On Better Communicating
Several years ago, I was assigned a task as a newly joined member in my team. It took me several days to complete it, and I was so anxious to finish it early to prove myself to my new colleagues. I finally made my Pull Request and I was very keen to receive nice words. What followed was several dozens of comments from a single person and a big block of text criticising my work. Moreover, he demanded a rewrite of the whole thing from scratch without offering a good reason. What’s worse? Not a single line of encouragement and acknowledgement of my efforts. I was devastated and a bit upset, since I had spent so much time and effort to push this out fast.
Looking back at this situation after many years, I can recognise several red flags in this communication. Surely, both sides could have done much better. Being able to communicate with people in a more human way in our work is such an important skill in the tech industry. Teams need good communication to make great achievements and resolve any conflicts fast.
Keeping in mind that everyone operates and thinks differently as a human being is significant for the flow and outcome of each communication. We all have our good and bad moments and approaching people we should try to be considerate of that. This article will go through some tools that will help communicate with more empathy and hopefully better results.
This post will be structured into 3 main sections; receiving and providing feedback, mainly negative which is the tricky one, and how to argue in an empathetic way.
While we can find different techniques for each category, there are some behaviours that are shared and it is wise to always follow them.
- First and foremost you have to make sure you are willing to change your mind and admit you are wrong. If this is not the case you are not in a good position to have any fruitful conversation.
- Assuming good intentions is also another key point for every communication. Your mindset should be that your peers always mean good and don’t have any hidden agenda.
- Not everything is perfect, or as Sturgeon’s Law mentions “ninety percent of everything is crap”. This means that not everything deserves our attention and our valuable time. Sometimes it is better if we let some behaviours slip, acknowledging that they are bad but not worthy of our time and effort.
Providing Feedback
A lot of times we are in a place where we want to give feedback about a behaviour. Other times we want to mention something that was annoying and caused us negative feelings. In cases like these, providing timely feedback is usually the right way to avoid building up complicated situations.
Feedback
When our goal is to provide feedback about a behaviour it’s always good to follow the SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) framework. SBI framework advises us to 1) describe the exact situation, 2) followed by the observed behaviour that caused the issue and 3) lastly the actual impact it had on us. Let’s see this in a real example. What follows is an example of a conversation between a couple of colleagues.
“Hey Bob, during yesterday’s meeting when I was talking about X and you interrupted me a couple of times. That prevented me from finishing my thoughts. I was frustrated because my attempts to prove my theory were disrupted by your interruption.”
Using the SBI model to dissect the above feedback we can see the different parts:
- the situation – “during yesterday’s meeting when I was talking about X”.
- the behaviour – “interrupted me a couple of times”.
- and finally the impact this had – “prevented me from finishing my thoughts. I was frustrated…”.
In a similar manner, if we additionally want to ask for actions to prevent something from happening again, we can follow one of the best tools for clearly expressing feedback; Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication framework. This framework allows people to have sincere and fruitful communication and can be summarised in the four following steps:
- observation, the actions we observe and bring us to the given emotional state.
- feeling, how we feel based on the observed actions.
- need, the needs that create these feelings.
- request, the concrete actions we request in order to make our well-being better.
If we would want to add the last step in our example conversation between colleagues it would be something like:
“Hey Bob, … Next time could you make sure I’ve finished my thoughts and make sure I’ve acknowledged that I’ve finished.”
The Nonviolent communication framework takes time and effort to master. Several pitfalls are described in the book and only with practice can one achieve better results with it.
Both SBI and Nonviolent Communication frameworks are similar but the latter is more powerful. It forces us to prepare ourselves, think how we feel, why we feel this way, and how this feeling can go away.
Regardless of the framework we use, there are times that there will be an awkward silence at the end of the feedback. Most people are eager to fill this silence by saying something irrelevant to the feedback point itself. This is not helpful as it might move the focus from our feedback point. We should learn to allow and be comfortable with these small silence periods. These seconds are important for our peers to digest the feedback we just gave and regroup their thoughts.
Criticism
Criticism is a negative feedback that mainly focuses on weaknesses and is rarely constructive. There is no way around criticism; most of the time the other side will struggle to accept it. There is a tool though that can help make this process smoother. This is Rapoport Rule, which is great to have in your belt if you ever are in a position where you have to provide criticism. Daniel Bennet in his “Intuition Pumps and other tools for thinking” summarises the steps of this technic:
- You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
- You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
The second and third steps are very important because they help us build a rapport with the other side before actually giving the negative feedback. Similarly, trying to find points where we can give compliments will help us build a better rapport. Mind, though, that a fake compliment is not going to help most of the time. Try to find genuine and sincere words that will not sound and look fake. This will make the other side trust us and categorise us as friends.
Remember the initial situation that I had and couldn’t cope with easily? Consider the reviewer had written a message like the following:
“Hey Andreas, great that you went through this fast and without any help!
I didn’t know you could use the X function this way, nice to learn new things. I see that you got several things right, which is great for a person that is so new to this codebase.
There are also some things that could have been written differently. I’ll try to explain it with a code example below but if you think it’s easier we can go through this offline together.”
Notice the part where we give a compliment and mention that we even learned something from this. We create rapport to prepare our peers for the criticism we have, and we also offer our help for the solution. This way we increase our chances to face a less defensive attitude.
