WHY IS LEADERSHIP SO IMPORTANT?
Leadership, in a nutshell, is about creating a compelling vision and motivating people to achieve it. Businesses that don't have this capability, can't hope to survive in today's turbulent economy. For this reason more and more businesses are focusing on developing their leaders.
But leadership is key for everyone - for individuals in terms of how they lead their own lives, through to political leaders rallying support for radical, global change.
CAN LEADERSHIP BE LEARNT?
We believe so. Certainly there are mountains of theories and tactics about how to lead. And many of these can be learnt from books and in business schools. But we don't believe that acquiring these skills or knowledge is what makes the real difference.
Many leaders share characteristics, but no characteristic is true of "all "leaders, except the fact that they "all have followers". What attracts people to follow others are how they make them feel, and this is where NLP can help you to develop your true leadership potential.
If it can be learnt, where do I start, it seems such a muddled topic?
To get a grip on leadership, it's helpful to think of it as an onion and explore each layer:
Leading yourself
Leading your team
Leading organisations
Leading yourself - the heart of the matter
Fundamental to leading yourself is learning to live 'at cause' rather than 'at effect'. This means taking responsibility for the results you get from what you do, and recognising that if you want different results, you need to do something different - only you can change! Others can be influenced, but not changed directly.
Part of learning to live at cause is choosing to be in a resourceful state when you need to be. 'State Management' is core to NLP and there are many techniques for allowing you to 'access' states that were useful to you in the past so that you can use them in the present.
One of the key tools is 'anchoring' and it's hugely beneficial to leaders to be able to draw on positive experiences to help them handle difficult situations in the present.
To get an idea of this, think about an experience that represents your 'personal best' as a leader. Think about the underlying themes - what factors, resources or strategies helped create this achievement? What was special about that situation - what you believed about it - that led you to this extraordinary achievement? Can you really get back into that experience and remember what you felt, saw and hear? If you can, then next time you need to feel more resourceful in a leadership situation, you can draw on this memory or 'anchor' and become more resourceful on the spot.
In addition, you may be able to influence the situations you find yourself in to recreate the beliefs you had that led you to extraordinary performance. If you understand what brings about the best in you and create more of those situations you will find it easier to lead yourself.
Learning to live 'at cause' and being able to select 'resource states' when you need them will help you achieve many things. However, to satisfy yourself, you need to select courses of action that are in line with your values. If you don't things will be 'incongruent' and decisions and actions may 'feel uncomfortable'.
Getting clear about your values isn't straightforward, and values do change over time. But to get started, take a decision of major importance in your life (such as getting married or moving house) and ask yourself what led you to make that decision - what did you want it to get for you?
If you do this with several major decisions, several decisions of medium importance (where you chose to go on holiday) and several minor decisions (what you ate for lunch yesterday!) you will build up a picture of the values that drive you.
Once you are clear about what's important to you as an individual, you will be in a position to create a personal vision that honours these values.
With this in mind, you can give your goals some POWER:
Goals that are 'well-formed' are much more likely to be achieved than those that aren't. The following model will help you create well-formed outcomes:
Positive: what you do want rather than what you don't
Own it: What can you do to influence or initiative this?
What will it look like, sound like, feel like, taste like and smell like - make it sensory specific
Ecology: What are the wider consequences of achieving this goal? Are there any downsides? If so, how can you refine the goal to eliminate the disadvantages?
Route: What is the first step? What's the next step? What will the last step be?
If you can master these skills you are well on your way to creating the personal foundations which will enable you to lead others.
LEADING YOUR TEAM
When leaders are at their best, they Challenge, Inspire, Enable others to act, Model the way, and Encourage the heart. This model, developed by Kouzes and Posner following extensive research, builds on useful NLP tools.
Challenge the process: Sometimes leading means initiating change and sometimes it means accepting a challenge that others might have overlooked or ignored.
Either way, people who lead need to take risks and innovate. This either means creating new ideas or recognising and supporting new ideas and challenging the system to turn these ideas into action. Most important technological breakthroughs were not initially recognised as good ideas (e.g. personal computers) - remember this the next time someone comes to you with a 'crazy' idea!
Inspire: Creating a picture of a positive future is essential if people are going to join together in achieving a collective goal. Often people think this comes down to inspirational speeches, but leaders find all interactions moments to inspire whether they are one on one or with large groups.
Some useful ideas about how to do this do come from looking at inspirational language used by great leaders however. And there are many examples that that have led to major changes in mass behaviour.
