Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Change Leaders

The Butterfly Effect

David Potter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351583473
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Small Business

We know a lot about change leadership. We understand how to design change programmes, and we know how to prescribe best practice change methods. Yet, despite all this knowledge, it is reported that up to 70% of change leadership projects fail to realize many of their objectives. The fault lines are cited as occurring at the micro level of social interaction.

What we don't adequately explain and demonstrate within the change leadership literature is how change leaders may consciously generate in themselves and in others resourceful mindsets, emotions, attitudes, and behaviours to enable positive change leadership dynamics. Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Change Leaders: The Butterfly Effect fills this gap by connecting the practices of personal development with those of corporate change leadership.

This book has the vision of advancing NLP as a serious technology in the change leader's tool box. The book introduces to operations managers, HR practitioners, OD specialists, and students of management new ideas and practices, which can transform their effectiveness as change leaders.

It focuses on the benefits of applied NLP to change leaders as a generative change toolkit. Secondly, the book provides a model that shows change leaders how to build a climate of psychological safety to establish rapport with stakeholders. Thirdly, the book provides a strategy for enabling broader cultural change and stakeholder engagement throughout the organization.

Part 1

The theory and operational context of NLP

1 Conscious leadership

Introduction

In this chapter I will introduce my definition of the change leader and the specific idea of Conscious Leadership that will form part of the conceptual and practical framework to connect with the overarching themes of the book. I will introduce the practical activity of meta-reflection as a core change leadership capability. I have designed a short reflective statement regarding my own change journey as an explanation regarding the motivations behind this book. This chapter is intended to encourage the emergence of the reflective practitioner that lies within all of us involved in leading change initiatives.

Defining the change leader

The change leader can be understood to be any manager who has been tasked with leading a change project to a successful outcome within an organization. The change leader as a job title is usually implicit rather than explicit. It is normal for the change leader to hold a foundational job title such as HRM manager, operational manager, IT manager, general manager, team leader, or head of department. The secondary title of change leader is rarely written on the person’s job description. Rather, it is an implicit expectation that the manager in question will (A) provide leadership to followers when required, and (B) lead their followers through episodes of planned change management interventions on behalf of their employers. The change leader often inhabits two worlds, (1) the world of managing established processes concentrating on making variables predictable and controllable, and (2) the world of unpredictable social outcomes imbedded within change leadership processes. The change leader may, or may not have been formally prepared for their role and therefore may hold impoverished maps in relation to the complicated task of change leadership and thus have fewer options regarding the strategic choices required in terms of behavioural, conceptual, and emotional flexibility.

We need a more specific understanding of the identity of a change leader. The current term is too general, and it implies an external focus where the manager leads others in the execution of their work. When we review the literature on the causes of failure rates associated with change projects, we identify the emphasis is on weakness in soft leadership skills rather than hard leadership skills (Parkes, 2011; McCalman & Potter, 2015). The latter involves the technical skills associated with an occupation and associated analytical skills. The former involves the inter- and intra-personal skills necessary to build collaborations and dialogues with others. By intra-personal skills I am referring to the capabilities we have for managing our emotions, behaviours and thinking styles and reflecting upon the ways in which these expressions impact on our external relationships. By inter-personnel skills I am referring to the capabilities we must build to maintain open and co-operative relations with others.

The change leader needs to be comfortable with hard analytical change techniques such as ‘mapping out change’ (McCalman et al., 2016), and the softer cultural side of change which involves managing one’s own inner states and building a generative field of dialogical exchanges between stakeholders (Dilts, 2017). This book mainly addresses the latter skill set.

As the world of work changes it is important that those in power who are charged with the strategic development of organizations are equipped to manage both first and second order change. The former deals with incremental changes in established methods, structures, and systems, for example, replacing one IT system with another; the latter deals with the ability of organizational members to critically reflect on the way they do things, why they do things the way they do them and to generate a productive state as a group phenomenon and a critical leadership competency.

