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How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

medium.dave-bailey.com

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Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#81

Post by quanticle »

codingdave wrote: post #69
quanticle wrote: post #28

Suppose product development has slowed down, reported bugs have increased 30% since last month, and sprint velocity is down by 40%. Your engineer is feeling desperately unhappy and is terrified of building new features because of the risk to the system as a whole. They want to stop building new features and refactor some of the system architecture. But what do you think their unmet universal need is here? If I were i…

> situations where the bug-count goes up by 30% and sprint velocity goes down by 40% don't just happen out of nowhere. In every situation I've been in where that's happened, management has been warned repeatedly and well in advance that engineering was implementing short term hacks I've found those result are just as likely to come from a team with low morale. Still a management problem, but if people do not feel val…

Ah, but why is the team's morale low? Could it be because the team's feedback is consistently ignored by management? By their deadlines being unreasonable? By the leadership of the team signalling (and, in more than one instance that I've personally witnessed, outright stating) that quality doesn't matter, what we need to do is ship?

Of course that will erode the team's morale. Of course that will reduce the team's velocity in the long run. But it's on management to understand that and realize when a short-term intense burst of effort is necessary to hit an important deadline and update the plan accordingly to include both the short-term burst of effort and the recovery downtime afterwards for the team to relax and for technical debt to be cleaned up.

If management can't (or won't) recognize the basics of planning and pacing, phrasing one's concerns using NVC isn't going to suddenly enlighten them. The way I see it, NVC is just tone-policing dressed up in psychobabble. It becomes yet another excuse for management to dismiss engineers for "not having great culture fit", when the reality is that the expectations from the leaders create the culture and it's those expectations that need to change.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#82

Post by adrianmonk »

> When you apply the format to the letter, it usually comes off as over-prepared and clunky. It’s not how people normally speak so it can sound inauthentic.

This reminds me: it's hard to overstate how much of communication is nonverbal. Your tone, attitude, body language, facial expression, etc. can make all the difference in the world. This is probably especially relevant in conflict situations.

Imagine you have an attitude of thinly-veiled annoyance and you say a sentence (from the article) like, "When you didn’t bring me a cup of coffee, I felt DISAPPOINTED because I have a need for inclusion. PLEASE, could you get me a coffee next time?"

Now compare that to having a relaxed, positive attitude and saying the exact same sentence but not loaded down with negative emotion. Imagine saying it in a way that makes them feel like it isn't a big deal to you, you're not going to remember The Coffee Cup Incident forever, you still like them, and that you probably brought this up because you care about getting along.

The words you say obviously matter some, but the way you deliver them might is often way more important. For example, some people could probably get away with saying, "Well... fuck you for not getting me a cup of coffee. I guess I'm not important. Nah, I'm kidding. I would have liked one, though. It's going to take me a while to work through this, but eventually I'll be able to forgive you."

Once I realized how important the nonverbal aspect of communication is and started practicing to get better at it, it made a lot of these things a ton easier.

---

Also, as long as I'm going on tangents, after a conflict has happened is sort of your last opportunity to get it right. Good conflict resolution methods can definitely help, but everything is going to be much easier if beforehand you spent the effort developing healthy relationships and building trust. Resolving conflict will be an uphill battle if you haven't. And if you have, then it will be much easier. So basically preparation and maintenance serves as an important multiplier.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#83

Post by BeetleB »

geofft wrote: post #54
BeetleB wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the deal: I've yet to come across someone who is critical of NVC but can provide something better . And in my experience, the status quo is rarely better. NVC has its flaws. It won't always work. Nor will anything else we know of. If something comes along that works better (higher "success rate"), I'll jump on that bandwagon. If you can't be bothered to read the rest of this long comment, here's a TLDR: Most c…

> Just yesterday there was a nasty discussion at work about whether to split a monorepo into smaller individual repos. One side's work is bogged down by it being a monorepo, and the other side would have trouble if it were split into monorepos. Both sides discussed the their problems, yet neither side acknowledged the other's pain. Validating the other's emotions is a core principle of all communications books I've r…

> This is a technical tooling problem, not a problem about the feelings of the two teams. By all means, dig technically into why one team's work is being bogged down and why one team prefers the current setup. Maybe you need a different design for integration testing or deployment pipelines. Maybe you need another branching strategy. Maybe you need some ground rules about monorepo-wide changes. All of those can be discussed productively between the teams. Perhaps the underlying conclusion is you need more release engineering resources, and both teams might agree on that. (What did you end up discussing, anyway?)

