What Makes Collaboration Work? - Part 2

by Miki Kashtan

This piece is a continuation of yesterday’s post.

Telling the Truth with Care

The founder of a start-up company brought to the workshop the challenge he had about having a sales person whose judgment calls he doesn’t always trust. What can he do to move towards a collaborative experience with this employee?

Sometimes the most important thing about collaborating is truth telling. Often enough we avoid telling the truth because of fear of hurting other people. This is because we’ve been trained to believe that truth and care are mutually exclusive. Instead, I aim for truth with care. In order to find a way to shift the dynamics with the employee, I invited everyone at the workshop to imagine themselves being that employee, and what they would want to hear from the founder in such a situation. Within moments we came up with several ways to present the truth. One example: “I have some concerns about how you respond to some situations. I want us to work together well, and I want to support you in being successful in this job. Are you open to reviewing a few situations together so we can get more alignment around our priorities?”

More generally, whenever we have a difficult message to deliver, we can imagine being the other person, really and truly stepping into their proverbial shoes. From within that perspective we can often feel directly what would register as care, what’s necessary to say or highlight to make room for the truth to be digestible. It’s never about compromising the truth; it’s only about framing it in a context of collaboration.

Shared Ownership of Outcome

One young facilitator in a hi-tech area brought forward the challenge of having very acrimonious meetings, full of arguments and without any clear resolution. She was daunted by the prospect of navigating such a meeting to a collaborative spirit.

In polarized situations one key skill is particularly helpful – the ability to hear the dream, vision, value, need, or goal that is hidden behind the different opinions. For example, let’s say that we are in a meeting to evaluate two different software platforms, and someone says: “This product sucks. They haven’t been supporting it for years.” What I hear is that what’s important to this person is reliability in terms of tech support. Or if someone says: “It’s so boring, there’s nothing to it,” I hear that they want a product that’s innovative or has complex functionality. Why is this capacity important? Because moving towards something has more potential for getting people together than arguing about what’s not working.

Once we verify with each person that we got clearly what’s important to them, the next step is to generate one list with all that’s important. This, then, becomes the list of criteria to use to evaluate the product in this case, or to evaluate any proposal that’s on the table more generally. Key to the success of this approach is to create one list with the core qualities that are sought without any reference to the specific product, direction, or strategy that’s being discussed. What then happens is that the group can move to shared ownership of the list, an act which gradually de-polarizes the group and shifts it into an orientation of finding, together, a solution that meets as many of the criteria as possible. In that way we support collaboration even in a charged context.

Learning to Collaborate

Most of us have been raised to work alone and in competition with others. I have a lot of compassion and tenderness for our efforts to collaborate without having all the necessary tools, and I feel passionate about providing these tools. I can only do so much online through this blog. To move more clearly towards transforming our work lives and making collaboration be the norm in our society, I am collaborating with a group of other NVC trainers to create the Making Collaboration Real retreat and optional yearlong program that’s starting next month.

As part of our vision, we want to transform the way businesses deal with money, and we are committed to modeling this transformation in our own practice around money. Now that the curriculum for the program is ready, I am itching to make this unique opportunity available to more people. If you are drawn to participate in this retreat or program and cost is the only reason you would not attend, please read our brief philosophy about money, and contact us to talk about how to make attendance at this program possible for you.

The depth and level of detail of the curriculum leave me in awe about how much is needed in order to make collaboration work. I am so excited to have a coherent and systematic way that collaboration can be taught, experienced, and practiced. I have confidence that with focus and dedication we can all master the art of collaboration at all levels.

The Power of Collaboration

by Miki Kashtan

Everything that at some point is in the future eventually becomes the present and then the past. I know this is not major news for anyone, and yet the experience of it continues to amaze me each time. For some months now I had been inviting people to come to the Making Collaboration Real conference that took place this past weekend. Now that this conference is in the past, I want to share some of my highlights and what comes next.

