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The Prime Minister’s Salary and a Force for Change

If you are living in the UK and pay attention to the news, you won’t help but be aware of just how many public servants are paid more than the Prime Minister – 170 according to the Guardian and Telegraph.

Why does it matter?

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Photo credit: World Economic Forum

It isn’t what we get paid that matters

It clearly matters that public servants’ pay is set properly.  But why does the comparison with one post matter?  The answer seems to be that most of us are less concerned with how much we get paid, than we are with how our pay compares to that of the people around us.

If you work in an organisation, you and your colleagues are probably curious about what everyone earns.  And whilst you may be happy with your salary now; how would you feel if the colleague at the next work station doing the same job at the same level earns 5% more than you?

Enter John Stacy Adams

It was John Stacy Adams who first articulated a management theory of fairness.  He was an industrial psychologist at the General Electric Company when he published ‘Inequity in Social Exchange’.  This puts our feelings into a mathematical framework:

What matters are the comparisons between the outcomes we get (through reward such as pay) and the work we contribute.  For me, that ratio is: O/W.

The Comparison

What I will unconsciously do is compare my ratio (O/W) with your ratio, as I believe it to be, (O’/W’).  If I find that they are equal, I will be content.  If, however, your ratio is bigger than my ratio, I will be unhappy – I will perceive an ‘inequity’.

So do why we worry that 170 senior Civil Servants are overpaid?  It must be because there is an instinctive belief that they cannot possibly do that much more work than the Prime Minister.  Is this true?  My answer to that is: ‘I don’t know’.

Equity works both ways

It is also the case that if I perceive I am over-rewarded, then I will probably feel a sense of guilt.  Our innate need for fairness is what drives Adams’ ‘Equity Theory’.  He argued that where we feel a sense of inequity, we respond in a way that will, in our minds, remove the inequities.

An example, please, Mike…

Sam is a sales rep; her boss, Chris, is head of sales.  Chris regularly sniffs out the best sales leads from her team and then ‘poaches’ the client, to try to make the sale herself.  She also re-allocates her less promising leads to other sales reps, like Sam.  Sam is angry and wants to do something about this.  She is confident in her ability to close a sale and knows she is every bit as good as Chris – if not better.

So what’s going on with Sam and Chris?

Chris believes she is better than her team members.  She has the experience and the seniority.  Having worked hard to achieve it, she unconsciously (maybe consciously) thinks she deserves to get the best leads and pocket the big commissions.

Sam has worked hard to generate the leads.  She feels Chris is unfairly cherry-picking the best leads from Sam and her colleagues, getting the rewards of their work, for little input.

A Force for Change

When Sam and her colleagues feeel the  inequity is ‘too great’, they will be motivated to do something about it.  Whatever it is – maybe challenging Chris, or under-reporting their progress – Equity Theory predicts change.

Look out quangos!

Management Pocketbooks you might like

Adams’ Equity Theory is one of many theories and models of motivation in the Motivation Pocketbook, by Max Eggert.

9781870471602

You will also find a detailed analysis of two other powerful models of motivation in the Management Models Pocketbook,

… and a wealth of guidance on how to manage your staff, Chris, in the People Manager’s Pocketbook,

… and ideas for how to handle your boss, Sam, in the Managing Upwards Pocketbook,

… and tips on how to have that tough conversation, Chris and Sam, in the Tackling Difficult Conversations Pocketbook.

PS:

Yes, Max and I have spelt Stacy correctly – it’s Wikipedia and another famous business amd management website that have it wrong!

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Learning Decision Making from Dr House

At its best, television can inspire and educate.  It can also make us think.  Some of us mourn the loss of House from free to air TV in the UK – ho hum: there are always DVDs.

So what can you learn from House?  Masses, it seems and there is even a book ‘House and Philosophy’ to guide you.  It is part of the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series.

Introducing Dr House

image For those who didn’t catch the US drama series, House is an ornery, arrogant, self-centred and devious doctor who specialises in diagnosing and treating the most mysterious of cases that come into his hospital.

He is played by Hugh Laurie, about whom one American writer said: ‘does a terrific job with his British accent on Jeeves and Wooster.’

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Don’t Care

House appears not to care about his patients – his concern is for solving the case.  Whilst there are episodes with exceptions to this rule, a distinct illustration of this is when he risks brain damage to a boy in order to find the evidence that will allow him to save the boy’s life.  When challenged about this, he replies to the effect that he does not worry about things he cannot do anything about.

