Nonviolent Communication for the Workplace

Nonviolent Communication for the Workplace is for HR directors, leaders, and managers who are looking to improve how they attend to the some of the more challenging aspects of managing teams and doing human resources. Whether you are looking at correction, termination, ways of working that bring better cooperation and good relations in your team, Nonviolent Communications has a set of principles and practices to help you do hard things in a people-centred way. 

My approach to Nonviolent Communication is one that supports people to recognise and live into their full humanity. This can be especially challenging at work. But, no matter what challenges you are facing in your organisation, solid communication and collaboration practices are foundational to your success. Not knowing what to say, how to say it and being assured that you have been heard and understood are some of the most common ways that teams can get off track..

NVC can help us to tend to many of the challenges that disrupt and slow down the work we are doing as teams. In HR it can help with challenges of that small per cent of your team that occupies the most time and can be the most demanding to work with. 

Learning NVC and how it applies to workplaces is learning soft skills for doing hard things. No matter your goals, on the job, good relations is essential because it determines what the threshold will be for trust. NVC can help to deepen the practice of your individual and organisational values day-to-day.

When we think of the challenges at work such as:

• Recruitment: How can we design selection processes that open the field to the the most qualified and diverse set of candidates?
• Retention: Where is the role of good relations in establishing trust so that your shared work can be done with the best possible outcomes.
• Correction: Improvement plans that get you to a place of shared awareness about what isn’t working, what improvement looks like, and shared understanding about expectations and capacities
• Separation is inherently fraught since it leaves a hole in the team and is deeply impactful to the individual's sense of belonging. How can this be approached with greater awareness of the needs involved?
• Collaboration:  Which is often sought, starts with enthusiasm, but can be mired by lack of clarity and distractions that impact focus and can strain relationships

What I find really helpful about Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is that it has practices that not only useful as a communications tool, which is valuable, but also as a collaborative practice where we find our voice in service to our own creativity, clarity, and ultimately supporting the interdependent nature of teams. These are tools and practices that I have used in my own life as a leader and team member and that I have shared with organisations locally and internationally.

This course is deeply experiential and will explore foundations and practices that you can start using right away.

We start with the fundamentals of NVC such as how we can identify what is most what is meaningful for us; how to identify what needs, both individual and collective, how to in any situation we can connect and anchor in our values; and how we bring that all together when in conversations that are connecting, corrective, and, collaborative.

Drawing from your own examples, we will look at how to apply these skills to:

• Collaborative decision-making that welcomes all relevant voices and perspective

• Feedback, including exploring my Blame-Free Feedback work
• A principled-approach to solid agreements for support performance improvement
• Work with conflict in a way that supports learning and in a way that builds good relations
• Learn how to ask for what you need to support our fullest contribution to shared work.

If you have a challenging conversation ahead with a co-worker, your boss or with a project team, you will leave the sessions with the tools you need to get through that conversation. While the outcomes cannot be guaranteed, what can be is known that you showed up fully and demonstrated your commitment to your team and the work that you share.. How you show up is within your control.

Info: We will start to get to know one another and create intentions for what we want to explore.

Info: What is important about understanding the value of the relational at work. What level of connection is needed for good relations to support great work.

Info: Exploring what empathy is. How it supports people to show up more fully and how it can be applied to the self and to others for a more connected work experience.

Info: Water in. Water out. Rest and stretch.

Info: We will gather your real work scenarios that will shape practice sessions in the afternoon and discuss different ways to use applied empathy at work.

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Host or Publisher Leonie Smith