I do see some criticism of techniques like non-violent communication here on HN and then I see articles like this that reinvent it half-way.
You don’t need to sugar-coat your feedback as often if you provide context and ground your feedback in facts. That’s a big chunk of NVC right there. If you don’t have a good strategy for giving people honest feedback, then what you do is you stumble around trying different strategies to sugar-coat feedback and end up doing more harm than good.
We humans, very naturally, are just trying to feel good most of the time and we want people to like us. That’s why we don’t like giving people feedback. We try all sorts of different ways of giving feedback so we can keep feeling good and make people like us, and it's easy to end up falling into the trap of being brutish (delivering feedback with careless disregard for other people) or into the trap of being manipulative (distorting feedback because we value people’s feelings more than our stated goals).
You don’t need to sugar-coat your feedback as often if you provide context and ground your feedback in facts. That’s a big chunk of NVC right there. If you don’t have a good strategy for giving people honest feedback, then what you do is you stumble around trying different strategies to sugar-coat feedback and end up doing more harm than good.
We humans, very naturally, are just trying to feel good most of the time and we want people to like us. That’s why we don’t like giving people feedback. We try all sorts of different ways of giving feedback so we can keep feeling good and make people like us, and it's easy to end up falling into the trap of being brutish (delivering feedback with careless disregard for other people) or into the trap of being manipulative (distorting feedback because we value people’s feelings more than our stated goals).