Good point on caring, it's easy to forget and we all need a reminder sometimes.
As for the question-reflex, I'm not suggesting asking a leading question that assumes your idea... more an open curious question that seeks other points of view.
Having read all of the comments to this article, it's quite impressive how quickly people lost sight of the conflict, and took sides with whoever they empathised most with.
I included enough facts to elicit a trigger response for anyone that's worked in a tech company. Just reading them was enough to make people angry, and invent a back story that 'management never listens' and 'this company is going to fail' (paraphrasing). This wasn't in the piece and likely reflects a projection of their reality.
This angry tone is pervasive in the comments and quickly turned people against each other. Anger that came from somewhere, perhaps a place that isn't apparent to the angry. A lasting sensation of not feeling listened to, or truly seen and valued.
Even if you only communicate your emotions to yourself, and get curious about where they come from, it's likely to help simply by acknowledging that not all emotions arise from the present situation. I believe this is true in life as it is in the comments.
> Nope, he doubles down, just saying that it will be awkward at first but that you'll learn
Dave here. The point of the article was in fact not at all that NVC is awkward and you'll have to learn, but to say there are valuable principles that you can apply without the format, that can help you address conflict.
> NVC and NVC-like forms of communication work when the participants are relatively equal in power
Could you suggest a general approach to mitigating conflict when there is inequality in power without getting to the specifics, listening to both sides, and attempting to find a win-win?
If the less-powerful don't try to get what they want, the more powerful wins by default.
> "I feel belittled by the fact that you constantly ignore my feedback and impose unreasonable deadlines because a salesperson put you on the spot in front of the VP"
Let's work with this. Are you feeling resentful because your need to be listened to? If the answer is yes, how about we take 15 minutes and you can explain the extent of the issues? If not, I haven't understood—could you try again?
>Let's work with this. Are you feeling resentful because your need to be listened to? If the answer is yes, how about we take 15 minutes and you can explain the extent of the issues? If not, I haven't understood—could you try again?
I'm not sure what you're trying to show here, because just because you can write a positive reply to that here on Hacker News does not in any way change someone's actual trepidations with expressing that to their actual manager.
Plus the entire subtext of that reply is just "I don't want to acknowledge the possibility that I have made any mistakes, and so I am going to reduce your problems down to cliches."
> “ Let's work with this. Are you feeling resentful because your need to be listened to?”
comes off as quite infantilizing and degrading. If I received this reply, I would feel you are not treating me with respect and you’re trying to undercut me by appealing to an emotion (resentfulness) and shifting focus onto that instead of dealing with the actual problems.
I honestly don't understand your point. Listening to how you feel (you're frustrated) and uncovering out why (you want to be treated like an adult) isn't theatre, it's how adult resolve problems. It's worth considering whether you're projecting onto NVC here... after all, NVC doesn't infantilize you, although this may be an area you're vulnerable to shame.
This reply, for example, is infantilizing. You have not engaged with the points I made at all and instead are pretending that a reply all about feeling or perceptions is in any sense an adequate way to respond.
The only part of your reply that contains non-belittling words is the first sentence where you admit, “I honestly don’t understand your point.”
While there's lots of interesting points in the thread, I'll focus my response on this one.
1) I completely agree that the title 'Nonviolent' is awful. It doesn't even follow the NVC principle of 'say what you want, not what you don't want'. The original author conceded to this. However, you shouldn't judge NVC by its title.
2) NVC doesn't purport to resolve the issue of the bugs or velocity, it aims to help resolve the conflict between the sales manager. Gosh, if NVC actually changed reality that would be awesome. Instead, it helps you find solutions given reality, which is actually very helpful.
3) I sense a lot of irritation and frustration in your tone because you want to be spoken to like an adult. Fair enough—that is a universal need. If you'd like to get your boss to 'give it to you straight', you could NVC to get what you want, without sounding self-righteous :)
