An Ouch Moment!

It could have been one of those squirmingly embarrassing evenings. It was a few years ago and, along with the two other trainers, I was at the after-training dinner with delegates on the management development training we were presenting for a large multi-national.

The dinner was an opportunity for the delegates to have some ‘informal time’ with one of the senior directors, who was also the after-dinner speaker. And the  senior director was one of the ‘old school’ (he has since retired!) and by the time he stood up to begin his speech it was obvious that he had more than enough to drink. Read the rest of this entry »

People who are ‘going to’ have a great future

The next Pegasus NLP Newsletter will be out shortly. It will be about people who have their ‘future on wheels’. The ones (unlike you or I!) who talk a great talk about the wonderful future they are going to have. But who never seem to get any nearer to it.

The ‘future on wheels’ pattern is a sort of never-never approach to life! Read the rest of this entry »

Managing and Leading in tougher times

Managing and team leading in 2010 and beyond is more demanding than ever before with the challenge of raising and maintain morale and motivation in a smaller workforce in which people:

• have less job security than ever before
• are often dealing with an increased workload as a result of staff cuts
• are experiencing the stress of having to adjust to almost continuous change. Read the rest of this entry »

‘I’ll try…’

It’s only a tiny word. Just 3 letters. But how a person uses the word ‘Try’ provides important clues to their beliefs and attitude.

This widely used and quite sneaky little word is generally used without much thought – almost as a figure of speech, in fact. But what lies beneath it is the attitude I don’t believe…as in ‘I don’t believe you can’ or ‘I don’t believe I can’. And like a lot of words and terms we use it so often that few of us listen to our use of it even though this is emotionally impacting ourselves and our listeners. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s listening… and there’s really listening.

Normally when we’re listening to somebody we tend to pay attention to what they are actually saying. We listen to the words, the sentences, the descriptions, the story line, etc. As a result we may have feelings about them and what they are saying. Yet we are really just hearing and responding to a quite superficial level of their full message.

On the other hand some people, and especially those who have had a thorough training in NLP, will ‘hear’ more. They are also listening for what’s underneath the words, in other words what is going on inside the person doing the talking? How are they really feeling? And this level of information is picked up by paying attention to the implications of their words and phrases and tonalities.

Read the rest of this entry »

‘I’m a good manager!’

No doubt Jack believes he is doing a good job in how he handled Mohan. In his view that’s the way to efficiently breeze through an appraisal: tick all the right boxes to keep HR happy and make sure your people know who’s in charge.  (By the way, if you have not yet read the article about Jack’s appraisal it would be a good idea to do this before continuing).

That’s how we do things around here

It is more than likely that Jack has been taught this approach, or picked up the style from his own managers, or was hired for his ability to manage in this way.

It’s also quite likely that senior management has no awareness, and possibly little real interest, in how their ‘front line’ troops are being managed and led – and that, rather than ‘managing by walking about’ (MBWA) they manage by data, using reports and spreadsheets to know what is happening.

And we can make a pretty reasonable guess as to the reliability of the data on which they rely from the manner in which Jack ensured Mohan’s appraisal ticked the right boxes and in the right way. Read the rest of this entry »

Curiosity: being other-conscious rather than self-conscious

When we are curious we are not self-absorbed. Our attention, instead of being on ourselves and how we feel and what people think of us, is on the world outside us – on other people and on what is happening around us.

In the state of curiosity we take a break from that little dark room in our minds with all the chatter and analysis and doubts and hopes and irritabilities and guilts and resentments.

In the state of curiosity we take a holiday from self-absorbed thinking! We replace self-consciousness with other-consciousness. Read the rest of this entry »

How not to do an appraisal

Sitting in Caffe Nero a few days ago I had the uncomfortable experience of watching and hearing a loud and brash young manager (unintentionally, I think) humiliating a soft-spoken direct report.

As appraisals go it was a pretty thorough example of how not to do it.

Rapport – what rapport?

There was no quality of rapport. The manager was clicking his pen, constantly shifting his position in his chair, bouncing his knees under the table as if to an internal fast paced rhythm, he’d start off his very loud comments by looking briefly at his victim and then continue the comments in a quite mechanical manner while gazing out the window beside their table, as if reciting a rehearsed spiel.

He (we’ll call him Jack) demonstrated no attempt to understand the other person’s (let’s call him Mohan) viewpoint and in fact showed little interest in Mohan at all. Read the rest of this entry »

No… you’re wrong!

Sometimes the temptation is almost irresistible… to tell the other person just how wrong they are, that is.

I experienced it this morning and, this time at least, I did resist the temptation and decided to write this blog instead.

Pass on the word

It seemed like a good idea (it still is, actually). I’d received one of those ‘sponsor me’ messages from two people who are raising money for a village in India. The target is £600 and when I looked at their site they weren’t making much progress and had reached less than 10% of their target.

So I thought why not tell people who follow me on Twitter about the project? Which I did, pointing out that the cost of just two cappuccinos from each ‘follower’ would enable them to reach their target for the charity.

Within less than two minutes of posting the tweet I received a one-liner reply ‘Charity begins at home!!’ Read the rest of this entry »

Curiosity…

He was walking along beside me, looking around him – and being uncharacteristically quiet. Then, as four or five-year olds do, he stopped and made a few attempts to say it but in the emotion of the moment the words sort of log-jammed a bit before he could get them out: ‘Why… emm why… why are the clouds so high?’

It was one of those ‘get out of that one questions’! Do you give a sensible and logical and scientific answer, which would damp the moment of curiosity and wonder, or do you keep the mood going by throwing the question back to him?

I did the latter, with a ‘what do you think?’ question, and we had a wonderfully existential chat. Read the rest of this entry »