The most valuable framework in my tech career

Spoiler: it's not React

Within a week into my new role as an Engineering Manager at a London Fintech startup, I was pitching the founders on running a workshop for the whole company. A few weeks later, I delivered it, with half the room full of people I hadn’t even met yet.

It was a talk on a framework that had been so valuable to me when working with both tech teams and the wider business, and which I felt would be so appropriate to many of the issues the company was facing, it seemed like a no-brainer - despite my freshness.

Needless to say, it had nothing to do with engineering.

The framework is called Non-Violent Communication (NVC), and I believe it provides tools that are indispensable for any leader or manager, but which are particularly useful for technologists.

Before outlining what NVC is, it’s helpful to define what ‘violent’ communication looks like. There’s the obvious stuff, like threatening, abusive, or demeaning language. Thankfully, we don’t tend to have to frequently deal with that in your average tech company today.

But NVC also defines violent language as anything that judges.

What does that mean? Simply, whenever we label something as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, we are implicitly attaching a moral judgement to it.

It is ‘violent’ because it creates a sense of separation, of conflict, where one side ‘should’ win and the other ‘deserves’ to lose.

This might seem like semantic nitpicking or oversensitivity, but I invite you to compare the following:

• “You’re always late.”

• “The last 3 mornings, you’ve arrived 15 minutes after the agreed time for standup.”

• “This code sucks.”

• “There’s no automated tests for this component.”

• “He never does what I want.”

• “The last three times I asked him to do a task, he declined.”

Which would you rather hear from your manager? Which is more information-rich?

In NVC this is called observing without evaluating.

I’ll cover more in future posts, but back to the story, and that first workshop went well. I even ended up starting an NVC reading group. I ended up being promoted VP of Engineering role within 6 months, and I’m sure that NVC, both in theory and in practice, was a big part of that.

After all, behind all the tech, we’re still just humans.