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These are all good points, though I think a deeper point may be missing regarding employing empathic, curious, positive communication tools (If you prefer a ter

These are all good points, though I think a deeper point may be missing regarding employing empathic, curious, positive communication tools (If you prefer a term besides NVC, please use it--the politics of taxonomy could only distract us from the potential benefit of ideas). Here's a theorem: For common personal or professional conversation types, I maximize the expected outcome of "difficult conversations" (both to me and to the group) by (in the conversation) assuming the best and focusing on open-mindedness and collaboration. Proof: Enumerate expected outcomes from using that mindset versus not doing so over all possible values of {am I in the wrong?, is other person in the wrong?, other person's disposition}. (For full rigor multiple through by your priors on each of these but I hope the idea is clear enough). In the example you gave, if I'm management and I'm in the wrong, being curious when trying to debug the problem will make it way easier for me to be open to my mistakes, since I've introduced no specter of guilt, shame, or blame for the fact that there is a mistake.

btilly 7y ago
The deeper point is true, but hits at an even deeper point. Which is what lay behind the attitude in the comment that I was responding to. Are you familiar with https://www.triballeadership.net/ https://www.triballeadership.net/? Based on language patterns, people and organizations can be classified into 5 levels. The linguistic patterns are (1) Life Sucks, (2) My Life Sucks, (3) I'm Great (but you suck), (4) We're Great (but some other organization sucks), and (5) Life Is Great. There are formal tools behind that classification, and formal ways to measure it, but in general the opinion of people you interact with will be fairly consistent. That notwithstanding, most people judge themselves as operating at a level or two better than they actually do. Here is where that becomes a problem. Most successful executives operate at level 3, but think that they operate at level 4 or 5. They can adopt any linguistic pattern that they think will make them more successful, but the tools make them more effective at being level 3, with the attendant problems that result for others. This is not a slight on the communication tools. Emotional people will tend to escalate until the emotion is noticed and acknowledged. Therefore doing that up front really does calm the other person down, and really does facilitate communication. Conversely, approaching challenges with openness, curiosity and openmindedness really does make problems easier to solve. However if you give a person the tools without changing their underlying attitudes, what looks and sounds wonderful will, over time, create the exact same type of problems in the long run. It just creates them more effectively.

btilly 7y ago

The deeper point is true, but hits at an even deeper point. Which is what lay behind the attitude in the comment that I was responding to. Are you familiar with https://www.triballeadership.net/ https://www.triballeadership.net/? Based on language patterns, people and organizations can be classified into 5 levels. The linguistic patterns are (1) Life Sucks, (2) My Life Sucks, (3) I'm Great (but you suck), (4) We're Great (but some other organization sucks), and (5) Life Is Great. There are formal tools behind that classification, and formal ways to measure it, but in general the opinion of people you interact with will be fairly consistent. That notwithstanding, most people judge themselves as operating at a level or two better than they actually do. Here is where that becomes a problem. Most successful executives operate at level 3, but think that they operate at level 4 or 5. They can adopt any linguistic pattern that they think will make them more successful, but the tools make them more effective at being level 3, with the attendant problems that result for others. This is not a slight on the communication tools. Emotional people will tend to escalate until the emotion is noticed and acknowledged. Therefore doing that up front really does calm the other person down, and really does facilitate communication. Conversely, approaching challenges with openness, curiosity and openmindedness really does make problems easier to solve. However if you give a person the tools without changing their underlying attitudes, what looks and sounds wonderful will, over time, create the exact same type of problems in the long run. It just creates them more effectively.