8 Tips for Connective Leadership

It’s truly remarkable how Nonviolent Communication works within organisations! Agility, growth despite the crisis and continuous quality improvement at a breathtaking pace. It can be done! To inspire everyone, here are eight tips to benefit from Connective Leadership.

1. Make sure people enjoy coming to work. When people look forward to their workday, they tap into their strengths and make the most of their talents. A few simple thought exercises can transform a work environment from ‘a boring place’ to ‘the job of my life’.
2. Keep moving! We often see organisations become paralysed by dilemmas and difficult issues. Through Connective Decision-Making, teams bring the essential themes to the surface. Tackling the urgent, important and easy issues provides immediate relief. And the urgent, important and difficult themes are addressed by taking simple steps. Assigning these actions to people who are given the space to carry them out gives an organisation wings.
3. Train your people in Nonviolent Communication. This doesn’t just make them communicate more efficiently. They also gain more control over their own well-being and happiness. It’s wonderful to see the transformative power of Nonviolent Communication in action for everyone who engages with it.
4. Design your processes around creating connection. Giving feedback, regularly thinking together at team level, transforming worry and frustration: all of this takes time. Time spent in dialogue pays off! Schedule this consultation systematically. It gets the energy flowing in organisations. Choosing the right moments for discussion, bringing together the right people around issues they have experience with, ensures their knowledge translates into new quality.
5. Create space for cross-team consultation. Nothing is as time-consuming as problems and solutions that have to travel the entire hierarchy. When people can reach out to colleagues across teams and make proposals that serve the bigger picture, the gains go beyond quality and efficiency. Engagement and well-being improve too. Consider keeping an empty chair at team meetings where others in the organisation can provide input.
6. Use the extelligence of your organisation and your clients. Extelligence is the knowledge and experience of everyone involved in a particular theme. Build on existing quality. Regularly assess where growth is possible and look for ways to achieve it with the least resistance. Our flow diagrams on Connective Decision-Making offer inspiration for discovering the path of highest quality by listening to resistance and the underlying needs and values.
7. Let everyone lead from their role. Make it possible for everyone, in consultation with others, to steer processes. A technical worker can improve certain plans by walking into the design office in overalls and making concrete suggestions. A new colleague can offer ideas you no longer see because you look at reality differently. Listen to suggestions from anyone, say what you feel is missing and build on what’s proposed. When people see their ideas being picked up and integrated, they stay alert and involved.
8. Make sure people stay in touch with what’s beautiful in life. It may sound like a cliche, but life is more than work. It’s inspiring and meaningful to regularly connect with the beauty of nature. It’s heartwarming to meet each other as human beings. Encouraging gentleness and genuine contact between people creates a sense of belonging and inner strength. An investment that pays off on many fronts!

If you’d like more inspiration to discover Nonviolent Communication and its variant for leaders, have a look at our open training programme. If you’d like to immerse your entire organisation in this approach, get in touch.

Call to actions:

Learn more about Connective Leadership

Learn more about the open Nonviolent Communication programme