(I'm told that) I'm a rather dominant person in a work environment. This is a known and outspoken issue since my superior is a distant but long term friend of mine (20 years plus). From time to time I get his "complaint" that I'm not giving him the required respect. When I ask if he can give me more specific hits he struggles and refers to general explanations basically telling me to be more sensible.
Of course, my actions are never meant in disrespect but I understand how they could appear disrespectful (from his view). However when I asked a close colleague he didn't confirm my friend's assessment. I only asked once so this could be by accident.
This issue didn't come up for quite some time, so I can't repeat/paraphrase his previous comments anymore. But today I said something (don't remember what exactly, something about me being less dominant) and his response was "that he doesn't know me as a person who is not dominant, he just knows situations where I'm less dominant." I'll have to raise this issue again (or wait for the next complaint) to give you a more specific version of his "explanations".
What would be a good way to approach this? I'm to solve this by changing my behaviour (I'm not planning to change his perception even if it is off unless it will be off no matter what I do).
Update: Due to an escalation with another (complicated) college, where my behaviour simply clashed, I managed to bring um my "short coming" within a inhouse mediation. Hopefully this will solve the problem and give me some good pointers. For those who gave or will give suggestions please keep on doing to and thanks for doing so. I suspect I'm not the only one that ever comes to this site with this kind of problem and several suggestions to choose from might be helpful for other people