One of the best examples is Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. Unpicking the constituents of his speech reveals why his speech was so influential:
It was vivid - he used lots of images and word pictures and people could see the examples.
People could relate to the examples - they were familiar
He appealed to people's values and common beliefs
He used repetition and was positive and hopeful
He started using the term "I" and changed to "we" halfway through
He spoke with passion and emotion and his words felt highly congruent - he was personally convinced
As you think about the future you want for your team and organisation, how can you use these tips to make the way you talk to people more compelling? Not just in group situations, but one on one.
And can you frame your own personal vision in terms that are compelling to you too?
Try some of these things out next time you have an opportunity.
Enable Others To Act: When your team has understood and taken on a shared vision of the future, you need to enable them to deliver for you. "Coaching "is becoming a core competence for leaders today, to help them deliver through others.
A simple model which builds on NLP tools is the ROME model.
R=Rapport. Until you have built effective rapport your coaching efforts will probably be wasted
O=Outcome: Are you clear about what their outcome is for the coaching? And what about yours? Are they well formed i.e. in the POWER format? And do they dovetail?
M=Method: What is the best method for coaching them? What resources will you need?
E=Evaluation: How will you review their progress against the outcomes?
As well as setting up the direction for people, you need to think about how you delegate to them.
Challenge turns work from a chore into an adventure, but too much challenge creates stress. Instead of relying on carrots and sticks to motivate people, think about how can you provide your team with unique opportunities to discover learn and grow - opportunities where they can work in a 'flow' state: not bored and not over stretched.
And think about the impact you have on them each time you interact with them. Do you know what happens when they think about you, are they energised or demotivated? If you don't know, then ask them - and take responsibility for changing things if you don't get the answer you want!
All the above things are easier if you have built good relationships with your team. But good relationships aren't necessarily about 'liking' people, they are about two-way communication.
If NLP is about anything, it's about helping people communicate more effectively - try the following ideas on for size: how would you behave if you believed that "The meaning of what I said is what is understood" or " you cannot not communicate". These "presuppositions "of NLP help people take responsibility for their experiences and, we believe, make them more effective.
Modelling the way: Leaders who say one thing and do another have little credibility and rarely generate willing followership. Take some time to evaluate how consistent your behaviour is with what you've identified as your values.
Pay particular attention to your diary and time management - how well does what you are scheduled to do over the next month reflect what you say you believe is important? If it doesn't match, how can you change what's on your agenda? You can even ask your team what they think is important to you - if they can't tell you, they won't know how to please you!
Encourage the Heart: Unless you show people how you value their efforts motivation will wane. There are a whole host of ways to recognise individual contributions to the success of every project. And one of the most simple is to say thank you and provide feedback. It's also well known that the thing most people want from their bosses is to understand how well they are doing, which means providing constructive feedback as well as acknowledging what people do well.
Ask yourself how often you praise people. If you find this straightforward, ask yourself if you ever find reasons not to help people improve their performance?
Create a plan to rebalance things if they need it.
LEADING ORGANISATIONS CREATING MASS FOLLOWERSHIP
Leading larger groups of people requires all the skills covered in the first two 'layers' of leadership - leading yourself and your team. To succeed in today's business environment, leaders also need to ensure that their vision for their group includes becoming more flexible and faster when reacting to the market.
In addition, leaders need to understand how to relate to stakeholders and build partnerships in new ways. In today's business environment, clients are sometimes also competitors, and the people who contribute to the success of the firm are not always directly employed by the business.
And as a firm, you still need to be able to identify commercial opportunities and take calculated risks. To be an effective leader, you don't need to necessarily cover the spectrum of competencies yourself.
We believe that if you are skilled in the foundations of NLP, lead your own life according to a set of principles and can motivate a team, you are probably equipped to select and motivate a group of people who have the diversity of skills to complement yours. By inspiring a team who collectively have the skills to succeed in today's economy, and sharing that vision with the wider set of stakeholders, you will have set yourself up for success as an inspirational leader.
SUMMARY
ISNT ALL OF THIS COMMON SENSE?
Hopefully. Although it's amazing how little common sense seems to be around when things get tough. Truly awesome leaders know that success comes from engaging hearts and minds. Yet many people still get caught up the more tangible aspects of business such as the financial aspects and underestimate the value in the long term of effective relationships.
We believe that NLP is the very best set of tools for developing leaders and we hope the ideas detailed here are useful. If you have questions or comments about any of the ideas raised, please contact us a PPI.
Similarly, if you would like to lean more about the techniques and how to apply them in your own environment, feel free to e-mail us and we will do our best to help. Laura Lewin.
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