Agent Regret

For most of us, however, the consequences of our decisions weigh heavily.  Regardless of our intention, if the outcome is bad, we have to live with the guilt.  This is known to philosophers as ‘agent regret’.  For House, the ends entirely justify the means, but it works both ways.

Moral Luck

If House makes a wrong decision – or indeed one of his subordinates does – it is not enough, for him, to hide behind ‘we followed procedure’.  In judging responsibility, it is again the outcome that matters.

A Good Decision

When we think about decision-making in organisations, we talk about a ‘good decision’ as one that can be defended.  It requires three things:

  1. The decision maker or makers have the authority and expertise to make the decision
  2. The decision maker or makers have the best information available
  3. The process that the decision maker or makers follow is sound – it is transparent, logical, and fair

But a good decision is not the same as the right decision.  We require good decisions, because they appear to maximise our chances of getting it right.  But we also require them, because we cannot require that all decisions are right.

How much do your decisions matter?

Agent Regret seems to me to be a fancy philosophers’ phrase for conscience.  Knowing about it can have two effects:

  • It could freeze you to the spot and stop you making a decision
  • It could galvanise you to take just a little more time to look for one more fact, or conduct one more test, before finally saying ‘go’.

So here’s the deal

Of course, when House takes the latter course, it usually works out.  Real life is rarely as obliging.  But even so, what is there to lose if you make one last check?

Management Pocketbooks you may enjoy

9781870471763

The Decision Making Pocketbook will give you a sound process and a range of useful tools to help you make your decisions.  They won’t prevent Agent Regret if you get it wrong, but they will limit your regret to the consequences, rather than ignorance or negligence.

You may also enjoy:

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The Secret to Success

Before moving to Hampshire, I lived on the edge of Surrey and Kent, and became a Governor at a fantastic and forward thinking school, Warlingham.  Warlingham School is a Business and Enterprise Specialist School, which is very active in promoting its specialism through the whole curriculum, and through many special events for the pupils.

On one of these events, I was asked to speak to a large group of younger pupils.  As a professional speaker, this was, perhaps, my toughest gig.  I decided to tell them what every young teenager needs to know in life – the secret to success.

No Snake Oil Merchant

Before you start wondering if I was peddling snake oil, or “the secret”, or some mystical approach, stop now.  The formula I promoted requires application and effort.  It follows common sense, and it is taught in military colleges around the world.

Because of its military roots, it is not well known – yet it deserves to be.  It is brilliant for managers in managing your team and your function, for leaders in reviewing progress, for anyone who wants personal success and, of course, for young people setting out to succeed. It went down a storm.

So what are you contributing to Schools?

I learned a lot by getting involved with Warlingham School, and later, as Chair of Governors at a primary school.  And I hope they got something from my contribution.

We hear a lot about “Big Society” but the truth is that volunteering has always been a big part of British society.  And the biggest single group of volunteers is school governors.  According to School Governors’ One-Stop Shop, there are 300,000 governor places in England, with around 40,000 vacancies – that’s over a quarter of a million active governors!

… and a load of opportunities to get involved.

Make a Business Contribution

18-22Oct

Visit our Schools and Colleges week runs from 18-22 October and offers a collaboration between schools and colleges, and business leaders and senior staff.  Whether you work in the private, public or third sector, here is a chance to spend a couple of hours helping your local school or college and I promise you will love it.

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From the Visit our Schools and Colleges website:

During the week of the 18-22 October leading CEOs and other senior staff from the private and public sectors, at the invitation of head teachers, will visit state schools throughout the country. It will be chance for them to hear from headteachers and young people about their schools, to witness that work at first hand and to discuss how they could work together to help young people reach their potential.

  • It’s free to register and be involved
  • Visits only take 2 hours in October

The National Campaign, the first of its type, will harness the huge appetite across schools, colleges and employers to work together by making it easy and simple.

Hundreds of thousands of employers are already working with schools and colleges and helping young people and at the same time seeing the benefits to themselves of doing so – motivation and retention of their employees who volunteer as well as building their reputation in the community.

Learn about the OODA Loop

9781906610036You can see my original presentation to the children (with an extra page) on Slideshare.net. and read all about it in chapter 10 of the Management Models Pocketbook.

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Other Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy


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Social Networks – a Short Early History

Émile Durkheim

Emile_Durkheim[2] Émile Durkheim has to rank among the great names of social science and is, perhaps, the founding thinker in our modern ideas about social networks.  He first distinguished between ‘traditional’ societies where individuals bow to pressures to subsume their individuality into a homogeneous whole; and more ‘modern’ societies where we seek to harness the diversity of people, by co-operation.  Social phenomena, he argued, are the result of these interactions.