In the end, remember that we should try to keep criticism to the minimum every time. Giving criticism about too many points, we jeopardise that the message we want to transmit will not be received with success.
Receiving Feedback
Sometimes we might find ourselves on the other side of the table, where we have to receive some feedback or criticism.
It’s important here to “Listen First, Talk Second”, as Benjamin Franklin said. After listening to our peers, acknowledging that they have finished is a good move. Thanking our peers for the feedback is also important, especially if it’s well structured and well thought out. This way we acknowledge that we appreciate the time they put in and welcome any future feedback.
Making sure we understand the given feedback is also important. It’s good practice to summarise what we’ve heard. We have seen this last technique in the Rapoport rule in the previous section, where we should try to clearly re-state our peer’s view. This will also give confidence to our peers that we have understood their point and didn’t misinterpret something.
A lot of times, feedback or complaints are coming from people that might be emotionally charged. A good way to build some quick rapport is to acknowledge their feelings and their state. An exception to this though is anger, where acknowledging that someone is angry, will most certainly raise your peer’s defensive walls.
Remember the conversation between two colleagues where one interrupted the other? A great response following the above would be something like:
“Hey Alice, thanks for sharing this!
I understand your frustration! Nobody wants to be interrupted and lose their train of thought. I would probably feel the same way.
Sorry for acting like that, next time I will make sure you have finished your points. ”
Sometimes feedback might come unstructured; a helpful tool to find what the real message is, is the socratic method where by asking several questions we help our peer to form her ideas and her feedback better and in a way that we can understand. Let’s see an example of that where we take the interrupting conversation but we change the initial feedback to something more unstructured.
“Hey Bob, you keep on repeating the same behaviour when we are in a meeting and I end up being frustrated! Please stop doing that!”
Pretty much unstructured, right? Let’s see how receiving feedback with empathy can transform this type of message into something more useful.
“- Hey Alice, sorry to hear you are frustrated. Could you share with me which meeting you are referring to and what action caused you frustration?"
“- It was yesterday’s noon meeting with the Alpha team, and you interrupted me twice when I tried to explain X to people! I couldn’t finish my thoughts properly!”
“- Oh, I see, yes that was not nice from my side. I felt you had finished but apparently, I misunderstood. I understood that I had done the same thing in the previous meeting, when was that?”
“- Yes you have during last week’s recap meeting and the day before in W meeting. It’s very frustrating every time.”
“- Yeah, I totally understand that. I would feel the same way. Thanks for being open and sharing this feedback, that was very useful for me. Next time I’ll make sure I acknowledge you have finished before I talk. Will that help?”
Of course, not all feedback is that easy to dilute but hopefully you got the idea.
At last, there might be cases where receiving feedback can be frustrating for us. In such cases, it’s better to take some distance and digest it. After the initial emotions pass we can put our thoughts in order and respond with a clear mind. We should avoid responding while angry or frustrated. A nice way to initially respond to such feedback is something along the lines of “thanks for the feedback, I will need some time to digest this and come back to you as soon as possible”.
Arguing
What about arguing though? When was the last time you argued about something with one of your colleagues or a friend or your partner? I bet the answer is less than a week at best. Arguing is part of our life and we should be able to know how to do it productively.
A lot of people though argue blindly just to win an argument, which is not fruitful, nor productive. Our goal should be to come up with the best decision, even if that means that we might be wrong. Winning arguments should not be our goal and therefore we should be willing to change our minds.
Since winning arguments as a goal is something that everyone has observed at some point, being able to identify several wrong techniques to win arguments is useful. Arthur Schopenhauer has sarcastically described these tricks in his “The Art of Being Right”. This book is an interesting read and knowing some of these techniques could help us defend our arguments and observe weaker ones.
There are, though, useful and rightful tools that can help us reach the right decision and communicate our arguments in a way that will give us the best chances to be considered with an open mind.
Starting any conversation it’s very useful to establish rapport with the other side as already mentioned previously in the post. Building rapport makes the other side less defensive and more receptive of our points. There are several ways to build rapport but the most common is small talk about subjects that interest your peers and you can relate to them. This might be sports, hobbies, family, children, cultural things, work interests, etc. A good source on different ways to build rapport is “How to make friends and influence people” from Dale Carnegie which was first published back in 1936.
A lot of times we have second thoughts about someone else’s views and we try to directly challenge their views. Instead of pointing out that something is plain wrong, an alternative way to form this, is through a scalar question. In this type of question you ask your peers how sure they are from one to ten about the truth of their argument. This forces subconsciously your peers to be open minded, rethink their theory and do additional checks for any thought fallacies. A quick example would be “on a scale from 1 to 10 how confident are you that this algorithm is the fastest?”
At the end of the day strive to get a decision and move forward. Most of the time moving forward is more important. Decision paralysis can hurt people’s spirit and motivation. After all, it is okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are key to making progress and allow us sometimes to move faster.
Wrapping up
Communication with other people is a significant part of our daily lives. It can be challenging sometimes and many people find it hard to have fruitful discussions at work and in real life.
As we grow, communication skills will be more useful and they are worth sharpening; this is a skill that can be acquired and perfected with time and practice. The more you try to apply any of these rules the better you become at them and will observe big improvements.
Hopefully reading this article will give everyone some more tools to communicate better with other people. If you find any of these tools interesting you can dive into it in more detail.