To maintain office relationships, we must all be tactful when communicating our true feelings about a colleague or project.
At best, this results in people carefully selecting their words so that the message remains relevant and helpful to the task at hand. At worst, we can become passive-aggressive, burying hostility and frustration beneath corporate jargon that allows us plausible deniability.
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“It’s easily deniable: ‘Oh, I didn’t mean anything by that. I didn’t mean that you’re not doing a good job. I was just saying this,’” said Ryan Howes, a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, California.
“The problem is that it’s neither really constructive because the person may pick up on it or they may not … And it also doesn’t feel all that satisfying for you if you’re being passive-aggressive, because you are not getting your thoughts heard. You are just getting in a jab and walking away.”
Learning how to recognize passive-aggressive behaviour at work so you can call it out — or suppress the petty urge to be indirectly mean — is an important part of stopping it.
Here are some of the most common passive-aggressive phrases we all hear on the job, as well as some alternatives that are more assertive and tactful:
1. “Per my previous email … ”
“‘As I mentioned,’ or ‘per my last email,’ or ‘like I said,’ are all passive-aggressive variations of asserting yourself, correcting someone on a communication they missed or anchoring your reply on previous information,” said Anyelis Cordero, the founder of Propel On Purpose Coaching, designed for first-generation professionals.
“If you find yourself using these often, perhaps it’s a sign to review your initial communication,” she added. “We expect others to read emails and understand them as we intended, in our voice and nuanced ways of communicating. The reality is that it doesn’t always translate.”
It can also be an indirect way for you to indicate that you are doing your homework while the recipient of your email is not.
“The other reason people say, ‘per my previous email,’ is that it is a CYA [cover your ass] move, which suggests a lack of trust. Somebody might say ‘per my previous email’ to avoid getting in trouble or to suggest that they had already given that information, so ‘You can’t get upset now,’” said organizational psychologist Laura Gallaher of the consulting firm Gallaher Edge.
Instead of becoming frustrated by having to repeat yourself, Gallaher suggests “approaching the other person with grace and simply providing them with the helpful information.”
2. “CC’ing my boss for visibility.”
Kimberly B. Cummings, a leadership consultant and author of “Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning Into a Career You’ll Love,” said that when someone loops in your boss in an email thread, it can be a passive-aggressive way to convey that they don’t trust you.
“This is really a flag that they would like for your manager to stay in the loop in order to have their request prioritized or there may be a lack of trust in the relationship between the two peers. Another way to fix this is to simply ask for the request to be prioritized or ask about the person’s bandwidth or timeline to get back to you,” Cummings said.
3. “A lot of us think … ”
Gallaher said using phrases like “A lot of us think” can be an inflammatory way to hide your views behind the vague opinion of many others.
“It suggests, ‘We’ve all been talking about you behind your back.’ It also is usually vague about who ‘us’ refers to, which means that the person receiving the information can’t have a real conversation with the people who supposedly think what they think,” Gallaher said. “It is far more effective and more self-accountable for each person to speak for themselves.”
Plus, if you’re one of the co-workers being misrepresented in that broad category of “us,” it can “feel passive-aggressive, or at least ineffective, to be ‘spoken for,’” Gallaher said.
4. “Obviously” or “Clearly … ”
According to Howes, these are passive-aggressive qualifiers whose hostile tone contradicts their meaning.
When co-workers deploy these qualifiers in statements like, “Well, clearly, you know our company’s policy on this,” there is coded hostility, Howes said. “‘Why didn’t you know that? You should know better.’ That’s kind of the subtext there.”
A more tactful way to go is to point out to your co-worker, “Hey, you might not be aware,” or “Hey, not sure if you knew this,” Howes said.
5. “No offense, but … ”
Not only is this a condescending phrase that signals a lack of respect, it is also a common passive-aggressive one, Gallaher noted.
Instead of passively saying you don’t want to offend and then doing it anyway, Gallaher suggested you could directly state, “I’m concerned what I say might upset you, so I want to know: Do I have permission to give you feedback on something?” or “I’d love for us to build trust so we can have really open dialogue with each other. What do you think?”
And if you want to stop passive-aggressive behavior from taking over your team, recognize that it all comes down to building trust with colleagues.
“People are often passive-aggressive because they haven’t clarified for themselves what they really want, or they’re afraid to put it out there honestly,” Gallaher said. “A lack of trust is usually a problem when people are afraid to be vulnerable and real with each other.”
