Change Your Business with NLP

Powerful tools to improve your organisation's performance and get results

Lindsey Agness

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781907312403
• eBook ISBN: 9780857081339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Transform the way your business works. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques can be applied to all business challenges. As a leader or manager in either the public or private sectors, whatever your industry or size of organisation, you can use NLP to improve your business by changing the mindsets of everyone you work with.

When tailored for practical business application, NLP can help you to identify and deliver efficiencies, hold onto clients in the midst of increasing competition, improve morale and increase organisational performance and results.

Change Your Business With NLP is the first genuinely practical guide for managers, showing how to use NLP techniques to overcome specific business problems. You will learn how to:

• Improve your results as a leader
• Build an exceptional team
• Manage change more effectively
• Change your organisation's culture
• Create more effective client and customer relationships
• Transform your presentation skills
• Increase the overall performance of your business

Bestselling author Lindsey Agness, an international change management consultant and certified trainer of NLP, uses step-by-step techniques and a broad range of case studies to show you that NLP can deliver measurable results in business.

PART ONE

TRANSFORMING LEADERS WITH NLP

1

BUILDING STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS

As we start this new decade we are still in the midst of one of the biggest recessions of all time. Why are some businesses still growing whilst others are struggling or even going bankrupt? Why are some public or charitable businesses using their funds more effectively whilst others are wasting potential opportunities for efficiencies? One of the key factors is that the businesses that are successful have leaders with a mindset that ‘makes things happen’.

These leaders:

• Have a Vision

• Start with the big picture or the end in mind

• Have a healthy appetite towards risk

• Are driven by the need to make a difference

• Are tenacious when things don’t go to plan

• Know 100% about their business

• Are passionate

• Innovate

• Most importantly, they are leaders or participants and not followers or spectators

Those organisations with leaders who batten down the hatches and hope for the best may find that, when this storm is over, they have been surpassed by their competitors who were prepared to continue ‘making things happen’ and learning even through the tough times.

In this first part of the book, we are going to explore exactly where you are starting from - your current mindset, leadership style and the feedback you’ve received in the past. Then we’ll move on to create what you want for the future, setting your personal leadership goals and giving you the tools to develop your own mindset for success.

Where are you now?

Cast your mind back to the quiz that you completed at the start of this book. Were your scores mainly As, Bs or Cs? I described the As as being on the way to the Brilliant Zone, the Bs hovering dangerously close to the Grey Zone and the Cs struggling to move out of the Awful Zone. I’d like to describe these in more detail so you can work out where exactly you sit.

The Personal Leadership Grid

The Personal Leadership Grid describes three personal leadership zones that people typically find themselves in along with the attached generalised experiences. By ‘personal leadership’ I mean the amount of control and responsibility you are taking currently in order to become the leader you want to be, have the impact that you want to have and achieve the results that you know you are capable of achieving. You don’t even have to be a leader right now. The important question is, ‘Are you personally leading yourself towards where you want to be?’

Personal Leadership Grid

The Awful Zone is a place where you don’t want to stay for too long. You feel wretched and unhappy. Normally you find yourself there because something has happened - maybe you’ve been made redundant, fired or pressurised into a situation that you don’t want to be in. The only good thing about the Awful Zone is that it does make you take action and change.

The Grey Zone is that place where people all too often get stuck, under-achieving or marking time in careers where they meant to stay for a stop-gap and spent a lifetime instead. It feels comfortably uncomfortable as you know that you are selling out on your potential. I believe that many people spend most of their career in this zone.

The Brilliant Zone is the caretaker of our ambitions and dreams. It’s the zone where you know you’re heading towards achieving your goals. It feels good to be on that road.

The question is: where are you right now?

Exercise 2: Where am I on the Personal Leadership Grid?

Take a red pen and mark where you think you are on the Personal Leadership Grid. Be honest with yourself. As you look at the Grid are you surprised where you ended up? Are you ready to find out how to move faster towards the Brilliant Zone, or how to finally find the courage to move out of the Grey Zone, or how to make an immediate improvement by moving out of the Awful Zone? Good, so let’s get started by discovering more about each Zone and how to move up as quickly as possible.

The Awful Zone

The Awful Zone is not somewhere you want to be for long. You end up in the Awful Zone when something significant and negative happens to you such as:

• A sudden redundancy (especially if there is not a pay-off)

• A new boss who treats you badly, maybe even bullies you

• Restructuring where you are left in a role that you don’t want

• Withdrawal of funds or budget cuts

• Someone at work who makes your life a misery

• Disciplinary or sacking offence

Get the idea? The Awful Zone is the point of no return. This is the point where you finally take action. It’s the moment when you deal with the situation at work differently or you leave. At this point, although it is bizarre to describe it as such, the event does you a favour as it drives you to take action and produce different results. This is the terrain of the Awful Zone.