Collaboration has become more and more of a stated goal or practice in many places. One of the things that became apparent to me during this conference is just how much we need to learn in order to achieve true collaboration. Perhaps counter-intuitively, in order to collaborate well we need to learn how to engage in conflict in a productive way. Sometimes when we are uncomfortable with conflict we end up acting indirectly, which may result in more pain and discomfort for others, sometimes even for ourselves, rather than face the discomfort directly. For example, today I heard from a friend about a former employee who is very dedicated to nonviolence and collaboration, and yet since this person left she has engaged in actions that stir up conflict and may result in punitive action directed at a former co-worker instead of coming to her supervisor to attempt a resolution. What would it take for all of us to learn to walk towards conflict so that we can find ways of working with those who are different from us or whose actions are upsetting to us?

Collaboration means learning more about power, and engaging effectively across power differences. One theme that showed up repeatedly is the isolation of people at the top of organizations, especially those who run the most traditional of them. Because others are afraid, those at the top don’t get full information; they hear more often than not an inauthentic “yes”; they are not challenged enough; and they are seen as the “enemy” which means that actual co-creation is less available to them. Ulrich Nettesheim presented a series of insights and practices for making the focus on human needs relevant to people who work at the top. All in all, I became even more aware than I was before how essential it is to relate to the goals, vision, and perspective of the person at the top in order to establish sufficient trust to get any openness to the power of connection and collaboration.

We also explored power from a different angle, when Edmundo Norte challenged us to look at our unconscious assumptions and perceptions about people different from us. We learned how being positions of power and privilege makes us less able to see the effects of our actions, and how essential it is to learn to engage others and invite their insights and wisdom, because they can see what we cannot. And when we are in a position of less privilege, how important and vital for the whole is our capacity to find courage to speak up. True collaboration appears to require both love and courage, speaking and listening, and changing our habitual ways of acting in the world so we can see and show more of what’s going on.

I was delighted to see how much of the conversation during the conference focused on systemic considerations, beyond looking only at individual needs. I have had a sense for some time now that the community of people who have been studying Nonviolent Communication have not been sufficiently informed about the organizational level, and I am delighted the word is now out for many that when humans form an organization something else is going on. Marie Miyashiro, organizational consultant, discussed her distillation of the needs and conditions that are essential for any organization to thrive: identity, life affirming purpose, direction, expression, and energy/resources. Gregg Kendrick, former business owner, inspired us with his personal story of how he applied the principles of Nonviolent Communication in his own business, and how he now supports other organizations in shifting into a paradigm of true collaboration using a combination of Nonviolent Communication and Dynamic Self-Governance. I was inspired and intrigued by his firm commitment to work only with those who are consciously ready to embrace the cultural transformation.

We also heard about two ongoing experiments with introducing Nonviolent Communication into large scale organizations that are only minimally committed to such change at the highest levels. While the trainings of people who work at the organizations are showing powerful results in terms of a variety of measures, the question of how to translate the successes into a shift in the structures of decision-making remains open. Whether internal to the organization, as Wes Taylor is, or an external consultant/trainer as Dian Killian is with her team of trainers, I am left with a great deal of curiosity about how far change can proceed without the explicit blessing of the person in charge, which loops back to the question about how connection with the person at the top can be made. I am glad that Jane Connor who works with Dian is conducting scientific research on their work at a Fortune 500 company.

Over the course of the conferences many people expressed a tremendous hunger for practical how-to’s that they could apply back in their own organizations. Two of the sessions we presented were more practical. Martha Lasley led us through a preliminary practice of coaching skills using the tools of Nonviolent Communication, and I modeled a decision-making process based on the principle of maximizing willingness, a way of making collaborative decisions that everyone can live with.

I am deeply committed to integrity between what we teach and what we practice. Because of that, my biggest personal celebration is the degree of collaboration that I experienced among the presenters. Some of us had never been in a room together, and yet we worked together to make this conference a success. We met every morning to reflect on how things are going and how we might adapt the flow of the conference to respond to feedback. We had several conversations in which we explored some differences in our approaches to the work, and I found our trust deepening as a result of these explorations, reaffirming my faith in the power of dialogue to metabolize and make use of differences. I know that it’s only through deep collaboration that we can truly rise to the challenge of the immense need we are facing on a global scale. I can’t wait to see how this collaboration will continue to unfold in the coming months and years.

