Performance Management
How it's not always best to be focused on results.

Being in the Right State
How I first discovered that this stuff actually works!

A Sunny Room
Things look different when you look at them differently!

Michael's Story
Changing a lifetime's belief.

The R&D Director believed that failure to "confront complacent behaviour" was a weakness in his management team. Except for Barbara, who seemed to be very effective in this aspect of performance management. A project was undertaken using the techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) to "model" Barbara's behaviour and to transfer it to others.

Interviewing Barbara, and observing her in action, revealed some fascinating differences between her approach and the one her colleagues mostly shared.

Firstly, Barbara valued the team and its members and was anxious for them to succeed for their own sake. She stressed this herself and it was noticed by her team members. This emphasis on individual and team success overrode inhibitions to giving honest and timely feedback - including the "confronting" mentioned above. In contrast, other managers who valued other factors more strongly didn't give the same attention to performance (as opposed to results). They were perhaps reluctant to raise "difficult" issues when there were practical (more interesting?) problems to be solved.

Another manager, who was recognised as valuing his people even more strongly than was Barbara, was actually concerned about their general well being rather than their success. As a result, he tended to avoid "hard" feedback for fear of causing damage to the individual concerned.

Secondly, Barbara utilised very effective strategies in team meetings. Typically, she gave attention to people's state, i.e. were they engaged in the discussion, preoccupied, confused, concerned, afraid, happy? If she perceived that something was wrong then she acted to identify the issue and to resolve it by, for example, calling a break, having a one-to-one conversation or by taking time to explain and to check understanding. This was very different from the more common management approach which was to be concerned about the details of the problem being addressed, i.e. the task, and to intervene with ideas or instructions related to it.

The results of these observations were analysed along with feedback from various team members and summarised in the form of a "model". This was then used as the basis for one-to-one sessions with each of the three other managers involved in the project. These sessions were where the model was "installed" using NLP techniques.

One of the three was unable to put the model into effect due to factors outside the scope of this project. The other two applied the strategies and, in one case, changed the hierarchy of their personal values. As a result they began to bring key elements of Barbara's behaviour into their own and successfully to "confront complacency".

In a follow-up survey their team members noticed changes in behaviour and positively welcomed the more direct approach.

There was a time, a few years ago, when I wasn't particularly happy at work. Most mornings I would arrive and walk through Reception and into the office area as if I was going to be executed at the other end! I was often in a black mood by the time I reached my desk and woe betide anyone who wanted to speak to me.

One day, I realised that I was doing this and, having just listened to Steve McDermott (a motivational speaker) on tape I knew how important it is to be in the right state (rather than in "a" right state). So, the next day, as I entered the building, I deliberately stood up straighter, lengthened my stride and smiled. By the time I got to my desk I felt great and was more than ready for some social interaction!

I continued to do this every day and soon found that it began to happen automatically even if I forgot, consciously, to go through the routine.

Since then, I've studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming and am now a Master Practitioner. So now I know a lot more about controlling state and "anchoring" resourceful states to sights, sounds, places and gestures.

This is what I unknowingly did back then, repeating the actions that got me in a positive state and anchoring them to the entrance of the building so that the state was triggered every time I walked in.

Her manager told me that Jane was not living up to expectations. She was technically brilliant and extremely hard-working but hadn't fitted into the team. She seemed to lack confidence in putting her views forward or in taking initiatives.

After some time spent listening to Jane's account of things, and particularly how she felt about authority figures, we got to talking about her previous position. Immediately her mood lifted and she told me with great enthusiasm about her old job. The nature of the work was quite similar and yet her perception of it was completely different.

I decided to look at "submodalities", that is the way that Jane represented her memories internally.

When she thought about her old workplace she "saw" a bright, sunny room (a laboratory) with everything labeled with her name. It was all organised and she could see herself in the picture, bustling happily around.

When she thought of her new surroundings, she saw a dark, grey place. She was "associated" in the picture, i.e. seeing it as if she were actually there rather than as a film with an image of herself in it. She felt less confident and unsure of what to do.

I asked Jane to focus on this grey image and to imagine that she could simply turn on the sun. I knew she had managed to do this because the effect on her face was just like the sun coming out! Next, I invited her to step out of the picture, to dis-associate from it. This magnified the effect.

She now felt confident and enthusiastic when she thought about going back to the lab. So we fixed this in place by "future pacing", simply running through in her mind a few situations that she expected to encounter over the next week or two. With the altered submodalities, this established a positive expectation that Jane's unconscious mind could continue to build.

This was probably one of the quickest and most dramatic changes in my experience. It should be noted though that particular submodalities are very individual and often counter-intuitive. Just because "sunshine" equaled "joy" for Jane doesn't mean it would be so for everyone. Submodalities have to be systematically elicited for each client and each context.

Michael had a problem in meeting new people. He usually stood back and found it very difficult to overcome his reserve and enter into conversations. He dealt with this by avoiding social situations that would bring him into contact with strangers and had managed to shape his job to allow him to follow a similar strategy in business.

He knew that this was going to become more serious as the demands of his job changed. He also now realised that he was missing an enormous amount of enjoyment in his life due to this inhibition.

His NLP coach guided him back along his "timeline" until he was looking at himself as a very young boy. In a shallow trance state, but still as a dissociated observer, Michael watched his younger self, with his mother, at a time shortly before he started school. The family lived just across the road from the village school and Michael could see the children there from his window.

As he described to his coach some of the things that were happening, the older Michael suddenly became aware of a voice. It was something that he had completely forgotten about years before. It was his mother warning him to keep away from the older children.

Everything fell into place. This well-meant caution had been distorted by the young boy to mean, "Older children are dangerous". When he subsequently started school, he soon made friends with his classmates but the older children remained strangers. So, his mother's warning now came to mean that "Strangers are dangerous" and the pattern was laid down that would shape Michael's feelings and behaviours for his whole life. Until now!

Reversing this was simple. The coach talked him through a process within which he took the resources of an adult (confidence, knowledge, social skills) back into that earlier time and then rapidly "walked" through his life up to the present. Then he pushed that new, resourceful attitude out unto the future and mentally rehearsed several meetings with strangers that were still to happen.

Coming out of the trance, Michael felt liberated and astonished by the effect that such a tiny incident had had on his life, and by how easy it had been to change the pattern.