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Ferdinand Tönnies

525px-Ferdinand_Toennies_Bueste_Husum-Ausschnitt[1]His contemporary, Ferdinand Tönnies, distinguished between ‘community’ and ‘society’. Communities share values and beliefs, whilst a society is tied together by formal links such as obligations, management and trade.

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Georg Simmel

Simmel_01[1] A third contemporary, Georg Simmel, first looked at the social distance between people and how this can affect our sense of individuality if we get too close to another person, or our sense of connection if we are too far.

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Jacob Moreno

Jacob_Moreno[1] It was Romanian-born American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno who gave us the tool that I want to focus on: the sociogram.  He looked at how interactions occur in small groups, such as classrooms and workplaces.  Sociograms are still widely used as a way of charting and understanding the relationships among groups of young people.  Some of the earliest graphical depictions of social networks appear in his 1934 book Who Shall Survive?

Jump Sixty Years

Network Nowadays, we are all very familiar with the way the internet is widely connected and the concept of ‘small world’ networks is widely bandied about.

However, these diagrams derive from Moreno’s sociograms, which remain a powerful tool for charting workplace networks.

Stakeholder Analysis

Sociogram As a project manager, I have used sociograms to chart the relationships between stakeholders within and outside organisations, to better understand how I can anticipate and handle resistance to change, and how to harness and reinforce the support that I have.

Anticipating Conflict

9781903776063Max Eggert and Wendy Falzon recommend using sociograms to anticipate conflict between co-workers.

In their Resolving Conflict Pocketbook, they give the example of a workgroup of five colleagues.  They show how, by drawing a simple sociogram, you could anticipate which potential sub-teams could lead to conflict.

Other Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Handling Resistance Pocketbook

The Working Relationships Pocketbook

The Discipline and Grievance Pocketbook

The Influencing Pocketbook

The Networking Pocketbook

The Handling Complaints Pocketbook

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An Infinite Number of Coaching Acronyms

Coaching seems to be one of those disciplines that everyone likes to invent their own process.

I’m not sure if it’s because I like systems, or I like to collect, or I’m just a coaching ‘geek’, but I have been collecting coaching process acronyms ever since I did my first coaching training with Sir John Whitmore in the late 1990s.  So here’s a survey of some of my favourites:

One of the first, one of the simplest and one of the best: GROW

Developed by Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and John Whitmore, GROW is fully described in ‘Coaching for Performance’ by Sir John Whitmore.

Goal
Reality
Objectives
Will – Way forward

CoachingSession

ACHIEVE

Dr Sabine Dembkowski and Fiona Eldridge developed the ACHIEVE Model to make the details of the steps more explicit.  It is one of many, many variants on GROW.

Assess the current situation
Creative Brainstorming of alternatives
Honing goals
Initiating Options
Evaluating Options
Valid action plan design
Encouraging momentum

OSKAR – a Solution Focus Approach

In their book, ‘The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE’, Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow introduce the OSKAR Model, which introduces the importance of getting a perspective on the scale of the problem to GROW and its many variants:

Outcome
Scaling
Know How
Application
Review

Don’t confuse this with Worth Consulting’s OSCAR model

Outcome
Situation
Choices and Consequences
Actions
Review

Many, Many More

Here are some more I have inventoried – you may like to look some up on your favourite search engine: WHAM, OUTCOMES, PIDREF, STEPPA, FLOWS, CLEAR, ACHIEVE, ARROW, ACE.  I don’t have the space to spell them all out for you, but if you get really stuck, do feel free to ask in the comments.

Two more – called COACH

Coincidentally, our very own Pocketbooks have two more models to offer you, that are both called COACH.

The Coaching Pocketbook, in the Management Pocketbooks series offers:

9781903776193C – competency – assessing current level of performance
O – outcomes – setting outcomes for learning
A – action – agreeing tactics and initiate action
Ch – checking – giving feedback and making sense of what’s been learnt

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And my own current favourite (if it isn’t a little disloyal to the Pocketblog) comes from the Teachers’ Pocketbook series, and The Coaching & Reflecting Pocketbook:

9781903776711 Clarify the Issue

Open up Resources

Agree the preferred future

Create the Journey

Head for success

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Add your own …

If you have a favourite coaching model or process, please do add it, using the comments section below.