Yep, the person who initiated the conversation was hoping to have precisely this kind of conversation. And no, he didn't get such a discussion. It's easy to say that this is what the conversation should have been. The reality was quite different. So the question is why did they not end up having a fruitful discussion?

In the past my thought process almost exactly mirrored yours. It's only due to a bunch of years of observing these dynamics in multiple teams did I realize that these expectations I had were off. SW folks, as much as they try to deny it, are as emotional as anyone else. Everyone is emotional - they just manifest it in different ways. The fact that a person has described his pain with a technical configuration, and the other party isn't explicitly acknowledging that pain usually will have negative consequences. Frankly, as a third party observer, I think both parties heard and understood the others' pain. But neither party indicated it to the other. And so every exchange in the conversation was a restatement of the pains they had with other's preferences. I catch on to this pretty well because I used to be guilty of the same. And my experience has taught me how frequently disarming it is to merely convince the other party that you truly understand the other's pain. It takes very little effort.

The issue is not resolved. The manager is likely going to step in and pick one solution. This is the worst way to resolve it as he is the one least impacted (at least directly).

> Just like "there are no technical solutions to social problems," there are no social solutions to technical problems.

Something I heard in my first or second year in the industry: "At top tech companies, there are no technical problems. Every problem is a social one. Even a problem that looks technical is really due to a social problem somewhere behind the scenes." Whoever said it was so right. I've worked on plenty of technical problems that arose because people did not get along.

So I must disagree. Solve the social problems, and you often solve the technical ones as well.

> The solution to "people keep breaking the build on trunk" has nothing to do with your feelings about the people who keep breaking the build - it has to do with your lack of a bot that runs tests and only pushes to trunk if the tests pass. (Nor is the reason that they keep breaking the build on trunk about their emotional needs - it's about the fact that they can't make use of such a bot because none exists.)

First: Feelings aren't "about people". My problem is not that people are breaking the build. My problem is that I don't have a clean build to work on. There's a difference.

Second, I've been in teams that allowed anything in the trunk (CI would fail later, but it worked off the trunk, so the damage is done). Yet every time someone proposed to switch the CI to reject things that broke the build, there was push back and it never got implemented. Why is that? How do you solve this?

We had the "technical" solution. That we could not implement it is a social problem. You are not going to succeed unless you deal with the social problem? No matter how bullet proof your technical solution is.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#84

Post by lidHanteyk »

BeetleB wrote: post #25
lidHanteyk wrote: post #19

When I see people teaching "non-violent" communication, I become disappointed with their selfishness and inability to empathize with other people. I don't need anything from them, but I mark them well so that I understand that I will have to constantly have word-duels with them when they come to me with their passive-aggressive bullshit. > When you didn’t bring me a cup of coffee, I felt disappointed because I have a…

If this is how you're going to behave in these situations at work, I'll have you off the team/company in a heartbeat. Your concerns are valid. Your method of expressing them is problematic. And your automatic assumptions are lethal to a good work environment. I was going to address some of the specifics, but you're not exactly giving the impression of someone who wants input.

I don't work for you. I am the consultant sitting to the side and watching you crash and burn. If you want to hear how I'll talk to you when you're my manager, then you'd better put a salary in my pocket first.

When you say that my concerns are valid but that I am expressing them in problematic ways, you are tone policing. This is a typical technique used by management: First, break up the original complaint into small pieces, then estrange the emotional content from each piece, minimizing and shifting as necessary. It is a useful way of dodging actual responsibility.

The attitude you are displaying, where you would have given a substantiative reply, but only for the way that the complaint was phrased, is a common empty rhetorical technique that comes with tone policing. Odds are strong that you don't actually have any substance to reply with, but you need to ensure that my tone isn't allowed to flourish or even gain sympathy or support.

Let's double-check my concerns, without profanity:

* People are not entitled to coffee or other errands being run by other employees. There are appropriate ways to join a coffee run, and this ain't it. Right? Now, does Dave give alternative wordings? Nope, he doubles down, just saying that it will be awkward at first but that you'll learn. Yep, you'd better learn to ask politely about coffee runs and other communal activities.

* Feature factories are a management anti-pattern, right? The engineering director in Dave's story is negligent to not seriously consider the risks to the stability and quality of their services and products.

* Sales must never drive engineering decisions unilaterally, right? It sounds like this engineering director lacks the ethical spine necessary to support their engineers.

