sometimes the hands were open, sometimes closed. I felt under pressure, especially when my boss started asking me some questions and I had to give satisfactory answers. In my strategy, I had planned to control the conversation, but my boss is the one who controlled it instead. I did not ask my boss any questions, but she listened to what I had to say very actively.

She even asked me for more information to solve the problem (Knapp and Vangelisti, 1992). Towards the end, I thought that my strategy was almost not working because for a few moments my boss sided with the EDM. At the end of the role play, I decided to use my strategy which involved convincing her of the