Last week, I trained a group of about 30 people who are employed by a medium-sized business in the skills of Compassionate Communication.
One of the participants asked a question while I was sharing various forms of conflict-inducing communication, namely making demands and threatening to punish people if they don't do what we want:
"How do you apply NVC in a workplace situation when you are the boss and you need to get certain tasks accomplished?"
The distinction I drew was between punishment and consequences, although I admit I didn't answer the question with as much clarity as I would have liked.
Here is the way I see it:
PUNISHMENT: If I want to get someone to do something, I threaten to punish them if they don't, either explicitly or implicitly. For example, if they don't do what I ask then I will blame them, lay a guilt trip on them, label them (irresponsible, inconsiderate, insubordinate, etc.) or use some other such alienating response in an attempt to induce them to do it. The focus is on getting the person to obey me.
CONSEQUENCES: I make it clear to a person the need behind my request, and tell them that if they act in a certain way (or fail to act in a certain way), then I will respond in a certain way. I do this without any idea in my mind that they are bad, wrong, inappropriate or otherwise if they don't do it.
I reveal to the person why this is important to me (i.e the needs that are motivating me), and even engage their creativity to show me some other way I could get my needs met, that would be even better for them at the same time.
The focus, rather than being on getting the person to obey me, is on getting my underlying need(s) met.
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To me, the key differences are:
1) My Objective: With punishment, it's to intimidate the person into doing what I want, and if they don't, make them suffer for their actions; with consequences, it is to get my needs met.
2) My Strategies: The threat of punishment is one strategy, whereas an alternate strategy that can go along with consequences is to invite the person to tell me if they have any ideas of how I could get me needs met in the situation.
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I welcome clarification and conversation about this point. I believe I could be a little bit clearer inside myself and a great deal clearer about how to express it. Any ideas?
2 comments:
Hi Jeff,
Comparing the two initial descriptions of punishment vs consequences, I hear about the same level of strategy-attachment. In the later elaborations, I start hearing some some flexibility. So I'd guess that there are a couple of separable issues getting combined here. One being whether the boss is seeing his/her strategy as good (right, appropriate, professional, considerate, etc) or just as expedient, and the other is the boss's openness to other strategies.
Now let's back up to the question: "How do you apply NVC in a workplace situation when you are the boss and you need to get certain tasks accomplished?" The quality of answers we get depend on the questions we ask, so I doubt you'll get to much clarity & power by answering this question at all. I'd instead work on transforming it, starting with noticing the underlying assumption.
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