Me, Myself, My Team E-Book

Angus McLeod

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 202

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Me, Myself, My Team brings you effective strategies to improve your team's communication and motivation, discover new perceptions and begin new courses of action. Full of practical ideas, this exceptional book demonstrates how team playing achieves the best results.

Leseprobe

Me, Myself, My Team

How To Become an Effective Team Player Using NLP

Angus McLeod, PhD

Revised edition

This second edition is dedicated to Salli G A friend in deed

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One Thinking  Preferences

Chapter Two Similarity and Difference

Chapter Three Me and My Team: Same or Different?

Chapter Four Performance Mindsets

Chapter Five Powerful Influencing

Chapter Six Internal Conflict and Dialogue

Chapter Seven Conflict in External Teams

Chapter Eight Communication Styles

Chapter Nine Assessing Motivation and Needs

Chapter Ten From Responsibility to Achievement

Chapter Eleven Objectives and Action Tasks

Chapter Twelve The Coaching Culture

Conclusion: Open Minds and Flexibility

Appendix 1: Feedback

Appendix 2: Qualities and Mindset of the Coachee

Appendix 3: Qualities and Mindset of the Coach

Appendix 4: The Coaching Session

Appendix 5: Prioritisation or Ranking Process

Glossary

References

Index

Index of exercises

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to April Curtis, who opened up her Raleigh, NC, home and office. She provided me with everything necessary for a writer. I am eternally grateful to her for her hospitality and friendship. I want to thank Lex McKee for the mind map, Salli G of Nutty Tart Grafix for the illustrations, and, last but not least, my warm thanks, appreciation and love to Obie Watson, who provided great support and encouragement in the final stages of the first edition.

I wish to thank Clare, Caroline and David at Crown House for adopting this second edition and for their successful work in bringing Me, Myself, My Team to a truly international audience. My thanks and appreciation to you all.

Preface

‘When one has weighed the sun in the balance, measured the steps to the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there remains oneself.’

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

If you will, imagine two managers sitting next to each other at a business meeting. They share many similarities in background, education, skills, training and commitment. One is startlingly more effective than the other. What are the secret ingredients that make the difference?

Arising from all your competencies and everything you do is the difference you make as an individual. Add to that individuality the secret ingredients and you have startling individual performance. This book is the recipe for that difference, and there are two broad areas of cuisine. The first is flexible thinking and the second isopenness to self-challenge. It is these, more than anything else, that make the performance difference: from good to startlingly effective. Put a Team together using these skills and two plus two equals ten!

The science of emotional intelligence tells us that to improve our management of others we need to start with greater self-awareness. This, then, needs to be followed by actions that manage self differently. This mental exploration and the experiences that we have tend to raise awareness of the similarities and differences between self and others, with new and fascinating perceptions. And when all these new abilities are mastered we experiment and improve our ability to influence/manage others. For that reason, there are practical explorations and information here about the different ways in which people are stimulated to action.

Throughout this book, I use the word Team with a capital T. This Team is what you define as: a small project group, a departmental Team, a group of divisional managers or CEOs.

Although the book is structured in form, I have destructured the content so that some elements of the skills are touched on before and after they are introduced. This should make some of the reading familiar and increase the recall that my readers have for the content.

Angus McLeod Worcester

Introduction

When I first made the move from academia into industry, I reinvented myself as a go-getting, success-at-any-cost manager. I was bright and self-assured and got things done. People who got in the way of my vision (of the corporate goals) were manoeuvred out. I was operating from a set of ideas and beliefs that, although apparently successful, ignored the benefits that come from real teamwork, or the ‘two plus two equals five’ phenomenon. What changed me was the catalyst of pain. I rose fast and was cut down twice, in each case my patterns and competencies being outmatched by more politically agile people. With hindsight, it would have been smarter not to fail but instead to make the essential changes in thinking performance for myself. The two essential traits necessary for that to happen are openness (to challenge and new ideas) and flexible thinking – it is not necessary to fail in order to learn!

Each of us is already gifted with phenomenal ability. And some of that ability is invariably trapped in set ideas and beliefs that limit our perception and the chance to perform superbly. The keys to releasing our abilities are those two traits: openness (to challenge and new ideas) and flexible thinking. This book is designed to develop openness and flexibility by offering you and your colleagues a set of tools that may be used to create your own change and success both as an individual and as a Team achiever. The first part of this book investigates the similarities/differences that we have in relation to other people. Then we explore those further to consider the similarities and differences that you have with your Team as a means of introducing some of the flexible-thinking skills that will be used throughout the book. It may be useful to read quickly through Chapter Three (whether you have a current Team or not) and complete the working examples. The book is designed as a working manual and reference work, which refers both backwards and forwards to other work and working examples.

