You may have seen many books, ebooks, websites and newsletters on the
subjects of coaching and NLP, promising instant results.
You may have experienced many training programs that promised to give
you easy answers and foolproof recipes for success.
And while you may have realised that none of this was realistic 'as
stated on the tin', you still wondered what parts might work for you.
This book is the result of ten years training, coaching and mentoring
rising executives and highlights ideas and concepts from using NLP in a
coaching and mentoring context that have helped people move towards
their ambitions and dreams.
If you are genuinely interested in your own development, in getting the
most from your career and life and playing your part in your business
and it’s aspirations then this ebook will be an important step forward
on your journey.
This ebook is written for you as both as a rising executive and coach
and also recognises that being a coach may also be part of your own
personal journey of learning and development.
What could you get from reading this ebook?
A firm grounding in coaching and NLP
Ideas that that, when taken on board, will make a
genuine and positive difference to and for you
Perhaps even the start of an exiting new adventure
which will result in a step change in your career and enjoyment of
life
Some powerful and pragmatic questions to ask both
as coach and client
While this ebook is titled ‘A useful Guide to NLP as a Coach’ many
of the skills and techniques apply to mentoring, leadership, sales,
managing change and consulting as well as coaching.
What are coaching and mentoring?
In most of the companies we've worked in at various management levels
over the past 10 years, different people have very different views and
expectations from coaches, mentors and change agents.
Some of these different views make it harder to establish the benefits
and distinctions of these interventions and yet also underline the need
for different approaches based on an organisation’s varied and changing
needs.
An organisation and its managers have a very wide range of needs and in
order to serve those needs we have to identify the professional roles
that can support organisational development and change.
Change at the individual or organisational level follows the same
underlying pattern and what matters are the abilities of the person
facilitating that change as a coach, mentor, consultant and leader.
All of these roles perform the task of helping an individual or
organisation move from their current situation to something that they
aspire to. In an simplified scenario, the client or organisation is in a
present condition and wants to move to some other condition. That
movement or change requires action, and the role of the coach is to help
the client to plan and manage a series of action steps which bring about
the desired change.
Part of the coach or mentor’s role is likely to involve establishing the
current situation and true aspirations of the organisation or
individual. Often, consultants, coaches and managers assume that the
perceived current situation is accurate, when in fact it may not be for
many reasons ranging from insufficient information to blind optimism or
even the deliberate misreporting of performance data. This is dangerous
because in order to accurately navigate to your destination, you need to
know exactly where you are now.
The generic approaches to coaching that are based on it fail not because
of a flaw in the coaching process but because the world is not ideal.
Clients are not always where they think they are, and what they want is
not always what they really want, and so any action plan must take this
into account.
Imagine that you have satellite navigation in your car and that it is
telling you to ‘turn right’. You look out of the window and cannot see a
right turn. Where is the fault?
There have been many instances of lorries getting stuck under low
bridges because the satellite navigation didn’t take that detail into
account. The route only makes sense when the present location and
destination are accurate, and when the route has a useful relationship
to ‘reality’.
Individuals and organisations often set goals that are not true to their
actual intentions or aspirations because they are based on the
expectations of others. For example, someone might pursue a promotion
because of his or her perception of what friends, family and managers
expect, even if it is not really what they want. Rather than succeeding
or failing, the person ends up in between the two, wasting energy that
could be directed into real achievement.
Companies often set a direction based on the needs of the market, their
customers, stakeholders and competitors and again try to swim against
the current of their own true intentions and needs. The result may be
moderate success, but in a competitive market, that inevitably leads to
failure of the business or venture.
The value of NLP to a coach or mentor is therefore in having a set of
tools and techniques for managing the difference between the ‘ideal
world’ coaching model and the ‘real world’ of the client’s situation.
Where the client is missing or hiding information that is vital to
understanding their current situation, a skilled coach can use NLP to
align the client’s perceptions with reality so that any action plan is
much more effective in achieving the results that the client seeks.
The organisation or individual client is responsible for wanting and
choosing the outcome, for making the change, and for taking a view on
the value of the intervention. The coach and mentor agent is responsible
for facilitating the change; for identifying the steps and putting
forward their recommendations.
The client has to take responsibility for implementing those
recommendations, otherwise they do not take ownership of the outcome.
How directive or non-directive that facilitation is depends on the
context and the individuals involved. In my experience, change is most
likely to 'stick' where the individuals concerned have worked out the
answers for themselves. However they often need a few missing pieces,
ideas or parts of a strategy to make the change work effectively.
I differentiate between coaching, where the focus is more on a single
outcome such as increasing sales revenues or customer service scores,
and mentoring where there are complex and often competing outcomes such
as managing stakeholders’ expectations or personal career aspirations.
In his book 'The Element', Sir Ken Robinson suggests that mentors have
four key roles. They recognise our talents, they encourage us, they
facilitate us and they stretch us.
In my experience the coaching that has the greatest value to an
organisation is directed at their high performers and key influencers,
and that with the continual 'delayering' of middle management, the
coaches, mentors and change agents become an important 'knowledge store'
within the organisation.
Coaches are often engaged to support ‘high potential’ managers who have
been identified as having the raw skills and talent to become the
leaders of the business in the future.
Succession planning and talent management programs help groups of high
potential managers to build their support networks and develop the
skills, relationships and experience to shape the business and ensure
its continuing success.
It is also important to allow the organisation to evolve; to ensure that
tomorrow’s leaders do not perpetuate today’s cultural issues
Why will coaching become more important?
As organisations become more complex, traditional management hierarchies
disappear and the drive for performance accelerates. ‘Top down’
structures are being replaced with matrix management systems. People
move around the organisation more often and there is a greater focus on
exploiting tacit knowledge over establishing systems and processes.
Relationships rather than roles drive the business and the speed of
decision making has increased dramatically thanks to new communication
technologies.
Amongst all of this, many people no longer enjoy a consistent management
relationship and must look elsewhere for their personal and professional
development.
A coach can support targeted changes in the business such as increasing
sales performance or managing change whereas a mentor can be a longer
term guide. Both supplement the traditional management structure,
enabling a more flexible, more adaptable and more successful business.
In working with hundreds of clients and colleagues in dozens of
companies, I have found that people who succeed in the corporate
environment:
Develop a good relationship with and add value to
their managers and manager’s peers
Develop a good relationship with and add value to
their key stakeholders
Develop career options and revenue streams that
are separate to and non-competitive with their current employer
Improve performance in their current role
You may be surprised by point 3, yet when you think
about it you may recognise this in yourself or some of your colleagues.
What many people do is to ‘hedge their bets’. They have one foot in each
camp, saying they are committed to their manager yet reading job adverts
at lunchtime and accepting calls from recruiters. They dream about what
they want to do and resent their manager or employer for not letting
them do it.
People who develop non-competitive outside interests are often more
fully committed to the success of their current organisation.
When they are at work, they are at work, and will be until they either
go home for the day or they resign. The people who hedge their bets are
present in body but not in spirit, and this is obvious in their
performance. The people who commit to those different ventures are open
about it.
Coaching and mentoring can be extremely valuable to the individual and
organisation in getting people to commit themselves to the pursuit of
their goals.