If you are interested in seeing how you can learn about more collaboration in your workplace or consulting practice, come to our next informational call for the MCR yearlong program that starts in May.

Feedback without Criticism

by Miki Kashtan

I have yet to meet a person who likes criticism. Instead, what most of us do is contract inside when we hear a criticism. Sometimes we respond defensively, sometimes we add the criticism to our pile of self-judgment, and sometimes we deflect and ignore what’s being said. In the process, we rarely manage to make use of the vital information and opportunities that useful feedback can provide: learning, better teamwork, or simply insight and understanding.

On the other end of this painful and familiar dynamic, it is well known that both in personal life and in the workplace most people dread giving feedback. Knowing how painful it can be for people to hear a criticism, and how rarely feedback leads to productive conversations or satisfying change, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that giving feedback can have beneficial consequences. Add to that how few people have been trained in concrete skills for giving usable feedback, and you get a recipe for disconnection, resentment, or teeth gritting when time comes for performance evaluations or less formal feedback giving.

And yet feedback loops are essential for any individual and group to function at full capacity and potential. Knowing how our actions affect others and the larger whole of which we are a part can support us in learning when and how to change course to contribute to others around us.

Since all of us need feedback, let’s take a look at how we can offer it to others in ways most likely to create the effect we are hoping for: increasing performance while building trust and supporting goodwill all around.

There is much we can do to make our feedback digestible to another person, and to minimize the risk of being heard as criticizing. We can work on where we are coming from in offering feedback, and we can work on developing concrete tools that make feedback more useful to others.

Often confusions around feedback stem for a blending of two different motivations for letting others know of the effect of their actions. Becoming proficient in offering feedback takes us through learning to distinguish between feedback and personal trigger. Providing feedback is usually motivated by a desire to contribute to the learning of another person and to the functioning of the whole. Sharing a personal trigger is usually motivated by a desire to be heard, understood, or attended to. When we mix the two, we are likely to create confusion.

At least some of the time people hear criticism because it’s there. If we want to reduce the risk of being heard as criticizing, let’s indeed transform our judgments and evaluations. Instead, let’s look for, and communicate to others, what the behaviors are, why they matter, and what we want done about them. Here’s how this way of focusing helps feedback become more digestible.

The more we are able to point succinctly to specific behaviors instead of vague generalizations and evaluative statements, the more the other person can keep her or his attention on what we are talking about without getting caught in evaluative words. This diminishes the potential for defensiveness, and also prepares us for shifting our own consciousness away from judgments.

The more we are able to communicate why the behavior matters, the more the other person is motivated to want to do what’s asked of them. We can communicate what’s important to us personally, our own values and needs, or what’s at stake for the organizational whole. When we name the key elements that lie underneath our evaluations (and even judgments), we often feel relief and clarity. This, too, supports us in having feedback that’s less charged and therefore easier to hear.

Even when there is clear understanding of what the goals and values are, and what the significance of the requested change could be, many people can still find it difficult to digest feedback if it comes without specific strategies they could put in place to contribute to the desired outcome in terms of goals and values. Part of why this particular step can be so challenging is that we are called to trust that others would, indeed, want to support what matters to us and the whole. We are asked to shift from telling people what to do to a sense of partnership with them in moving toward shared goals.

No matter how thoughtful and clear we are with our feedback, we may still generate defensiveness or resistance if we are completely set on having the outcome we want, without regard for what the other person might want. Forging and sustaining a sense of partnership, especially in contexts where we have structural power, is no small task. The more we are able to show understanding for the experiences of others and the choices that others make, including understanding what might have led them to take the actions we found challenging, the more of a sense of partnership others can experience, along with more goodwill towards us. Similarly, if we are able to remain open to creating a solution together instead of being attached to a particular outcome, others can sense that their well-being matters, and are likely to be much more willing to stretch in our direction.

My hope is that as more and more people learn to offer feedback based on these principles, the overall dread of feedback giving can diminish, and feedback can be restored to its fundamental function: a method for people to work together to create environments where productivity flows, where trust and goodwill flourish, and where individuals thrive.