Claire: the moment of truth

Claire was a senior executive officer working for a central government department. When her boss left she thought long and hard about going for the promotion as she had been encouraged to do by a number of other senior officers in the department. However, she was pregnant with her first child and decided that it would be too much change all at once. She went off on maternity leave and returned six months later with a new boss in post. Her new boss was male, younger than her with much less experience. Instead of working collaboratively with her, he was competitive and stand-offish from the start. He would criticise everything she did whilst at the same time over-loading her with his own work. He also demanded that she work very long hours which was a strain for her with a young baby. Claire tried talking to him and changing her strategies. She began saying ‘no’ to his demands for her to take on his work and attempted to get her work-life balance back. As a result, their relationship further deteriorated. In desperation, she took out a grievance in the hope that his actions would be fully investigated. However, ranks closed, and, after twenty years of blemish-free service, she negotiated a compromise agreement and left. Though firmly in the Awful Zone, she had the space to re-think her future career. She set herself some new goals to get her career back on track. Having an exciting vision that she was passionate about helped her to take the initial challenging steps forwards.

If you are in the Awful Zone right now this book will give you the tools to resolve the situation or make a quick exit and to begin to move towards what you are really capable of achieving in your career.

The Grey Zone

Everyone knows of someone who feels like they’ve wasted years at work in a job they don’t enjoy and are under-achieving their full potential. Perhaps that’s how you feel yourself. Instead of being excited and stretched, you’ve spent years being bored and miserable. How does this happen?

Often it’s because of the promise of something coming in the future, like a final salary scheme pension or the potential of a generous redundancy. This wouldn’t be so bad if these ‘carrots’ were imminent, i.e. within 18 months to two years, but people waste their best years at work waiting for future redemption. I was recently coaching a public sector female manager who was in her early 40s. She was clearly miserable in her role and capable of far more but there were no opportunities coming up where she worked. When I challenged her about why she stayed in a role that made her feel that way she told me she was ‘coasting to retirement’ and didn’t want to risk losing her pension. As she had at least 20 years to her retirement I wondered what her attitude would cost her in terms of her health and self-esteem.

If it’s not because of the future, for many it’s because of responsibilities they have in the now. For example, a mortgage to pay, family to look after or fear of change can all keep you stuck in a career that you don’t really want to be in. I’m not promoting being reckless with your career - we’ve just experienced a long and hard recession where it can be sensible to sit it out. Yet even the recession can become an excuse for staying stuck. The recession won’t last forever and there are many people who have taken risks at this time and done well because not many others are!

I describe the Grey Zone as a place where many people spend their entire careers - it’s not awful but it’s certainly not brilliant. It’s comfortable because it’s what they know. Sometimes I describe it as that ‘comfortable yet uncomfortable’ place. It’s uncomfortable because, deep down, people know they are selling out on their ambitions for a ‘safe’ existence. Over my years of coaching and training I’ve come to realise that many people settle for second best because they haven’t got the courage to do anything about changing their situation. There’s a saying: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done you always get what you’ve always got.’ That’s the mantra of those who live their lives in the Grey Zone. Life in the Grey Zone feels familiar, comfortable, unfulfilling and stuck, and those in the Grey Zone do not feel they have any choice but to remain where they are. Of course if you are happy in the Grey Zone that’s great and I suspect you aren’t as you’re reading this book!

Jonny: cleaning his career away

Jonny had taken over his father’s very successful family cleaning business and had been running it for many years. The business had grown over the years to employ over 100 people and now had some very large corporate contracts and healthy profits. The business funded a good lifestyle-a large home, flash cars, motorbike, lots of holidays. Jonny had been feeling bored and disillusioned for some time yet was scared of admitting it to anyone, especially himself. He found the business very routine as he knew it inside out. Even the thrill of winning new contracts didn’t have the same excitement as it used to. He was dragged along to a personal development weekend by some friends and learned that he could make other choices for himself. That was a shock to him. He started to read more self-help books and he got into NLP. Through his personal development training he began to come up with new goals for himself which included a new career as a life-coach. He came right to the edge of making different choices for himself. Yet he still stopped short of making the change, which was very frustrating for him. He was terrified of losing the lifestyle he had built up and of handing over the management of the business to others. He chose to remain in the Grey Zone. I ...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART ONE - TRANSFORMING LEADERS WITH NLP
• PART TWO - TRANSFORMING TEAMS WITH NLP
• PART THREE - TRANSFORMING ORGANISATIONS WITH NLP
• PART FOUR - TRANSFORMING CUSTOMER SERVICE WITH NLP
• ARE YOU READY?
• WHAT NEXT?
• APPENDIX 1: - NLP GRID
• APPENDIX 2: - THE LANGUAGE USED BY DIFFERENT REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS
• APPENDIX 3: - WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED ABOUT NLP?
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• INDEX