Many change leaders are stuck in the ‘transmission model’ of change management (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2015) employing broadly transactional methods. This model relies almost exclusively on hierarchal power and reward and punishment systems to motivate change teams. This model, I feel, is outdated and redundant relative to a modern workforce. A cultural shift is required towards the ‘diffusion model’ embracing coaching and transformational leadership techniques utilizing intrinsic reward systems as key motivators. The diffusion model relies on an approach to change based on principles of organizational democracy and generative collaboration and stakeholder dialogue. The intrinsic rewards are based upon building a shared identity, common and compelling vision, and a shared sense of mission throughout the change network. Anderson and Anderson (2010, p. 3) recognize the need for this and they argue that managers need to “transform their beliefs about people, organizations, and change itself; they must view transformation through a new set of mental lenses to see the actual dynamics of transformation; and they must alter their leadership style and behaviour to accommodate the unique requirement of transformation.” A conceptual and practical model of change leadership which meets with our requirements is that of ‘Conscious Leadership’.

The conscious change leader

Dean and Linda Anderson (2010, p. 3) advance the idea of conscious leadership as an identity construct that I think best fits contemporary change leaders. Dean and Linda describe conscious leaders as “a new breed of leader for a new breed of change”. They describe conscious leadership as involving “a required shift in both leaders and consultants consciousness regarding how they view change, themselves, and their roles as Change Leaders.” Conscious change leaders are people who set out to master their own internal resources and the art of change leadership in general. They have a model of human nature, especially motivational drivers, and they understand the butterfly effect, i.e., a slight change in the values, beliefs, cognitions, behaviours, or emotional strategies in a potential leader can and often does create a ripple of change throughout the client’s socio/cultural system as others model the new expressions.

Conscious leaders are sensitive to their own inner world views; they are deliberate regarding their choice of social strategies and are habitually self-reflective regarding the feedback they get from social interactions. A key capability of a conscious change leader is the ability to meta-reflect on the part that their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural strategies in use played in generating their social results. Conscious leaders lead their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural strategies; these do not lead them. This means that they are self-disciplined at a level of meta-reflection. They minimize their tendency to react impulsively and unreflectively and they make a real effort to build empathetic competencies and the skills required to understand people. This book aims to share the ideas and skills required to build conscious leadership capabilities. A key conscious leadership skill is that of meta-reflection.

Conscious leadership skills involve mastery of the following variables:

• Mindset: the attitude of mind we construct based upon the way we perceive the world and the meanings we attach to our perceptions.

• Soul: our sense of community purpose and desire to serve and help others be the best version of themselves.

• Ego: our sense of ‘I’, our individualistic persona, our framework for self-validation.

• Emotions: an affective state of consciousness, instinctive or intuitive feeling towards an object.

• Cognitions: our thinking patterns and preferred sensory system.

• Meta-programmes: our cognitive strategies for interacting with the world to generate our social results.

• Behaviours: the strategies we use to enact our meta-programmes through interactions with our self or with others.

• Values: the scale of importance we place on a social object.

• Beliefs: the principles regarding the world and our experiences that we adhere to that we regard as being true.

All of the above can be regarded as states of being. Anderson and Anderson (2010) describe states of being as ‘ways of being’, and argue that the ability of a person to meta-reflect on their way of being is a critical conscious leadership skill. They define this concept in the following way: “It (Way of Being) can be used to describe how leaders are ‘being’ and expressing themselves at any point in time or how they are relating to others in various circumstances and situations. While mindset causes emotions and behaviour, the combination is the source of a leader’s way of being” (2010, p. 169). For me what is useful about this definition is that it implicitly points internally towards the inner sense-making dynamics of the conscious change leader. I prefer the tag ‘state of being’ to ‘way of being’ because it allows me to be very specific regarding the state of being I am meta-reflecting towards. Therefore, throughout this book I will refer to states as social strategies we employ to create our social results. NLP applications are geared towards managing and changing our states of being. The ability to self-calibrate at the level of meta-reflection and change one’s state of being if it is not generating resourceful results through NLP applications is the subject of this book.

Meta-reflection

Meta-reflection involves the potential for conscious reflection towards meta-cognition; meta-emoting and meta-behaving. These are all meta NLP techniques that are arguably foundational constructs supporting and underpinning the broader repertoire of NLP patterns and interventions. A NLP pattern is the specific process-led activity that generates changes in our beliefs, attitudes, emotions, behaviours and thinking strategies which results in a shift in our social results. The term ‘meta’ means something that stands above something else. For example, if one is frustrated at a change management meeting, meta-emoting would involve the process of accessing a state of active curiosity to define the primary state (frustration) and enquire into how resourceful this emotional state of frustration is in this moment. This process of reflexive thinking is also identified as a critical competence for the conscious change leader and, indeed, the general team leader throughout the organizational change literature (Schon, 1984).

