Chapter 5. Make Your Point without Starting a Fight
The vast majority of us unthinkingly sabotage our own attempts to communicate with ingrained knee-jerk communication habits that contaminate the communication process with defensiveness before it even gets started. On a daily basis, managers and supervisors must request changes in behavior, procedures and even attitudes from their people, and this is always fertile ground for defensiveness and conflict.
There is no magic pill to keep this from happening, but here are some communication tactics that will dramatically lower the likelihood of defensiveness and conflict when you must make requests for change.
The key principle is in expressing what you want without making the other person feel a need to defend themselves or their actions in some way. Defensiveness focuses the attention on the people involved, and not the problem. It is always a roadblock to solving problems. This skill is the path to becoming a highly skilled communicator. Let me suggest a powerful technique that can change mediocre communicators into superstars!