A young man tracked down my phone number a few weeks ago. He had finished university only recently, a good degree in hand, a head full of dreams, and one heavy question buried in his chest. We agreed to meet over tea at a small roadside kiosk near the bus stand, the kind of place where the benches wobble but the conversation never does. There, between sips, he asked me the thing young people in this profession often ask me: “Boss, what do I do to get noticed? What do I do to gain influence?”
I told him that, just as in football, even in the office there are only four ways to play the game of influence. Choose your style badly, and you can play the full ninety minutes without ever touching the ball. Choose it well, and you can become the player everyone is looking for. The problem is that most people don’t realise they have chosen a style at all. They think this is simply who they are. Yet to choose it is to decide, and to decide is to map out your whole working life.
The first: The Silent One
This is the person with brains, with ability, with weighty arguments sitting in his head except those arguments die right there in his head. He fears conflict. He fears disagreement. In a meeting, he waits for others to speak, and he only nods along. His good ideas are buried beneath his silence. Ask him, and he’ll say “it’s all fine,” even when there’s a storm inside his heart.
The Silent One’s problem is not ability. The Silent One is often the cleverest in the room. His problem is that an employer cannot promote a voice he never hears. A client cannot entrust work to someone whose thinking he doesn’t know. At the end of the day, the Silent One remains behind the curtain, doing the heavy lifting, while the praise goes to the person who spoke more than he worked. In football, this is the solid defender whose name nobody remembers until the day he makes a mistake.
The second: The Bully
Now this one is the complete opposite. The Bully fills the room with his voice. He talks over others, he interrupts before you’ve finished, and he’s certain his thoughts are the final word. For a short while, the Bully looks like a leader. He looks like a man of conviction, of courage, who knows what he wants. The meeting bends to him.
But the influence of bullying is like a loan at brutal interest. You get the money today; you pay a heavy price tomorrow. The Bully produces quick results, but he burns bridges. And in our field of communications, a burnt bridge is a loss that cannot be repaid. Picture the Bully in front of a journalist during a scandal, or facing a major client on a day of tension. That Bully becomes a danger to the institution itself. Decision-makers will learn to keep their distance from him not because he lacks brains, but because they want to protect the work culture they built over years. If you want lasting influence, the Bully is the first style to run from.
The third: The Quiet Hypocrite
This is the hardest of them all to spot, and the most dangerous of them all at work. On the outside he resembles the Silent One, he doesn’t speak openly; he doesn’t show anger directly. But inside him a fire burns slowly. He won’t say “I disagree.” Instead, he’ll sit in the meeting sucking his teeth, letting out a long sigh, dropping small barbs of sarcasm, or going quiet with a silence designed to punish.
This one doesn’t oppose you to your face; he opposes you behind your back. His bad feelings don’t come out of his mouth, they come out in his actions, work gets delayed, cooperation thins out, and crucial information “gets forgotten” on its way to you. The result is confusion and resentment simmering beneath the table. This style blends the worst of the first two: the silence of the Silent One and the poison of the Bully, but without the courage to speak the truth openly. An office full of Quiet Hypocrites is an office that is sinking, even if on the surface everything looks calm.
The fourth: The Assertive One
And here is where the market is. The Assertive One expresses himself with confidence, but also listens to others closely. He says what he believes without fear and without contempt. He sets clear boundaries, states his expectations without going round in circles, and does it all with respect, a calm voice, eyes that meet the other person’s, conversation that is open and honest.
This is the currency of our market. This is the one who gets hired the most. Decision-makers trust him with clients, they trust him with scandals, they trust him with the whole team. Why? Because he can disagree with your argument without disrespecting you. He can say “no” today and still share tea with you tomorrow. This is the whole secret, and I told the young man to hold on to it tightly: be hard on the argument, but soft on the person. Hold your ground on the matter, ease up on the human being sitting in front of you.
To plan is to choose
I finished by telling my young man that these four styles are not something you’re born with. They are chosen, often without knowing it. And we often choose them out of fear, we fall silent for fear of conflict, we bully for fear of looking weak, we turn hypocrite for fear of speaking the truth to someone’s face. True courage lies in choosing the assertive path, because it is the one that demands you stand out in the open while still keeping your colleague’s dignity intact.
The market of influence has four customers, but the one who is bought for the long haul is only one. The others will pass through, they’ll shine for a minute, they’ll fill rooms with their voices and their sarcasm and their silence. But at the end of the season, the one who remains in the first eleven is the Assertive One. The question is not what ability you have. The question is which style you have chosen, and whether it’s the style that sells.
The Assertive one 🔥