Applications of Conscious Leadership

I facilitated a conversation recently among a group of seven nurses and CNAs, along with the nursing supervisor and nursing director. It is a group I’ve been meeting with twice a month for about 6 months. The intention of the meetings has been to invite them to take ownership of co-creating the culture they want, to take responsibility for how they are showing up, especially in those moments of reactivity in themselves or in the people with whom they work.

At one point, a nurse said “I wasn’t going to speak, but I just need to say this … when I come to my supervisor and tell her that I’m overwhelmed and need more support on the floor, I don’t want to hear a response of ‘you don’t have anything to complain about … our nursing coverage is much higher than most facilities even when we’re short handed.’”

“I don’t feel heard when you say that, and I get even more frustrated. I want to hear that you understand how overwhelmed I am, how frustrated and disappointed I feel to not be able to provide the quality of care I want to.”

This nurse is describing a moment in her work day when she has a human need for empathy. 

When our emotions are surging— whether in joy or frustration— we have a yearning for another human being to be present to us, to understand what is going on in us. Not to try to fix us, or make us better, or to try to distract us from it, but simply to be present to us. 

Empathy has many close cousins, the simplest of which is the need to be heard. How rare in our work day (or anywhere else for that matter) do we encounter another person who is willing to give us their attention and to listen with understanding. Ahh … to be understood … another close cousin of empathy.

Amazingly, when we are heard, when we are understood, when we get nurtured with the empathy that we need, then we have a sense of being valued, of mattering.
​

A Conscious Leader's most potent skill is the ability to bring full attention and presence to people and to qualities that matter. At the team or organizational level, that means enlivening the intrinsic motivators such as Shared Purpose, Core Values and Direction. At the human level, it means the ability to fully "see" and "hear" the people with whom we work. In short, respect for their humanity.

This course builds on the skills from Needs-Based Communication (NVC) Core Concepts, and applies them in the day-to-day, moment-to-moment interactions that we have with the people on our team or in our organization. These are the moments that take a few seconds to a few minutes ... as we walk down the hall, in the few minutes before the meeting begins, or as we work side-by-side with someone on our team.

By consciously showing up in these brief but frequent moments throughout the day, the Conscious Leader activates and builds an environment of trust and belonging.

Workshop Outline

Session 1: Attention and Presence: The most precious of human resources ​
Session 2: "Hear Me": The foundation of being valued​
Session 3: "See Me": Redefining the need of recognition​

Workshop Format

This workshop is an interactive, activity-based experience where participants are invited to learn through self-reflection, interactions in pairs or small groups, and engagement with the whole group. Workshops combine innovative, interactive strategies with essential principles of leadership and communication to create a robust learning experience.

Delivery of this interactive workshop may either be as a live on-site event or a live video technology event —​ or a combination of both, depending on your needs.

Full Workshop Description including registration: Connect First!

When we imagine relationships in a "power-with" environment, many tend to focus on the "with" — the gentle, connecting qualities such as being valued, empathy and care.

These are essential skills of the Conscious Leader that we introduce in the "Connect First: Bringing conscious presence into the workplace" sessions.

Equally essential are the skills that enliven the "power": the fierce connectedness that leads us toward fulfillment of our shared purpose. 

Connection matters. And so does Purpose.

Conscious Accountability within an environment of intrinsic motivation looks very different than the accountability that we associate with blame and punishment. There are new levels of self-awareness to embrace and new skills to learn.

That's what this series is about.

We will apply the self-awareness and self-responsibility that we learned in the "Needs-Based Communication (NVC) CORE CONCEPTS" foundations to real workplace needs for feedback and accountability.

The Conscious Leader is both gentle and fierce. This course helps us develop the fierce side.

Workshop Outline

Session 1:  Conscious Feedback, Part 1: Moving beyond praise & criticism
Session 2:  Conscious Feedback, Part 2: Receiving feedback
Session 3:  Mutual Accountability:  ​"Calling in" to alignment rather than "calling out"
Session 4:  Conscious Agreements: Staying in integrity around our agreements
Session 5:  100% Responsibility, Not More, Not Less: Taking full responsibility for my behaviors, but not for others
Session 6:  Conscious Terminations: Honoring the humanness of everyone when employment relationships are ended

​ Workshop Format

This workshop is an interactive, activity-based experience where participants are invited to learn through self-reflection, interactions in pairs or small groups, and engagement with the whole group. Workshops combine innovative, interactive strategies with essential principles of leadership and communication to create a robust learning experience.

