Why we’re learning Non Violent Communication (NVC)
Open, honest and non-aggressive communication is essential to any great relationship. The same applies to great teams. Yet, it doesn’t come naturally to most of us to communicate transparently without attacking, especially when it comes to British politeness.
Many years ago, I read Being Genuine: Stop Being Nice, Start Being Real, a book introducing Marshall Rosenberg’s framework of NonViolent Communication (NVC). More recently, I read in Reinventing Organizations that NVC was used in lots of self managed organisations. This is when I realised that in order for us to grow as a self-managed organisation, we needed to drastically improve the way we communicate to one another, myself included.
The NVC framework consists of sharing the following in your conversation:
- Observations (with your senses): a situation, someone’s action etc.
- Feelings (emotions): I feel [hurt, disappointed, reassured] by that observation
- Needs: I need [trust, respect, understanding]
- Requests: a concrete action I’d like taken to change things
By focusing on those four steps, it essentially boils the hard conversation down to the needs we all have without attacking the other person. It turns out it’s very difficult to use every day, not because of the framework, but because we’re not used to focus on our needs. When we do focus on our needs, the hard conversations are much easier to handle, hence more frequent.
The other essential side of learning NVC is to learn to listen. It means listening in as well as listening out, trying to understand the other.
Today most of the team has had a ~12h training in NVC by Daren DeWitt, we have a dedicated #nvc channel on Slack and we’re going to experiment with an introduction to NVC for our students.
Exciting times ahead as I hope that by improving how we communicate, everything else will become easier, including self-setting salaries.
Originally published at blog.makersacademy.com on November 30, 2015.
