[cleverwebble]

"No, I'll do it myself" and "I feel like you aren't listening to me" comes straight out of couple's therapy handbooks on what not to do.

You can be direct and respectful, but this was not respectful, this was just aggressive.

[abetusk]

Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"?

Also, this dynamic is one of a boss to employee, not of a relationship peer. The boss in this instance needs to communicate something very clearly: "This is a fire-able offense if this keeps happening." Is it better in this instance to be more aggressive?

[roenxi]

> Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"?

The problem with that phrase is it is trivially untrue - the person is listening to him. It would be like me saying "you're not reading what I'm writing"; you are reading it. You might not understand it, you might not agree with it, maybe the writing is even improper in some way. But you can't write a response to it if you didn't read it. The concern he's raising isn't a real one and Jerry can't address it because he's already listening and he has no control over how his manager feels about said manager's misconceptions.

You'll notice that Jerry had to spend a few rounds of begging and pleading to figure out he needs to say "Yes, I will be accurate and careful from now on, so you can trust what I say. If I have a concern, I will raise it with you directly and honestly" to get through this and end the encounter. There are two things to note here:

1) Manager should have led with this if that is what he wanted. Not "I’m worried you’re not listening to me" but "To make sure you've heard what I've said, could you please repeat back in your own words".

2) The manager shouldn't be asking for Jerry to repeat stuff back to him in that way in the normal course of events, it is somewhat unprofessional/a stupid power play. Nothing Jerry is committing to in that sentence is a real change in behaviour. He was probably already trying to be accurate and trustworthy. He didn't realise there were any concerns here until his manager exploded. Changes in behaviour would be something like "There was a conflict between X and Y, in this instance I prioritised X. Next time I will prioritise Y." One of the issues is the manager did such a bad job of steelmanning and drawing out Jerry's reasoning behind the behaviour we can't tell what he did wrong. Many of the accusations ("attitude problem", "didn't like Jerry's tone", "not working in good faith", etc) are absurd and ungrounded. In my opinion we can't really figure out what Jerry's mistake was from the article; Manager wanted him to write certain code, he wouldn't because [reasons] and we aren't being told in any depth what [reasons] were. They may have been bad [reasons] but the manager should be interrogating and dealing with them instead of complaining about being "listened to".

"I feel like you aren't listening to me" happens to be a pretty classic phrase used by people who are inarticulate by the way. They can't get a message across and they don't think to look at their own communication to find the problem; but they know that they can't accuse the other person of being too stupid to understand (the other classic :[ ). So the problem becomes that somehow the other person just isn't listening.