* None of the people here, neither Dave, the sales director, nor the engineering director, are coders, right? So y'all don't understand the engineering concerns, which is unfortunate, because without addressing engineering concerns, your products and services will not be marketable.

Edit: After reading the rest of the thread, you've indicated that you do in fact have coding experience. Okay; in that case, I apologize and retract my guess. But I am then forced to conclude that you have a tremendous lack of empathy for fellow engineers and have decided to side with management, not just in terms of their emotional duplicity but also their manner of speaking-without-saying. I am, as before and as ever, disappointed.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#86

Post by travisjungroth »

pmichaud wrote: post #60
wintermutestwin wrote: post #48

One critical NVC concept that this article leaves out is that people often express judgements as feelings. A small cut and paste from the list of "non-feelings:" Unheard Unimportant Unseen Untrusted Unwanted Unworthy Used Violated Worthless

Yeah this is huge, and the sophomore mistake here is to try to "aikido" the people who are using feeling words to describe judgement. Ie. to immediately rephrase their statement into more a "correct," NVC-style format. It's a mistake for a couple reasons. First, it's a violent move (in the sense of NVC)--"I hear that you have a judgement that I don't want you" is a dangerous rephrase specifically because it substanti…

I think you've touched on the core problem with the implementation of NVC (and lots of other communication frameworks). People score themselves and others on their adherence to NVC instead of actually just doing it.

It makes sense after you read a book. The author spends all of this time judging conversations. A sentence is put out, and then the author says whether or not it's NVC. After reading the whole book, you come to think that's what NVC is: judging whether other people's sentences are correct or not.

So when someone says "I feel unwanted" the listener's natural instinct is to act like the author and say "Unwanted isn't a feeling, it's a projection of judgement". This is not NVC. This is not helpful. A simple "You're feeling unwanted." is 100 times better.

I have this theory that NVC, especially for listening, is done way better in "secret". It should be an internal process that the other person isn't really aware of. You don't have to force someone into your definition of observation, feeling, need and request to understand them. Maintain curiosity and respect, and you can get to those things.

Especially with all the negative connotation that NVC carries, if someone leaves a conversation with you thinking "That person did NVC", you probably fucked up. If they leave thinking "that person knows how I feel and what I want", you did it right.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#87

Post by BeetleB »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #84
BeetleB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is how you're going to behave in these situations at work, I'll have you off the team/company in a heartbeat. Your concerns are valid. Your method of expressing them is problematic. And your automatic assumptions are lethal to a good work environment. I was going to address some of the specifics, but you're not exactly giving the impression of someone who wants input.

I don't work for you. I am the consultant sitting to the side and watching you crash and burn. If you want to hear how I'll talk to you when you're my manager, then you'd better put a salary in my pocket first. When you say that my concerns are valid but that I am expressing them in problematic ways, you are tone policing . This is a typical technique used by management: First, break up the original complaint into sm…

You drew a lot of conclusions out of my 3 lines of text, while still not addressing a key aspect of it. If I actually was your manager or teammate, I probably would have to deal with this. Thankfully, I am neither.

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#88

Post by tome »

lobotryas wrote: post #42
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find NVC to be degrading and belittling. It presumes I am not a grown up who can handle important criticism, which infantilizes me. It is also a political weapon. It may be non-violent in one domain (the tone and language presentation) but it is very violent in other domains like undermining valid criticisms, changing the conversation so it’s not about the problem but instead filibustered with metaproble…

Agreed. The name NVC reminds me of the DPRoC. A country that is, unfortunately, neither democratic nor of the people nor a republic.

What's the DPRoC?

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#89

Post by munk-a »

tome wrote: post #88
lobotryas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The name NVC reminds me of the DPRoC. A country that is, unfortunately, neither democratic nor of the people nor a republic.

What's the DPRoC?

Democratic People's Republic of China is what I believe he was referencing, though it's officially the People's Republic of China - maybe confusing the PRC with the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo)?

Re: How to resolve a conflict when both sides are right

#90

Post by invalidOrTaken »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #62
uk_programmer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very acronym itself redefines violence to something it isn't which is always a red flag. This all sounds like the worst parts of working in a lot of modern offices where people don't speak frankly and instead everything is done through this sort of political office speak which is lets be honest here all about politics and not about solving problems. When I read things like this. I find it very insidious.

The WHO includes emotional and psychological in the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence That said, I do prefer the AKA of "Compassionate Communication"

The WHO can jump in a lake.
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