Moving from Fight / Flight to a Team that’s Tight: Guidelines for the Relational Leader

Originally written for and posted on CredibleMind.com as “Improving Leadership Skills through Nonviolent Communication (NVC)”

How would your life as a leader be different if all those in your organization had a deep sense of being on the same team? If conflict were confidently engaged as part of growth, learning, and deepening connection? If you could give and receive feedback that celebrates and amplifies the good while effectively addressing what needs to change? How would it be to work in an atmosphere of mutual care and trust?

If that sounds too good to be true, it’s worth reflecting on your relational operating system. Let’s explore this idea through two thought experiments.

Thought Experiment #1: The “Power Over” Type of Leadership

Think of a leader of an organization you were part of. Imagine them, now, approaching you and even before they say anything, you can just sense that they’re coming to convince you that they’re right and you’re wrong. Notice how your body reacts.

Most people experience some kind of contraction, bracing, defensiveness, self-protection, gearing up for a fight or wanting to get away…in other words, a fight-flight reaction. Convince comes from the Latin word for conquer, so it’s no wonder that it elicits a threat response. The way we relate shapes the energetic and emotional architecture of our workplaces. Fight-flight saps energy, trust, and innovation.

Mary Parker Follet, the 19th century management consultant and pioneer of organizational development spoke of two modes of relating, “power-over” and “power-with”. Most organizations and leadership styles employ power-over relations, reflected in practices of reward and punishment (think about incentives, trying to get people motivated, individual performance reviews), one-way feedback, top-down decision making, and a prevalence of power struggles. What a drag!

Thought Experiment #2: The “Power With” Type of Leadership

Introducing Nonviolent Communication

The sometimes misleadingly named Nonviolent Communication (NVC) developed by the late Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, is an approach that lays out the royal road to communicating in a collaborative way. NVC offers a relational operating system that shows how to create the quality of connection where our nervous systems relax into a naturally easeful and energized state, not by avoiding conflict or by being nice, but by focusing on a layer of connection that leads to a felt sense of resonance. When we know how to reach this level we can even navigate through conflict into connection, growth, and learning.

Leaders Can Begin By Fostering Psychological Safety

We know from Amy Edmonson’s research that the key factor for organizational flourishing is psychological safety. The big question then, is “how do we create psychological safety?” This calls for having clear and effective ways of building trust, navigating conflict, making decisions that people are on board with (rather than resentful for their needs and values being left out), for a way of handling difficult conversations, giving and receiving feedback (both critical feedback when things aren’t going well, as well as potent forms of appreciative feedback that enhance intrinsic motivation and people’s desire to contribute), nurturing an atmosphere that invites people’s innovative ideas, and establishing protocols for consistent understanding, efficiency, and clarity around roles.

Leaders Can Deepen Connection by Understanding “Needs”

If you reflect on a peak experience in a team or organization you worked with, you can see what ingredients went into that: perhaps a sense of togetherness, creativity, meaning, efficacy, play, a sense of being seen and appreciated, some degree of connection, perhaps choice and freedom, and probably a feeling of contribution. What are these? These are needs. Basic, universal human needs.

In NVC, “needs” are understood as those qualities that, when present, lead to thriving and fulfillment. The fundamental principle of NVC is that in fact all actions and expressions are attempts to meet needs and that connecting on this level engenders deep understanding and new possibilities. Though all underlying needs are legitimate, not all strategies are, (because some strategies come at the expense of other key needs, for instance imposing decisions might meet a need for efficiency but at the cost of choice and consideration). Conflict happens on the level of strategy or preference, whereas needs themselves are never in conflict.

Connection and then integration can happen if we split dialogue into two stages.

• Stage 1: Connection/mutual understanding from focusing on what’s important to each party
• Stage 2: Creativity/collaboration around what to do

Usually people skip straight to trying to decide what to do (Stage 2), missing out on the goodwill, flexibility, and creativity that emerges when people land in a felt sense of connection and really being heard (Stage 1).

One of the underrepresented powers of potent leaders is to give people the experience of being deeply heard, as well as to really take in, be affected by, and integrate the pith of what people share. Focusing on core needs is the secret. If we’re only focused on who’s right or whose strategy will be adopted, the only path to connection is through agreement. In the absence of sufficient psychological safety, people may feign agreement, compromising authenticity, or they may give in or give up, showing up later as resentment or withdrawal, and compromising retention, creativity, and flow.

When you orient towards empathic understanding (Stage 1), however, you can find connection through what’s important about a given preference, reflecting and connecting with the underlying value or ‘care at the core’.¹ In including all relevant needs as parameters for maximally satisfying solutions (Stage 2), we move from problems to dilemmas where the parameters become the constraints for collaborative creativity. How can we be efficient and caring? Profitable and sustainable?

As emotions take up a huge amount of energy and can either waylay us or propel us, it behooves us, especially as leaders, to develop skillfulness in navigating our own feelings and expanding our window of welcome and precision in meeting others’.

In NVC it’s understood that feelings come from needs, so when someone is upset or angry, through empathic listening even so-called ‘negative’ feelings become a doorway to connect with some important unmet need, allowing efficient resolution of feelings that otherwise can stew for years, taking up precious mental and emotional bandwidth.

¹Acknowledging Jack Cohen from http://brainbasedworkplace.com for this felicitous phrasing

Taking Practical Steps with Nonviolent Communication

Like the gutter guards in a bowling lane, NVC offers a number of guidelines along with a very practical method of honest expression and empathic listening that keep us moving toward resonant connection and creative collaboration. Care comes online naturally when we are in touch with others’ human needs while being honored in our own. Because language directs attention, we emphasize using language which centers what’s essential, important, and creates connection while eschewing the minefield of moralistic shoulds and right/wronging. The O.F.N.R. framework, described below, paves the way with the stepping stones to this connection and ensuing actionable clarity. O.F.N.R. stands for Observations, Feelings, Needs, Requests.

Observation: Objectively name what’s happening or what happened (actions/words/hard data), free of interpretation, evaluation or judgment,

Feelings: Sensations and emotional feelings in the body in relation to how what’s happening is or isn’t meeting needs

Needs: The underlying needs, values, or ‘cares at the core’ that are affected and underlie the feelings. (Needs are distinct from particular preferences or strategies. Remembering that there are many possible strategies to meet a given need opens room for finding mutually satisfying solutions)

Requests: What specific actions or words you wish for (by whom and when) that would meet those needs, either right now in the dialogue or as follow up actions? Requests honor the choice of the other person to say no until the request aligns with their own needs.

For those leaders who want to go deeper, you can find a helpful list of feelings and needs here and information about more in depth trainings here.

Like learning dance or martial arts, executing these steps in a way that is elegant and effective takes practice. This kind of relationality and relational leadership is a huge shift from the standard operating system, yet it IS possible, and the fruits – a much deeper sense of connection, more effective and fulfilling collaboration, and a more prevalent atmosphere of care – reward deeply.