If you want to learn more about the art of providing feedback, you can still register retroactively to the 5-session Feedback without Criticism course I taught last fall. If you want to learn more generally about using Nonviolent Communication in the workplace, you can get an MP3 of a class I taught on the topic a couple of years ago. Looking ahead, you may want to explore the MCR full yearlong program starting this coming May, and the MCR conference in March. If you are curious, you can get answers to all your questions in one of two informational calls coming up in February and March.

Receiving Feedback as Spiritual Practice

by Miki Kashtan

This week I finished teaching a 5-session phone class called Feedback without Criticism. The first 4 sessions were about giving feedback, and last night’s session was about receiving feedback. After last night’s session I have so much compassion for the untold millions who are regularly on the receiving end of both formal and unsolicited feedback which is so hard for them to receive. As a continuation to earlier posts on the topic of feedback, today I want to take a closer look at the role of self-acceptance in receiving feedback, as well as offer a few more tips to those who routinely provide feedback.

Conditional Self-Acceptance

In preparation for the class, I asked participants to read Overcoming Defensiveness, my earlier blog piece about the challenges of receiving feedback, which highlights the role of self-acceptance in being able to receive feedback effectively. With self-acceptance we are stronger, because our own view of ourselves is less dependent on what other people think or perceive about us. So it came as no surprise that people named the experience of someone catching them unprepared to give them critical feedback as being particularly painful. The deeper issue, as we learned together, is that very often our self-acceptance is conditional on being a very certain way. It’s as if we are telling ourselves: “I will accept myself for as long as I am always impeccable in how I do my work, or for as long as I always care about other people and the effect of my actions on the rest of the team members,” or whatever else you can insert there for yourself.

What would it mean to accept ourselves unconditionally, exactly the way we are? Imagine the freedom that can come from complete self-acceptance, without conditions, without having to be any particular way, without the pressure to be perfect. Imagine how much stronger we would become in facing whatever people say when we are not scrambling to hide the truth about ourselves. Working on accepting that which we don’t like in ourselves can reduce and ultimately eliminate the exhausting endless inner war in which so many of us live. With honest self-acceptance we come more fully into our place in the human fabric, alongside everyone else who’s also human, also glorious, also imperfect, also capable of making mistakes. We become less separate, and by extension more able to accept others, too.

How do we get there? By applying the core principle that whatever we do is an attempt to meet common human needs shared by all. Even malicious intent, however painful to acknowledge, results from some basic human need. Malicious intent arises when anyone is so caught in a desperate struggle to meet needs that they simply don’t see or experience any other way to proceed. Maybe it’s an expression of wanting to assert one’s existence in a situation of extreme powerlessness; maybe it’s an attempt to create justice (as violence expert James Gilligan demonstrates in his book on the topic); or maybe it’s an attempt to have one’s own pain understood in full. However unconscious these motivations may be, we can all understand them in others and in ourselves. The practice of self-acceptance is about identifying and connecting with the underlying needs that lead to any of our actions we are unhappy about, both at work and anywhere else. Doing this practice increases our self-acceptance and by extension our ability to make free and conscious choices about how to act.

Tips on Feedback Giving

Although harsh or critical feedback could potentially provide the gift of spiritual practice to the other person, providing feedback can be much more effective if we can provide it in a way that doesn’t require so much inner strength from the other person. I plan on writing a fuller piece about feedback giving in the future. For now, I wanted to share two specific and relevant tips. One is to ask, and mean it, whether our chosen time works for the other person instead of assuming that because we have something to say the other person is ready to hear it. The other is to do enough inner work before sharing feedback with another that we can truly imagine how much effort it would take of the other person to hear us. Then we can choose to express the feedback with complete honesty and yet with full care for the other person.

If you want to learn more about the art of providing feedback, you can still register retroactively to the 5-session Feedback without Criticism course I finished last week. If you want to learn more generally about using Nonviolent Communication in the workplace, you can get an MP3 of a class I taught on the topic a couple of years ago. Looking ahead, you may want to explore the MCR full yearlong program starting this coming May, and the MCR conference in March. If you are curious, you can get answers to all your questions in one of the informational calls coming up starting in January 2011.