So here’s the deal

No one process is better than the others, so you pays your money (or you get the basics free, online) and you makes your choice.

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The Awesome Power of Mentoring

Mentoring is everywhere!

Mentoring helps people to:

  • Develop knowledge and solve problems
  • Develop leadership
  • Be creative and innovative
  • Make better decisions
  • Develop confidence, commitment, motivation and morale

Mentoring in History

The first mentor was the Athena, goddess of wisdom, in Ancient Greece.

Athena took the form of Mentor, the trusted friend and adviser to Odysseus, King of Ithaca. When Odysseus left for war with the Trojans, Mentor helped his son, Telemachus to learn how to become a king.

Image of Athena by hslo

Fénélon (1651-1715), Archbishop and later tutor to Louis XIV’s son, wrote Les Aventures de Télémaque. This took the mentoring theme of Homer’s Odyssey and turned it into a case study of leadership development. Fénélon said that leadership could be developed but Louis XIV didn’t like that very much and banished him to Cambrai and cancelled his pension. Typical behaviour of elitist egotists!

Louis Antonine de Caraccioli (1723-1803) wrote Veritable le Mentor ou l’education de la noblesse. He says that his influence was Fénélon. Caraccioli invites mentors to work with the mind as well as the heart of mentees.

Honoria wrote two books called The Female Mentor 1793 with a third volume in 1796. The mentor, Amanda, knew about Fénélon and his approach to education and life.

And nowadays?

Nowadays, mentoring is talked about as a learning relationship between two people. It needs active commitment and engagement to be effective. Mentoring also involves skills including listening, questioning, challenge and support. All relationships have a time scale and mentoring maybe life long relationship or just a few months.

Why is mentoring awesome?

Mentoring is a powerful approach to learning and development because, nine times out of ten, it works! People learn and develop, make changes to their lives and feel good about it. Mentoring links to loads of theories on learning and it is mainly based on the idea that it’s good to talk with a purpose!

What makes it work?

Top ten tips for mentors

  1. Keep in touch
  2. Always be honest
  3. Don’t judge listen instead, you might learn something!
  4. Don’t give advice – no-one takes advice unless they want to!
  5. Don’t expect to have all the answers
  6. Help your mentee get resources and further support
  7. Be clear about expectations and boundaries
  8. Stand back from the issues your mentee raises but work together on them.
  9. Respect confidentiality
  10. If the relationship falters – hang on in there!

Top ten tips for mentees

  1. Accept challenge willingly.
  2. Share with your mentor how you feel about the way the relationship is working
  3. Be positive about yourself
  4. Do something!
  5. Trust in your mentor
  6. Talk openly
  7. Take a few risks
  8. Think about other ways to develop yourself outside of your mentoring relationship
  9. Don’t expect too much of your mentor.
  10. Talk about the end of your relationship when the time comes.

Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The author of this guest blog, Bob Garvey, is co-author of the Mentoring Pocketbook, which has recently been re-issued in its third edition.  Check-out the fantastic new cover!

The Mentoring Pocketbook

You might also like:

And, from our sister series, the Teachers’ Pocketbooks:

They have blog too, by the way, at:  teacherspocketbooks.wordpress.com

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Heron and Helping

JH2[1]

John Heron has been one of the most active and insightful leaders in the world of helping and counselling, yet relatively few coaches and mentors have heard of him.

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‘I don’t know how to Handle my Boss’s Hostility toward me’

This is a typical problem that you may hear from a colleague or client and, if you want to help, there are a number of ways that you could do so.

“What you should do is …”

“Let’s look at some of the things you could do …”

“What behaviours seem hostile to you?”

“How do you feel about this?”

“What’s going on when your boss seems hostile?”

“No-one should feel hostility from their boss …”

These are six examples of a response you could give and, working originally with the medical profession, John Heron identified six categories of intervention in 1974, which are equally helpful to teachers, managers, advisers, counsellors, and consultants.

They help us to understand the relationships between counselling and coaching, or between coaching and mentoring.

Six Category Intervention Analysis

John Heron’s model of six different ways we can intervene to help first divides interventions into Authoritative and Facilitative Interventions.  These each have three styles of intervention within them.

Authoritative Interventions

These interventions are clearly led by the helper, who takes on some of the responsibility for the client.  Here, the helper will guide, raise awareness, and even give instruction or hold the client to account.

  1. Prescriptive
    Giving advice and direction to the client
  2. Informative
    Focusing on giving information the client information and ideas that will help them generate solutions
  3. Confronting
    Focusing on the problem and challenging the client in a supportive way

Facilitative Interventions

These interventions are ‘client-centred’ in the sense that the client must take complete responsibility for themselves and the direction of their support.

