COMMUNICATION SPECIAL .....Lessons beyond the boardroom

Lessons beyond the boardroom

Communication is vital to ensure smooth functioning of professional and personal relationships. Try these methods to prevent your messages from getting lost in translation

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a company whose culture was known for hostility, infighting, and backstabbing among its highest executives.

To turn the company around, he made the members of his senior leadership team read the book Nonviolent Communication by psychologist Marshall B Rosenberg. Nadella handed out copies of the 2003 book at his first executive meeting. It was a sign that Nadella planned to run Microsoft differently than his predecessor, Steve Ballmer. Rosenberg preaches compassion and empathy as cornerstones to effective communication:

Effective communication has four components

1 Observing what is happening in a situation (such as someone saying or doing something you don’t like)

2 Stating how you feel when you observe the action

3 Expressing how your needs are connected to the feelings you identified

4 Addressing what you want by requesting a concrete action An example of all four components being met would be a manager telling his slacking employee, “XYZ, when I see you not fulfilling the role assigned to you to your full capacity, I feel irritated because I need optimum productivity from everyone as a team. Would you be willing to step up and complete the task assigned?”

Observe

Rosenberg says that good communicators are able to separate their observations of a situation from their evaluations, or judgements of it.

For example, the sentence “Janice works too much” contains an evaluation — working too much is subjective, and if Janice heard that, she may take it as criticism and become defensive. On the other hand, saying “Janice spent more than 60 hours at the office this week” is merely an observation without any judgement attached.

A vocabulary for feelings

One of the most interesting parts of the book is a section on learning to identify and express your feelings. When you’re expressing your feelings, it’s better to use words that refer to specific emotions rather than words that are vague and general. Don’t say you feel ‘good’ when words like happy, excited, relieved, or anything else could describe how you feel more precisely. “Words such as good and bad prevent the listener from connecting easily with what we might actually be feeling,” he said.

It’s helpful to distinguish between words that describe our actual feelings and words that describe what we think others are doing. For example, saying “I feel unimportant to the people I work with” may sound like you’re expressing your feelings, but you’re really describing how you think other people are evaluating you. The underlying feeling might be sadness, discouragement, or something else. Similarly, saying “I feel ignored” is less an expression of your own feelings and more an interpretation.

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