Business Not as Usual

by Miki Kashtan

A week ago I wrote about facilitating a simulated City Council Meeting. That same day I participated in a real meeting that was very enjoyable and productive for those of us who were part of it. Sometimes I think that some people don’t even have an idea of how simple and easy it could be to function differently, and I want to offer, perhaps, some way of envisioning. I have a deep faith in the value of vision, especially practical vision.

This meeting took place as part of the Consciousness Transformation Community that I created last February. From the start, this community has been an experiment in doing things differently. I created a list of 17 commitments that together comprise my understanding of what living the consciousness of deep nonviolence means, such as “Assumption of Innocence,” “Openness to the Full Emotional Range,” “Risking My Significance,” “Generosity,” and 13 others. I invited people to join me in living these commitments and forming a community of learning and mutual. We have people in the group from North and South America, Europe, and Israel. I set up structures of support and decided for myself what I was happy to offer within the community. I created a gift economy structure, so that people who join are invited to contribute and are not in any way “required” or even subtly “expected” to contribute, either financially or otherwise. I had a very large vision for what we could create over time, and I was ecstatic to see the initial response.

Although vision comes easy to me, sometimes staying patient during implementation doesn’t. I confess to getting discouraged rather easily at times, which I am sad about because of the toll it takes on others around me. And here, too, as the first few months unfolded and I didn’t see the self-organizing happening, I became overwhelmed and worried that unless I did everything (which I was clear I wouldn’t do), the community just wouldn’t happen. As part of my own path of living these commitments I chose to share, in full, with the community what my experience was. I was deeply moved and amazed by how I was received. This initial reception turned into a structure that is now more aligned with my original vision than the one I initially created. Not only do I love the outcome, I also have been amazed at the process by which it came to be. In addition to my own coming forth, other people stepped forward and empowered themselves to make requests, offer themselves to the community, and express their longings, dreams, and concerns about the initial design. The new structure emerged from our collective engagement with all that was put on the table.

One of the elements of the structure we came up with was the establishment of monthly, open meetings for attending to community business. Anyone who is holding any responsibility for anything in the community (whether offering groups, or doing administrative support, or welcoming new members, or any other function, all of which are voluntary) is welcome to participate. In fact, anyone, even if not holding responsibility, is welcome to participate or submit agenda items. Our intention has been to have these meetings, themselves, be conducted in accordance with the commitments we have all embraced.

Last Sunday’s meeting had a number of agenda items. The one that engaged us for most of our time was the process for accepting new members to the community. I want to describe the unfolding of this discussion without getting into the details of the conversation, which would take many more words than I imagine people would want to read. At one point all but one of us were comfortable with the process as it has been so far. For a moment there seemed to be an impasse, because this person wanted something I was very much non-negotiable about. One of the commitments was primary in guiding our conversation: “Openness to Dialogue”. We engaged fully with attempting to understand the needs behind what this one person wanted. I was in awe at the care, the openness, and the presence. One by one the needs and their related strategies became known, until everything was heard. The result was a deeper understanding on all of our parts which led to a process of accepting new members that all of us liked better than what we have had. Along the way we discovered that one member was challenged at an earlier moment in the conversation and had lost trust, and we turned our attention to her. From this bit of conversation emerged more clarity about our process for deliberation and decision-making.

I am sitting here, writing this, and suddenly feeling almost inept at finding a way to describe how radical and hopeful this one meeting appears to me. I have been advocating that connection and effectiveness can go hand in hand and that full collaboration and inclusion do not necessarily mean loss of efficiency. Here, in this meeting, I experienced it in full.

Granted, we are not producing anything on which anyone’s life depends. And yet experiments like this can pave the way and show what’s possible. I am very hopeful and passionate about offering the building blocks of collaboration to organizations of all sizes that do have products and services on which others rely in a timely manner. Last May I co-led the first Making Collaboration Real (MCR) program, and wrote about it on this blog. The effects of that retreat were so powerful that we decided to make more offerings. We are launching an MCR full yearlong program starting this coming May, and an MCR conference in March. If you are curious, you can get answers to all your questions in one of our informational calls coming up starting in January 2011.