Much of the thinking behind the book comes from current practice and ideas in coaching, learning science, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and coaching. My premise is that individuals operate internally as Teams. For example, I am a leader in directing and compelling myself to take business risks, but there is another part of me (my internal ‘follower’) that is fearful of doing this! And there may be ‘Team communication’ going on in my head: ‘Go for it!’ and ‘That’s too risky!’

This approach opens up new perceptions and learning for both the person and the Team in which he works. I would further argue that, unless each person has a properly functioning and efficient Internal Team, his performance in real Teams is questionable. My aim in sharing this book is to address the Internal Team and extend that thinking into the real (External) Team. The process is one that encourages both flexible thinking and also unique and individual solutions for each reader. My belief is that readers are more compelled to work through their own solutions than to borrow a standard ‘system’ from management theory. The best answers will be your own. It is part of this thinking that I bring to my work as a coach in business, catalysing individuals to fly. With luck, the receiving Teams will also embrace this work, and the beating of individual wings will be in harmony, allowing the Team to soar beyond the limitations of other Teams. In my experience, any change in one person leads to change within the Team. Even if only one person is flying, others will quietly practise and adapt themselves for flight! Enough of metaphor! The premise I make is that ‘culture’ is the result of similar behaviours, but it grows by the dynamics of similarity/difference.

The skills in this book enable you to have more choice about where you have similarity or difference with your Team (or a desired Team that you aspire to work within). When you change your behaviours they create change around you. Where others match this in the Team, you have a changed culture. Matching behaviours constitute Team culture. Your effort can therefore help the success of your organisation and is measurable by you. You can do this by noticing the changes that happen around you and whether or not these changes are in harmony with your own choice of behaviours.

We begin, then, by looking at the similarities and differences that we have when compared with others.

Chapter One

Thinking Preferences

Summary

We think differently and are motivated differently from other people. Only when we understand our own thinking can we make choices about a particular strategy to use in a particular situation. And understanding our own thinking processes leads to realisations about the differences between ourselves and others. These realisations lead to choice and the potential for improved communication, impact, influence and Team performance.

This chapter examines thinking preferences in order to give you insight into your own thinking preferences and how other people are similar to or different from you. It should also provide you with ‘reasons’ for how some people behave and why they may be effective or dysfunctional in a Team at the moment. Understanding creates opportunity for development and improved performance.

Understanding thinking preferences

Many of us tend to be surprised when other people do not understand something as easily as we do ourselves, or when they fail to grasp fully the importance of an issue. Most often, we project our own thinking preferences onto other people and assume that if they don’t ‘get it’ it’s because they have a problem. Let’s stop right there! We cannot force change on someone else (without their full willingness and participation); it is a hopeless and wasteful task. So let’s start with a set of beliefs that are empowering and enabling for you in the Team. Buying into these fully will give you a greater chance of success within all Teams.

I cannot change what other people do, but I can change what I do. People have different thinking styles and preferences.If I understand other people’s thinking styles and preferences, I can communicate with greater impact.I am responsible for getting my message across; it is not the receiver’s responsibility.The better I communicate with colleagues, the greater our combined productivity.Understanding leads to trust.

Now let’s look at some different kinds of thinking preferences. (I have drawn on NLP, learning theory and psychometric personality methods, including LAB profiling (Charvet, 1997) in setting these out, as well as aspects taken from my book Slay that Dragon.) The list below is not definitive. There are many ways to categorise understanding of people and their preferences. This list offers some insights as to how other people prefer information, how they use it and how they make decisions. The process is illuminating – whether accurate or not – and the benefits for you and your Team are considerable.

Left- and right-brain preference

The concept of left and right brains is one of the simplest and most widely known models of human psychology. It was brought to general attention (see, for example, Erdmann, Hubel and Stover, 2000) in 1981, when Roger Sperry shared the Nobel Prize in neurology. He asserted that our cognitive processes are largely split into mental activities on the left or right side of the brain. Thus, logical processing, comparing, organisation, structuring and arithmetic are all thought to be activities that predominate in the left brain. The right brain is concerned with emotional expression, creative inspiration and play. It may be assumed that the commercial, Western world is mainly populated by people with more left-brain skills than right-brain skills. Likewise, we can expect to find more instinct, inspiration and creativity in the East. As Sperry said at the Nobel ceremony, ‘The great pleasure and feeling in my right brain is more than my left brain can find the words to tell you.’

Whether correct or not, it is easy to imagine that there are people who have dominating intelligence on one ‘side’ of the brain rather than the other. In the USA and Europe there are many working people who are attracted to organisations that operate in logical, left-brain ways. This can occasionally mean that the Teams are perhaps weaker in emotional intelligence, intuitive solutions, creative explorations or the ability to ‘play’. It can be very challenging to those with left-brain thinking preference to ‘let go’, to play and run with the experience. It is only a preference and a determination to improve right-brain skills will result in raised competence in creative thought and intuition. Activities that stimulate the right brain include reading literature and self-questioning: ‘What is my gut feeling?’ for example. We can also encourage the right brain by opening up to creative expression through art, play and instinctive writing, for example, poetry written directly onto the page without editing during the creative process.