  1. Cathartic
    Focused on helping the client to gain insights into their emotional response by expressing their emotions
  2. Catalytic
    Helping the client to learn and solve problems for themself, drawing upon the client’s own resources
  3. Supportive
    Focused on the emotional and confidence needs of the client, by encouraging them and affirming their worth
The ancient Sumerian god Ningishzida, the patr...
Image via Wikipedia
The depiction of the Sumerian serpent god Ningizzida, the patron of medicine, dating from before 2000 BCE, gives us our modern Caduceus symbol for the healing arts and sciences.The god itself is the two (copulating) snakes entwined around an axial rod. It is accompanied by two gryphons.

Misleading Labels

The labels ‘authoritative’ and ‘facilitative’ are, perhaps, misleading.  Each of the six categories of intervention could be led in an authoritative ‘I will take control’ manner, or a facilitative ‘you tell me where to explore next’ manner. Indeed, in his later work, in ‘The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook’, Heron identified three modes of facilitation, which he called:

  1. Hierarchical
    Facilitator directs the process
  2. Co-operative
    Facilitator and client or group share responsibility for the process, the facilitator offering ideas and listening to suggestions to achieve a consensus
  3. Autonomous
    Client or group dictates the process

So here’s the deal

Why do we spend so much time worrying over precise definitions of coaching, mentoring, counselling, advising, consulting and the myriad of supportive help we offer one-another.  John Heron showed us at least three times six = eighteen different ways to help each other and there are doubtless many more.

Coming in future blogs will be insights into resolving conflict, coaching, and, later this week, mentoring.

Management Pocketbooks on these topics

And, in the Teachers’ Pocketbooks series:

And look out for The Cognitive Behavioural Coaching Pocketbook later this year.

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Is your Project Doomed

It’s summer time, so I am always on the look-out for something amusing.  Glen Alleman is a serious project manager who unearthed a humorous – but essentially profound – set of Laws of Project Management, which he calls Brasington’s Laws, after Bil Brasington who first articulated them.  I won’t steal all of his thunder by listing them all – they are well worth a look, on Glen’s Blog, Herding Cats.

Brasington’s 1st, 3rd and 7th Laws

Brasington’s First Law
‘No major project is ever installed on time, within budget, or with the staff that started it. Yours will not be the first.’

Brasington’s Third Law
‘One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let you avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs.’

Brasington’s Seventh Law
‘A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project will take only twice as long.’

Beating Brasington

Of course, you can’t – they’re laws, after all.  However, good project managers will at least try to hold their own against the chaos.  This means a carefully planned project is in order.

To do this, you need to set aside the third law and start with the clearest articulation of project objectives that you can create.  To do this, you need to bring together the key stakeholders to agree what success will look like.  How will each stakeholder evaluate the outcome, and what criteria will they use to measure success?

OnTarget
Photo credit: viZZZual.com

Objective Setting = Negotiation

Sadly, you will rarely work with a set of stakeholders with a single vision of success.  As a project manager, you need to conduct a set of negotiations to bring all stakeholders into alignment around a core set of objectives that they can all agree on.  Once you have done that, you must then create and agree with them a process for agreeing any variations to this.  If you don’t, then you will surely fall prey to …

Brasington’s 5th Law

Brasington’s Fifth Law
’If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.’

Conducting Negotiations

9781903776872

This is a nice metaphor for much of what real project management really is – and is the image that Pocketbooks illustrator, Phil Hailstone, placed on the cover of The Project Management Pocketbook, by Keith Posner and Mike Applegarth.

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This excellent Pocketbook has more on defining outcomes, setting objectives and working with stakeholders.

Other Management Pocketbooks
Project Managers might Enjoy

You may also enjoy the author’s own Project Management blog, Shift Happens!

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Coping in Tough Times

Personal success is about more than taking advantage of opportunities.  One of the most powerful personal attributes is resilience – the ability to take the knocks that fate lands on you, and then get back on your feet and keep going.

Mistakes; I’ve made a few

Photo credit Nicobobinus

Of course, it is okay to make mistakes and, if you aren’t making any then you are either playing it too safe to really succeed, or you are supernaturally lucky.  The first key to coping in tough times is to be able to evaluate risks and  to take a few, knowing that one or two failures are not a sign of inevitable doom.

