Power-With Is Not Soft: NVC and the Redesign of Institutional Power
- Shahar Dagan
- May 3
- 7 min read
Most organizations that bring in NVC training are solving the wrong problem.
They call in facilitators because the team is fractured, leadership is disconnected, feedback conversations end badly, or the culture survey came back worse than last year. The instinct is right: something is broken. But the solution they reach for, communication skills, treats the symptom and leaves the cause intact.
Here is what the cause actually is: the institution itself is built on domination logic. And you cannot communicate your way out of a domination structure.
The Misreading That Keeps NVC Small
NVC gets slotted into the "interpersonal skills" drawer in most organizations. A workshop here, a leadership program there. People leave with new phrases and a fresh lens, then walk back into systems that punish vulnerability, reward compliance, and concentrate decision-making at the top.
Three months later, the culture survey looks the same.
This is not a failure of NVC. It is a failure to apply NVC at the right level.
Marshall Rosenberg was explicit about this. He warned against NVC being used as "an analgesic," a way to help people feel better inside an unjust structure, rather than a tool for transforming the structure itself. The aim was never more empathic compliance. It was redesigning the foundational logic of how power moves through an institution.
That redesign is what this post is about.
What Domination Structure Actually Looks Like
"Power-over" is not just a management style. It is a set of structural choices embedded in how institutions are designed.
It shows up in who controls information and who doesn't. It shows up in performance review systems that reduce people to scores. It shows up in meeting formats where leadership speaks and everyone else responds. It shows up in accountability mechanisms built on punishment and reward rather than shared responsibility and understanding.
The data on what this produces is consistent. Only 23% of employees globally are engaged at work. In the United States, engagement hit its lowest point in a decade at 31% in 2024. This is not a personality problem or a motivation problem. Gallup's research maps disengagement directly onto leadership behavior, feedback culture, and whether people have genuine participation in decisions that affect them.
Employees spend an average of 2.8 hours per week resolving disputes. Managers dedicate 20 to 40% of their time managing conflict. That is not a sign of people who need better conflict resolution scripts. It is a sign of systems generating conflict faster than individuals can resolve it.
Domination structures are expensive. They cost organizations $8.8 trillion in lost productivity annually. And they cost the people inside them something harder to measure: the capacity to bring their full selves to work.
Power-With Is a Structural Claim, Not a Vibe
When NVC names "power-with" as an alternative, it is not describing a warmer tone in meetings. It is describing a different architecture.
Power-with means decision-making authority is distributed based on who holds relevant knowledge and who is affected, not just who holds rank. It means accountability processes are designed to understand what happened and meet the needs of everyone involved, not to assign blame and impose consequences. It means people have genuine voice in the systems that govern them, not just the opportunity to speak while leadership listens politely and decides anyway.
This is not soft. It is structurally rigorous. It requires organizations to examine every major process and ask: who has power here, on what basis, and does that serve the needs of the whole?
The Microsoft case is the most visible example in organizational circles. When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, he distributed Rosenberg's book to all top executives. But the signal he was sending was not "be nicer." He changed how decisions were made, who got heard in the process, and what behavior was rewarded across the organization. He shifted the structural culture. The communication shift followed from that, not the other way around. The company's market value grew by over $250 billion in the following years, and Nadella named empathy as the driver. Correlation, not controlled causation. But worth noting: it was a structural bet, not a training investment.
Why Changing One Thing Is Not Enough
A 2025 peer-reviewed study by Paakkanen, Martela, and Pessi (Sage) mapped the barriers to compassion in organizations across five dimensions: mindset, behavior, culture, system, and leadership. Their finding was direct: the barriers are interdependent. Remove one without addressing the others, and the intervention fails.
This matches exactly what NVC practitioners observe in organizational work. A leader who learns to communicate from feelings and needs will hit a ceiling if the system still rewards domination behavior in others. A team trained in empathic listening will disengage if the accountability process is still punitive. An organization that talks about psychological safety while concentrating all decision-making authority at the top is producing cognitive dissonance, not cultural change.
