How To Blend Nonviolent Communication With Radical Candor

Curious how you or your team can improve communication skills? We know just the book for you. ??

At our recent quarterly retreat, VP of Technology and Data Innovation Scott Ellis shared game-changing insights from his latest read, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

“Nonviolent what?!” Yes, this phrase sounds a little intense at first. But in essence, Nonviolent Communication is a technique for interacting with others in a compassionate manner that fosters understanding and connection rather than judgment and conflict. It involves five guiding components:

1. Observe instead of evaluating: Separate facts from your personal interpretations.
2. Identify and express feelings: Share your thoughts and be empathetic to those of others.
3. Acknowledge needs: Aim to understand the underlying needs behind yours and others’ feelings and behaviors.?
4. Make requests, not demands: Communicate in a way that respects others’ autonomy.
5. Receive empathetically: Listen to others with the aim of understanding their feelings and needs without judgment.

So how does that look in the real world? Let’s contextualize this for an office setting by analyzing a potential exchange between coworkers.

? A complaint using violent communication sounds like:

"You're always late with your tasks. You don't seem to care about your colleagues or the consequences of missing deadlines. Do you even want to be working here?"

? Rephrased for Nonviolent Communication, it sounds like:

1. Observe instead of evaluating: "I've noticed that your last three task deadlines weren't met."
2. Identify and express feelings: "I'm concerned about the impact this is having on our client relationships and our team's workflow."
3. Acknowledge needs: "We need to maintain reliability and timeliness to ensure client satisfaction and team harmony."
4. Make requests, not demands: "Could we discuss what's been happening and explore ways to improve time management and communication, or adjust priorities if needed?"
5. Receive empathetically: "I understand that you have tasks for multiple clients and there may be other obstacles you're facing. I'm here to support and work through this together."

Scott identified how interacting this way can help us shape better, more productive conversations with our team members and clients. But he also put a Strategy Labs twist on Rosenberg’s approach, marrying the Nonviolent Communication framework with a unique mantra already employed in our agency: Radical Candor.?

Introduced by Kim Scott , Radical Candor emphasizes caring personally while challenging directly. It encourages professionals to build stronger relationships by both caring for team members and clients as people and providing clear, constructive feedback — even when it’s uncomfortable.

Radical Candor means we value sharing good news as well bad news, unfiltered data, and genuine perspectives instead of avoiding important conversations. It empowers everybody to have a voice. It enables us to tackle issues head on and deliver better results for our clients.

When balancing Radical Candor’s directness with Nonviolent Communication’s empathy, you get something pretty unique for a marketing agency: transparency, supportive culture, and tangible success.

If you want a primer on Nonviolent Communication before you read the book, check out one of Rosenberg’s lectures on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF6kMJxOpvI?

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