Delivery of this interactive workshop may either be as a live on-site event or a live video technology event —​ or a combination of both, depending on your needs.

Full Workshop Description including registration: Conscious Accountability

This workshop helps you navigate that "space ... between stimulus and response." For most of us, it is a space where we can easily be triggered into the reactive "fight, flight, freeze" area of our brain. When we think and act from that fear-based place, our effectiveness and impact are diminished, especially as leaders within an organization.

In our values-based leadership assessments, this behavior shows up in the leader’s "personal entropy" score, where personal entropy is defined as the amount of fear-driven energy that a person expresses in his or her day-to-day interactions with other people.

Needs-Based Communication (NVC) is a potent process that stimulates new insights and gives us new tools to bridge the space between unconscious reaction and conscious response. It invites us to "stop playing the blame game," by enhancing our self-awareness and self-responsibility. At the same time, it enhances our ability to communicate and collaborate with others in challenging conversations, when emotions are rising, even when we seem to be heading into conflict.

Needs-Based Communication (NVC)* is a potent process that can support us when we are having — or need to have — challenging conversations that matter to us ...

... like giving authentic feedback to a co-worker ...

​... or listening to someone at work or at home when we disagree with what they are saying ...

... or how we respond when we perceive ourselves as being "attacked" in a conversation ...

... or expressing clearly our personal or professional boundaries when a colleague has stepped beyond them ...

... or what we do when we feel anger rising in ourselves and we know we will likely regret the words we are about to say ...

... or when we've just expressed something in a meeting that really matters to us, but no one seems to have heard it ...

... or when we're too scared to speak up at all.​

NVC guides us to move beyond blame.

• To recognize our own reactivity.
• To understand our reactivity in terms of what matters to us.
• To see another person's reactivity in terms of what matters to them.
• In this new way of perceiving the situation, we are better able to respond consciously in a way that is likely to create mutual understanding.​
• In that understanding, we can make choices and take actions that are more likely to advance all of us toward what matters to each of us.

Here are some of the skills and benefits of using Needs-Based Communication in the workplace ... or at home:

• listening — so that the other person has an experience of being heard, even if we don't agree with what they are saying
• empathy — the basis of care and compassion — recognizing the "weird" ways that we unconsciously ask for empathy
• expressing disagreement without blame — an integral skill of conscious feedback and mutual accountability
• recognizing our own unconscious reactions and limiting beliefs —​ these are what diminish our relationships and effectiveness, especially as leaders
• seeing conflict as something to be harvested, not avoided — learn to "lean into" conflict instead of away from it, learn to hear the underlying essence of what matters to the people involved

​Needs-Based Communication invites us to expand our perception so that we see ways to bring connection amidst conflict. At the core of this expanded perception is the skill to focus our attention on the underlying human needs that are seeking to be nurtured in any moment, both within ourselves and within the people around us.

Examples of human needs include such things as ... 

• being heard
• mutual respect
• inclusion
• autonomy
• belonging
• purpose 
• competence

These underlying human needs are the motivation for our actions and our words ... the "why" behind what we do or say. Because human needs are universal — they are common to all human beings — when we bring them into explicit focus, they tend to stimulate understanding and draw us closer together.

The potency of Needs-Based Communication is in its pragmatic simplicity. In any moment, including a moment of conflict, there are two ways to enhance connection & understanding:

1. authentically express our own feelings & needs, or
2. empathically listen to the feelings & needs of the other.

These are radically different choices than we are accustomed to experience when we are in conflict: namely, fight, freeze or flee.

While simple, NVC is often challenging to embody because we are so deeply conditioned to perceive each other through judgments and blame.

With practice, the process of NVC helps us navigate within ourselves to transform unconscious reactions into conscious responses.

What Needs-Based Communication is not ...

• NVC is not about being nice; it's about being real.
• It's not about stifling intensity, but transforming it.
• NVC is not about changing other people or getting them to do what we want. It's about changing ourselves, so that we inspire the quality of communication and relationship that we want.
• NVC is not a technique or formula. It's a process that helps guide our consciousness to a new awareness around human needs.

​Our workplaces and our homes will become more vibrant when there is greater trust and care, and less fear and blame; more conscious responses among us, and fewer unconscious reactions; more listening to understand, and less listening just to respond.

Needs-Based Communication is a pathway to take us there.