In the fast, changing world of business more managers need to be flexible and creative in their thinking and behaviours. Many managers are locked into reactive firefighting rather than the careful creation of strategy. Stimulating right-brain activity has to be a good way to encourage more flexible thought and creativity. These lead us to new inspirations, new possibilities, more effective strategies and methods.

The right-brain-dominant thinker can enter into a state, similar to trance, called psychological flow (about 20 per cent of the population are able to do this), in which words, images and/or feelings flow out and any structuring is left to subconscious processing, free of logical thought. Tim Gallwey (2000) calls this state, ‘Self 2 focus’. For example, right-brain writers do very little thinking – they just write and edit afterwards. During the creative flow they create structures (associated in the left brain) as a subconscious support to their right-brain creativity. When the creative flow has ended, the writer discovers (cognitive, left-brain logic) that their work is already very well structured.

The state of ‘flow’ can be so captivating that the person will not notice people speaking to him. This can create problems if the trait is not understood and overtly discussed with those who may be affected by it.

Creativity is not of course isolated in right-brain-preference thinkers. Left-brain-preference people also have variable levels of right-brain aptitudes.

The state of ‘flow’ can be so captivating that the person will not notice people speaking to him.

Where a person is right-brain-dominant, he may be weaker in project managing and can be more inclined to tweak and adjust rather than complete tasks. Again, these are just preferences and determined efforts will improve their left-brain skills. They can also challenge themselves by asking logical, objective questions that invite mental processing. These are likely to include ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions: ‘Why did I finish that report late again?’; ‘How can I create a plan that will get my next report completed on time?’

If you wish to influence left-brain thinkers, then logical argument is likely to be the key (but read on, because other preferences can also modify these preferences). In contrast, the right-brain thinker may be more interested in the ‘what’ and easily bored by the ‘how’ – this too is influenced by other preferences.

Visual preference

Visual preference

Visual preference, visual representation and visual intelligence are some of the names given to the intelligent storage, processing and recall of visual images. People who have a highly developed visual preference may be in jobs that use their skills, such as design engineering and graphic art. Another clue to visual preference lies in the language that our colleagues are using:

I see.I can picture what you are saying.This looks good for us.There’s light at the end of the tunnel.I’ll keep an eye on the situation.

Noticing language can help us to communicate more effectively with a person in the Team. Using visual language and charts would be a preferred way of introducing information to a colleague with a strong visual preference. Also, if that colleague has produced reports and presentations, it might be worth looking at the way they prefer to communicate so that, if you wish to influence them, you mimic their communication preferences. Because these are preferences, your efforts are rewarded because the colleague will be more alert and stimulated – they will not have to struggle to understand your key messages. Here is part of a report that would appeal to someone with a rich visual preference:

Quarter 2 provisional figures show that Quarter 3 results (see diagram) may be below target. The picture is not complete. Our partnership with Fall Inc. during Quarter 2 has led to falling transport costs and the savings have not yet appeared in the P+L accounts. The chart below shows how costs have tumbled from Week 9 (Quarter 2). These savings will influence the Quarter 3 figures very significantly, catapulting Quarter 3 by 4% NPBT. I see us hitting the Quarter 3 target.

There are visual words such as see, view and picture, and the phrases invite a visual reader to make mental pictures, e.g. ‘I see us hitting the Quarter 3 target’, ‘catapulting Quarter 3’ and so on. The text is supported by diagrams and charts, too. Visual-preference readers do not just read the report: the text itself triggers the creation of pictures in their minds. They are stimulated because of the writing style.

Auditory preference

Auditory preference

If you recall a Team event or meeting and ask your colleagues to summarise their experience of that in ten individual words, you may find a colleague who uses a number of auditory words. Here is a selection of phrases containing auditory language:

I hear what you say.Sounds good to me.That went with a bang.I’d say that …

Speech is the preferred method of receiving information for auditory people, but reading may also appeal. When an auditory-preference person reads, he is likely to ‘hear’ what he is reading – an auditory stimulation.

Where a colleague is highly auditory, he may prefer to get oral reports rather than written, and may be quite happy doing most of his communicating on the telephone. If you have to write to a colleague with an auditory preference, then using language that invites the reader to hear will be more stimulating for him. For example:

I met with Joanne this morning. She said, ‘Rachel, the interconnects are failing. Something needs to be done.’ We discussed the quality reports and it sounds quite bad. Briggs and Company do not seem to have heard what we have been telling them as regards quality. I attach highlights of our copy letters and faxes. I propose that you speak to them. You have the ear of the chairman and your intervention may achieve more than our grumbles about quality have, lower down the organisation.