The APA's 2024 Work in America Survey shows this gap clearly. Workers in high-psychological-safety environments report 95% job satisfaction, compared to 85% in low-safety environments. But even in the best-scoring organizations, only 50% of workers report genuine participation in decision-making. The mainstream has built better feelings without changing the structure. Half the workforce in the "safest" workplaces is still structurally excluded from power.
Psychological safety is the organizational development field's best approximation of what NVC names. But safety without power redistribution is comfort inside a still-intact domination system.
What Systemic NVC Actually Requires Organizations to Give Up
This is where most culture change initiatives stop short, and it is worth being direct.
Shifting from power-over to power-with asks institutions to surrender specific structural advantages:
Control through information asymmetry. Power-over depends on leadership knowing more than others. Power-with requires genuine transparency about what is known, what is uncertain, and what decisions are being made.
Accountability through punishment. Most performance and disciplinary systems are built on the threat of consequences. Power-with accountability asks what needs were unmet, what can be understood, and what would actually restore trust.
Legitimacy through rank. In power-over structures, a decision is valid because of who made it. In power-with structures, validity comes from whether the decision-making process included those affected and integrated relevant knowledge.
These are not small asks. They require organizations to redesign processes that currently give leadership control, predictability, and efficiency. The cost of not redesigning them is what the engagement data is measuring: $8.8 trillion annually in a workforce that has quietly disengaged from systems that do not trust them.
What Practitioners Can Do With This
If you are an NVC practitioner working in organizations, or a leader who has found NVC language useful, the structural frame changes what you prioritize.
Stop leading with the communication skills. Start with a structural audit: where does power concentrate, and on what basis? Where are decisions made without the people they affect? Where does accountability depend on punishment rather than understanding?
The five-barrier framework from the Paakkanen research is a practical entry point. Each dimension, mindset, behavior, culture, system, and leadership, requires its own intervention. If you are only working on behavior and mindset, you are addressing 40% of the problem at best.
NVC's deepest organizational application is not a training program. It is a set of questions an institution has to ask itself about how it is structured, and the willingness to change the answer.
Power-with is not a communication style. It is a governance choice. Every organization that takes NVC seriously eventually has to make that choice, or watch the training budget disappear into a system that stays the same.
The engagement crisis is not a mystery. The research is consistent, the costs are documented, and the structural explanation is available. What has been missing is the willingness to treat NVC as what it actually is: not a softer way to run the same structure, but a direct challenge to the structure itself.
That challenge is what makes it worth taking seriously.
Ready to go deeper? The NVC Learning Community brings together practitioners and leaders working on exactly this — the structural application of NVC beyond communication skills.
FAQ
Q: What does "power-with" mean in an organizational context?
Power-with is a structural architecture, not a communication style. It means decision-making authority is distributed based on who holds relevant knowledge and who is affected by the decision — not just who holds rank. Accountability is built around understanding rather than punishment, and people have genuine voice in the systems that govern them.
Q: Why doesn't NVC training stick in most organizations?
Because NVC is applied at the interpersonal level while the structural causes of conflict remain intact. When people practice empathic communication inside systems that still punish vulnerability, reward compliance, and concentrate decision-making at the top, the skills erode. The structure generates more friction than individuals can absorb through better communication alone.
Q: What is domination logic in an organization?
Domination logic is the set of structural choices — in performance systems, meeting formats, information flows, and accountability mechanisms — that concentrate power at the top and treat compliance as the primary organizational virtue. It is not just a management style; it is embedded in how the institution is designed.
Q: What did Satya Nadella actually do differently at Microsoft?
He distributed Rosenberg's book, but the more important move was structural: he changed how decisions were made, who was included in those decisions, and what behavior was rewarded across the organization. The communication shift followed from the structural redesign — not the other way around.
Q: What is the cost of disengagement caused by domination structures?
Gallup estimates $8.8 trillion annually in lost global productivity. In the US, engagement hit a decade low of 31% in 2024. These figures reflect workplaces where most people are not genuinely involved in the work or the decisions that shape it.
Q: Where do most culture change efforts fall short?
They address behavior and mindset while leaving the system and leadership dimensions of organizational culture untouched. Research by Paakkanen, Martela, and Pessi shows the five barriers to compassion in organizations are interdependent — remove one without the others, and the intervention fails. Most training programs address 40% of the problem at best.
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