———————————-

If you're intrigued by Needs-Based Communication, I invite you to learn more:​

• NVC Resources and Books
  
• "An Introduction to Needs-Based Communication (NVC)" - a 90-min live interactive workshop session
  
• "Needs-Based Communication (NVC) Core Concepts" - a 6-hour live interactive workshop

———————————-
​*Needs-Based Communication is based on the work of Marshall Rosenberg, which he called "Nonviolent Communication™" or NVC. I have chosen to call the process Needs-Based Communication for two reasons:

1. First, human needs are the heart of the process.
2. Secondly, I have wanted to avoid the common initial reaction from people in business that "... we're not a violent place." 

I have chosen to keep the "NVC" abbreviation for Needs-Based Communication because many people are familiar with NVC as a process — and it lacks the "nonviolent" connotation.

I am excited to announce the redesign of the live interactive workshops within the Conscious Leader Development programs at Basileia LLC, including a new workshop format using live interactive video technology.

Highlights of the new design include:
​

• New workshops, New content. A fresh integration of the last two decades of our learnings and experiences in needs-based leadership & organizational development work
  
  
• Workshops focus on tangible and specific workplace needs such as accountability, supervision, or building a cohesive team. Workshops include:
  • Introduction to Conscious Leadership - 6-hour workshop
  • Introduction to Needs-Based Communication (NVC) - 90-min workshop
  • Needs-Based Communication (NVC) Core Concepts - 6-hour workshop
  • Connect First - 3-hour workshop
  • Conscious Accountability - 6-hour workshop
  • Conscious Conversations - 6-hour workshop
  • Building Conscious Teams - 6-hour workshop
    
    
• Choice of two formats for live interactive workshops:
  • on-site workshops (our traditional workshop format), or
  • new video workshops using zoom's robust video conferencing technology including learning structures such as break-out rooms, screen sharing and polling
    
    
• People world-wide can participate in open-enrollment video workshops.
  
  
• Video workshops were created due to specific client requests:
  • short segments of training (75-90 minutes) that can fit into a professional's busy weekly schedule
  • a cost effective way to train one or two people at a time, or a group of 12 — without the added costs of travel
  • workshop recordings provide an easy way to catch up if the participant misses a session, or to review the training, in part or in whole, to support the learning process
    
    
• Continuing the best practices that have always defined our workshops:
  • engaging, interactive, activity-based training with a live trainer facilitating it
  • an opportunity for the participant to apply the training to their real workplace situations within the training process

I am thrilled that our new live interactive video workshops enable more people around the world to learn the skills of conscious leadership.  I invite you to have a look at the details about each workshop, including the ability to register online for open-enrollment video workshops, using the links above.

FYI: We've also updated the info throughout our website, especially in the "services" section. Here are a few highlights:

• Conscious Leadership
• Facilitated "Whole-Team" Conversations
• Supporting Leaders to Develop Conscious Organizations
• Individual Coaching for Conscious Leader Development
• Values-Based Cultural & Leadership Assessments

I hope to see you at one of these workshops soon!

Warmly,
Gregg

Gregg Kendrick
CEO  / Lead Trainer & Consultant
Basileia LLC
Create a Workplace Where People Matter™
+1.434.260.0437  | connect@basileia.org  | www.basileia.org

“Leaders must grow for the organization to grow.” —John Mackey

In a September 18, 2017 article in Fast Company (Satya Nadella Rewrites Microsoft’s Code, by Harry McCracken), McCracken states that “One of Nadella’s first acts after becoming CEO, in February 2014, was to ask the company’s top executives to read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, a treatise on empathic collaboration … The reading assignment ‘was the first clear indication that Satya was going to focus on transforming not just the business strategy but the culture as well,’ says Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith, a 24-year company veteran.”
​
Nadella also includes Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication among the short list of books upon which he’s drawn inspiration (The 7 Books Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says You Need to Lead Smarter, by Harry McCracken, Fast Company, September 18, 2017).

As a resource to those training in or learning Nonviolent Communication™​, we have been providing a no-cost limited license to use our introductory training materials for more than eight years. We have just added an updated version of these materials to the Resources page of our website which can be downloaded as a PDF.

This 22-page workbook includes the core pages from Basileia's training materials for the "Introduction to Needs-Based Communication (NVC)" workshop. We typically teach this workshop in a 1- to 2-day format for people who are new to NVC.

Hope that these materials will be useful for your personal learning or in group training sessions or practice groups!