Such a middle manager translates the board’s decisions to their people and motivates and inspires them to get to work. This is no small feat when it concerns a decision that they may find difficult to accept themselves and in which they may have had little involvement. A people-oriented leadership style is essential here.
Recognizing and acknowledging needs
With Nonviolent Communication, we provide managers with the right skills to deal with this conflict. A key element is the distinction between a need and a strategy to fulfill a need. Every choice you make or every behavior you exhibit will fulfill one need and not another. Therefore, you cannot always satisfy every need. The art is to repeatedly connect first with the needs underlying a decision. What need lies behind this or that decision? What need am I fulfilling for myself when I pass a certain message to my team? What needs do the members of my team have? Additionally, being alert to resistance from your team or supervisor is important, because an unfulfilled need can be found behind every form of resistance.
Listen first, act later
In nonviolent communication, the goal is to look, listen, and feel beyond the resistance. To truly listen to the emotion and the need behind the ‘no’ or ‘yes, but’. Make no mistake: emotions are signposts. You will get much further with them than by trying to blindly convince people. Action only follows listening. Only when we are in connection with our own needs, those of the top of the organization, and those of the employees, can we make conscious choices. Then we can seek strategies to fulfill needs and avoid being left with a great deal of frustration. The challenge lies in balancing attention to emotions—naming them and making them discussable—with providing a clear framework within which specific behavior and results are expected.
Nonviolent Communication helps managers to allow emotions while helping people to take responsibility for them themselves, rather than shifting them onto management, the organization, or colleagues.
Sense of control
A cornerstone of our training is the insights of Stephen Covey. His concept of the Circle of Influence and Concern is very valuable (see box). It states that we should focus our attention and efforts on things we can influence, not on things we are merely concerned with. This focus on what we can change provides a sense of control and helps us take ownership of our own choices. This is especially important in times of uncertainty, change, and stress. After all, we can always choose how we respond to a certain situation and which needs we therefore fulfill.