If, on the other hand, a pattern of failures seems to dominate your career, then maybe it is time to evaluate your decision making process.  Probably, either your criteria are wrong, or you are not fully evaluating all of the evidence before you take your risks.

The Grass is always Greener

Few people worry about how well they are doing until they suspect that their peers are doing better.  When things are easy, it is no problem to set ourselves goals and evaluate progress against them, but as things start going bad, we often feel tempted to glance over the fence to see how the folk next door are doing.  Unless you can deliberately learn from their experience, this is a destructive strategy.  If they are doing better than you, you’ll resent it: if worse, you’ll be tempted to complacency.

Continue to set yourself goals and monitor your progress against your own standards.

The Universe doesn’t hate you

In fact, it’s pretty indiscriminate.  So do not feel that adversity is your fault, or that you are fated to have bad luck.  Instead, believe in your ability to control aspects of your future, and focus on those aspects.  Let the things you cannot control happen.

There’s no point in staying angry

Oliver Burkeman in Saturday’s Guardian reported on research which shows that forgiveness really does help us, by making us less likely to suffer from high blood pressure, clinical depression and other health problems.  So don’t get angry, don’t stay angry and let go of past injustices and misfortunes.

Personal Success is a Set of Skills

There are a pocketful of Pocketbooks to help you achieve success, starting with The Personal Success Pocketbook, in which you will learn that Abraham Lincoln suffered twelve major failures before being elected President – that’s resilience.  Of course, we could argue that perhaps he’d have lived a longer life if he’d taken heed!

More Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Impact & Presence Pocketbook

The Networking Pocketbook

The Career Transition Pocketbook

The Positive Mental Attitude Pocketbook

The Self Managed Development Pocketbook

The Energy and Wellbeing Pocketbook

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I can’t do that now

The NLP wave rises and falls and, frankly, I’ve lost track of whether it is near a popularity peak or a sceptical slump.  Of all the ideas that managers use, this is the one that comes in and out of vogue most often – on a two or three year cycle, it seems to me.

Why does NLP peak and trough so much?

Many practitioners do NLP no great service in making some extravagant claims for what it can achieve, whilst others doggedly push away at the very real benefits of improved communication, processes and insights that an understanding of its models can offer us.  The world becomes exhausted by and cynical of the excessive zeal of some trainers, then recovers, as other trainers help build a new cohort of learners who can see real benefits.

Gillian Burn’s NLP Pocketbook is a contribution to ‘real benefits’ end of the spectrum, and has a nice take on one of the most powerful NLP models.

Logical Levels of Change

This model has many uses, so let’s pick one: let’s say that you ask someone to do something.  Let’s further assume that your request is reasonable, and that your relationship with them is good, so you have every reason to expect them to comply.  So it comes as a surprise when they say:

‘I can’t do that now.’

Handling Resistance

This sounds like resistance, so rule number one is to respect the resister and assume that their reason for resisting is a good one.  But what is it.  On the face of things, their statement gives you no clues; but if you listened very carefully, they probably told you exactly where the problem is.

Listen Carefully

What you are listening for is where they put the emphasis of their statement.  It may be very subtle, but can be remarkably obvious.  They may have said any of these statements:

‘I can’t do that now.’
Meaning: ‘there is a problem with the time or place.’

‘I can’t do that now.’
Meaning: ‘I have a problem with what you want me to do’

‘I can’t do that now.’
Meaning: ‘I don’t have the ability to do it’

‘I can’t do that now.’
Meaning: ‘I don’t believe I can do it’

I can’t do that now.’
Meaning: ‘this is not something I can do’

Once you know where the problem lies, you can tackle it more confidently.

What else?

Could there be another reason?  What if there appears to be no emphasis.  The Logical Levels model suggests a sixth possible level, deeper than the five we have seen.  If we characterise these five as:

Environment – Action – Capability – Belief – Identity

… the sixth level is Purpose, or meaning.

People need a Purpose

We all need a meaning to our lives and a purpose for doing something.  In their mind, they are possibly asking ‘why?’ If you are unable to supply a good reason, then you should not be surprised to encounter resistance.  One of the powerful words we looked at in an earlier blog is because.’

Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The NLP Pocketbook

The NLP Pocketbook
is full of easy to follow descriptions and examples from the best tools that NLP has to offer.

NLP, by the way, stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming

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There is also a chapter on the NLP model of communication in:

You might also like:

So here’s the deal

Listen carefully when people resist you, act on the information you gather: not your assumptions, consider the powerful tools NLP can offer you.

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