The conscious change leader needs to develop their meta-thinking capabilities as a critical tool. To be effective, they need to be able to critically reflect on their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural strategies, and how their choices are influencing their competence as a practitioner. Importantly, the conscious change leader needs to be able to identify the way they are generating their perceptual maps and the processes they employ that delete, distort, and generalize their experiences. The NLP technique developed by Bandler and Grinder (1974) known as ‘The Meta-model’ which is a set of language-based questions can be used to calibrate one’s filters and access deep structure sense making to generate richer and cleaner perceptual understandings or maps. Importantly, for conscious leadership to be authentic it naturally involves the conscious leader being able to honestly reflect on how they lead in practice, not in terms of their ideal socially desirable model but, rather, their model of leadership in practice (Argyris & Schon, 1978).

A central presupposition that guides the writing throughout this book is that conscious change leaders are fundamentally working within cultural and social systems. The socio/cultural system is dynamic, it is not static. Conscious change leaders have the potential to function as significant others and stand as role-models for desirable capabilities in their organization. Therefore, change leaders are, as Alvesson and Sveningsson (2015) claim, meaning-makers. They are important and active sense-making agents and they do have free agency to change the internal drivers that generate their attitudes, emotions, cognitions, behaviours, and relationships. When they exercise this generative power for personal change they cannot avoid disrupting the wider socio/cultural field that they operate from. Thus, they create the butterfly effect which, taken literally, means that they will stimulate shifts in the meaning systems and related social strategies in others throughout the wider socio/cultural field.

Within the above lies the essence of NLP as a conscious change leadership resource. The changes start from within. If they are perceived to be successful, then the strategies generated by conscious change leaders that produced the results will be unconsciously modelled by their followers. Modelling involves the analysis of the success factors that enable someone or a group to generate success and to adopt these success factors into behavioural, emotive, and cognitive resources to generate similar results. However, the change process must start with the conscious change leader acknowledging their shadow self.

A confession

As a conscious leadership practitioner, I have composed a confessional to demonstrate to the reader a very powerful technique you could employ that will greatly enhance this book as a conscious change leadership toolbox. This technique is known as ‘Auto ethnography’ which is basically a ‘letter to self’. It is a deeply personal account of the challenges associated with change leadership that are part of what Timothy Gallwey (1982) refers to as ‘the inner and outer game’.

We all have two models of self that we internalize and which keep us company as we undertake our life’s journey. The first is our socially desirable image of self. This is the ideal version of self that we adopt and try to emulate or at least convince others as being the authentic us. This version of self is particularly relevant front stage as we enact the role of professional managers. This version is the one which is seen to be:

• Decisive

• Strong

• Knowledgeable

• Certain

• Stable

• Reliable

The second version of self, which can be described as our shadow self is the private self that we think others cannot see, hear, or feel. This is our authentic self, which is not to say the desirable self is not authentic, rather it can be manufactured for public consumption whereas our shadow self lives inside of us and is arguably incompatible with the image of the socially desirable self-identity that organizations advance as core competencies in change leaders. Our shadow self may include the following characteristics:

• Anxiety

• Self-doubt

• Low self esteem

• Fear of failure

• Fear of criticism

• Low confidence

• Insecurities

• Emotional stress

• Mental stress

• Behavioural stress

• Parts conflicts

We are always in conflict internally with the various parts we associate with our socially desirable self and our shadow self.

My confession has two purposes: (1) to use my own experience as a device to illuminate the focus of change that will be the subject of this book; and, (2) to introduce the colourful conceptual language that forms the discursive space within which NLP operates. In the chapters that follow I shall define all of these terms and locate them for you in their functional context. I took the time to apply myself to decoding NLP language and when you also do this the field will shed its mysticism and be accessible to you in both practical and thoughtful ways

I invite you to think about your own journey as a manager and as a change leader. Write down your own confession, and explore the areas of social interaction that, on reflection, you acknowledge have hindered your ability to build rapport with others. This is the first...