How to Stand Up For Yourself at Work

Okay, so a colleague takes credit for your work. Your manager yells at you in front of your fellow team members. A client makes an inappropriate comment laced with sexual or racial innuendo. Welcome to the world of work. Not everyone behaves with integrity and respect in the workplace. So guess what? You have to demand it. Now, I don't mean with your fist or a loud voice, but by speaking your truth. Expressing what you will and will not tolerate. Today, I want to talk to you about how to set boundaries at work. Hi, I'm Jenny Clark, a conscious leadership expert who spent two decades in executive recruiting and talent management. Having worked with giants like Google and Spencer Stewart, I discovered that the secret to transformative leadership lies in the five dimensions of conscious leadership. And I'm here to help you unlock your full potential. Join me on this channel as we embark on an honest and vulnerable journey together to become the kind of leader that genuinely inspires transformation in your organization. I've got a little career boosting secret for you. Do you want the inside scoop on leadership, plus some juicy tips and hot takes you won't hear anywhere else? I've got a newsletter that's basically your personal career coach in your inbox. Just click the link in the description to join in. Oh, and if you're loving this content, I know you are. Click the subscribe button. It's like giving me a virtual fist bump, ensuring you won't miss out on any future career changing videos. My colleague, who was older and longer tenured, but not formally my boss, screamed at me and angrily accused me of contradicting him on a client call. Now, there were two junior associates who witnessed this outburst and were as confused as I was. He told us all to get out of his office. So I walked to the door with the two associates. I let them out and I closed the door behind them. I turned to the colleague and I said, listen, I'm relatively new here and I might not know what the bleep I'm doing, but you don't talk to me that way. He was stunned and then said, I'm sorry, I'm under a lot of pressure. I didn't mean to say that. I do want to see you be successful. Now, this man went on to become the head of the office, my boss, and later the CEO of the company and a supporter of mine that I could trust. So instead of being hurt, I was incensed and I knew instinctively that I had to establish a boundary. And it served me well because I earned this man's respect and I'm sure a reputation for setting boundaries throughout the organization. Here are three things you can do to set a boundary at work. The first is pause. Do a double check. Was there a witness or is there proof of this transgression? Make sure you understand the context before making any accusations or escalating the situation. This is also where you find your calm before proceeding. There's nothing worse that's going to damage your reputation than becoming accusatory and being hypersensitive to things that might not have been intended negatively. Okay, number two, confront. Now, sounds aggressive. That's not what I'm talking about. It can be scary. But I found that I have felt empowered by speaking my truth from a position of integrity and calm, regardless of the rank of the person you might be addressing. I found that a lot of people in the corporate world, especially leaders, are conflict diverse. And sometimes that means they don't want to confront you and they certainly don't expect to be confronted. But I'm not talking about just an aggressive sort of approach. In my case, my righteous conviction outweighed any fear or retaliation in the story that I told you. I'm like, you know what, you better bring it if that's what you got. But I need you to hear my truth. And this is not how I'm treated. In that case, I was a 30-something-year-old woman and I was not used to, nor was I going to accept someone screaming at me disrespectfully. So some of this is about you modeling to people how you expect to be treated, calling them out respectfully, professionally, letting them know where you stand. You know, I think some people are afraid to confront because they don't see it. Feedback is one of those things that people don't do well. So this is a form of feedback and it might be sort of in the moment and maybe emotionally charged, but it's still feedback. You, as a team member or employee, are entitled to give feedback to your manager, again, in a respectful way. Just because you're not getting it and you might work in what's even sort of a passive, aggressive environment where people are like, oh, everything's fine, you know, that's nice. Don't buy that and say, you know, no, I didn't appreciate that. With a smile, smiles help. I didn't appreciate it, but here's what I need you to understand about me and here's how I think you might have addressed this situation better so that everybody really understood where they stood. You know, I think there's some practices that people can use, even in their daily lives, to get more comfortable with this idea of confronting. And maybe that's not the word that you want to use to describe it in the first place, but it is just, it is speaking your truth so that you begin to speak your truth more often, hopefully you're doing it with your children, for those of you who have them, to your loved ones, your partner. Tell them, you know, that didn't make me feel good. That's the negative feedback, but offer the positive feedback as well. You can tell your manager, boy, I so appreciated how you spoke to the group today because I think that really inspired them. Or conversely, boy, I'm getting a lot of negative feedback from people that seem to really unnerve them and I know that that wasn't your intention. So this is really as much about feedback as it is setting your own boundaries. It's, they're inextricably linked. Here's number three, escalate if necessary. This is kind of a last resort. The same token, I don't want you to shy away from the process. Use it to test the system that is supposed to uphold a fair and equitable workplace. So having said that, pick your battles because if you're new to the organization and haven't really established credibility, consider having someone who might have been longer tenured offering you some input, right? They're going to help you protect your reputation as you move through the organization. You don't want to be known as that person who's always escalating and always kind of picking a fight and crying foul on others. So be careful and be very judicious about escalating. I get it. Taking that first step can feel daunting. I've been there too. But here's the thing, you've got strengths you might not even realize yet. I put together a free career mapping framework to help you uncover those hidden talents and chart your own path forward. It's not about changing everything overnight. It's about starting to see your potential clearly, ready to explore. The framework's waiting for you. Just click the link in the description. Your future self will thank you for taking this small but powerful step today.