Kinaesthetic preference

Kinaesthetic preference

For some people, the physical and feeling dimension is important in storing, processing and retrieving information. In other words, they are kinaesthetically stimulated. Indeed, their actions may be made on the basis of feeling rather than logical, or left-brain, thinking. A highly logical person might find this frustrating – just as the kinaesthetic person is likely to be frustrated by logic that ignores their own feelings.

The phrases that someone with a highly evolved kinaesthetic preference may use, include:

I’m going with my gut on this one.My sense is that we are onto something.I feel out of touch with this project.Let’s hammer this out once and for all.I’ll sniff out the competition.

The touchy-feely language does not necessarily link with a thoughtful, kind or sensitive disposition. Many of our most strident leaders of businesses act on ‘gut instinct’ while trampling over people in their path!

Rachel’s note to someone with a high kinaesthetic preference might read something like this:

Joanne and I touched on the quality issue with the interconnects this morning. We both feel that the issue needs forceful action. Briggs & Company have been insensitive to our quality concerns and, as things stand, these issues are going to hurt our customer relations. Could I encourage you to make a move on our behalf? You have a special relationship with their chairman and your physical intervention with him may succeed in stimulating action where our feeble attempts have failed!

Linguistic preference

A high level of linguistic preference manifests in a person’s accessing information by reading1 and a preference for writing things down.2 Note that another reason for writing may be a dislike for personal contact! Information may be rather clinical, or it may be devoid of experiential character. I remember hearing of a communication that was written by a colleague to a Swedish company and included the line, ‘I feel that we should…’ The reply contained the memorable line, ‘We fail to comprehend why you bring feelings into the situation …’ Linguistic-preference people may be quite turned off by feelings – stick to the facts!

Interpersonal preference

This demonstrates itself most easily in those who seem always to get what they want from you in spite of your best intentions. The gift of the gab, compelling conversation, attentive listening are all components. People with a highly developed interpersonal preference prefer face-to-face interaction above all else. Having a highly developed interest in people does not ensure that they will act in order to satisfy you. They may be manipulative because they know how to do it and a few will enjoy the outcome of that. They can also be very supportive and kind. They may dislike formal written communication, preferring face-to-face and telephone conversations.

Creative preference

Innovative people are not just logically questioning and self-challenging, but they add another dimension that, as we have seen, is usually associated with right-brain activity. Almost certainly, creative preference is further expressed in ways that satisfy several other preferences and styles. Creative people are turned on by fresh approaches and thinking. They are easily bored by procedures and the systematic, detailed development of ideas. They tend to like choice in how they do things and options when having to follow procedures. Many are attracted to computer technology, but you can anticipate a problem if they dislike procedures and documenting their work! The journey of exploration itself is often more rewarding than making notes about the process and sometimes the journey is so interesting that they are not stimulated to finish, preferring to adapt and adjust again and again.

Systematic/procedural preference

This preference is exhibited by people who need to access information sequentially from A to Z. Going off track in order to illustrate a point unsettles them. Each step must be followed by the next without elaboration. Information prepared for the systematic or procedural preference individual needs to be prepared with the question ‘What next?’ continuously in mind. This helps keep a logical focus and assists the reader to assimilate the information quickly. Tables are especially attractive to procedural-preference readers. Many will be confused if you do not explain steps logically.

Unfortunately, the stepwise process can be frustrating for people who do not share this preference. The skills of system and procedure are vital in organisations. However frustrating the type may be to others, we need to understand that the Team may fail without them.

Numerical preference

Numbers people should be excellent in this domain. If it is possible to express information in figures, then this will be appealing for them. Often they will be turned off by vague argument and gut feelings.

Away-from and towards preferences

Look at the list below and identify those actions that are motivated by an urge to move away from something and those that are motivated by a desire to move towards something.

We did that before so we will not make that mistake again.The targets are set at 6 per cent ahead of budget for the forthcoming fiscal year. That’s the third accident in that car. I’m not having green again!I aim to double our sales turnover within three years.

When creating arguments for a group of people it is important to include both types of language.

When preparing proposals for managers who have a towards preference, you need to highlight the positive. There may be pitfalls that need to be detailed in a proposal for them, but not like this:

Buying Acme will get us out of our uncomfortable position on stock holding.

This is an away-from sentence. To appeal to a towards preference we need to focus on something positive in the future. The above might be better written:

This acquisition will positively impact on our desire to reduce our group stock assets.

It’s often the case that senior people in bigger companies have a strong towards preference. If you are reporting into that level and wish to join the Team, your language will need to reflect that. These preferences are among the most consciously observed