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The following is an article from the CIPD. It offers insight into improving communication within organisations. We find that there are significant links with the Posner change model we highlighted in a previous post (http://www.qnlp.co.uk/leading_change/).

The latest CIPD employee outlook survey found that fewer than half of our 2,000 respondents felt either “fully” or “fairly well” informed about what was going on in their firms. There were also low levels of agreement with the statement: “I trust the directors/senior management of my organisation.” Such findings reveal just how important it is to improve communications with staff as part of an HR (and business) strategy.

1. Have a shared purpose – Creating a shared sense of purpose is an important starting point for a strategic approach to communication. People need to understand the collective goal they are working towards and to appreciate the difference they can make. ??
2. Convince your leaders – Don’t assume that senior managers automatically recognise the need for effective communication. They can rely too heavily on more junior managers to convey key messages about their vision through the business, and they can often fail to communicate frequently enough in times of upheaval. Communication is a key skill that you should seek when recruiting leaders. And give both leaders and line managers the support and coaching they might need.
3. Engage your people - The CIPD has identified three main drivers of employee engagement: having the opportunity to feed your views upwards; feeling well informed about what is happening in your organisation; and believing your manager is committed to the organisation. Your approach to engagement will therefore inform your approach to communication – and vice versa.
4. Consider your channels – Many organisations are embracing new communication media. One company in our recent research into M&As and employer branding used a CEO’s blog successfully during a takeover. Some employers use social networking sites to engage their graduate recruits before they join the organisation formally.
5. Keep the personal touch - Employees value face-to-face communication highly. The challenge is to ensure that managers develop the skills and confidence to hold meaningful two-way conversations – even on difficult topics. It’s important to let people know that you value these attributes. Consider them as part of the assessment and development process for team leaders.
6. Work collaboratively – Responsibility for communications could rest formally with either HR or a specialist internal communications team. But it’s important that expertise from the different disciplines is shared in order to create the approach that’s most appropriate for your organisation. Joined-up thinking is important here. For example, ensure that communications about your reward offering reflect communications about your employer brand more generally – as advised in Employer branding and total reward, the recent report produced by the CIPD in association with Mercer.
7. Measure your results – Employee engagement surveys are a common method of understanding the effectiveness of internal communications. To be more sophisticated in measuring the success of your activities, it can be helpful to segment your audience and look at whether the right message is reaching the right people at the right time.

Key points
- Employee communication is essential to create an engaged workforce that’s committed to working towards a shared goal.
- Ensure that leaders realise the importance of communication and take time to share their vision for the organisation.
- Create communication that is two-way, not only top-down.
- Measure the success of your actions.

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2. Telling your boss what you think of them is good for your health

If diets work, why is it that so many of us are continually on one? Could it be that dieting only deals with the calorific aspect – and we need something more? If the diet industry met all of their claims their would be few overweight people. If dieting works, why are we facing an ever increasing weight problem?

When a person goes on a diet, they are, by definition cutting back, denying themselves, reducing their intake. Does this restricive practice work? Does this make you want your favourites less?

We are working with a system, defined over plus of 160,000 years to deal with famine and eating (notice I didn’t mention feast!). Whenever we diet, our archaic system thinks “hello, this is a famine period. Better hold on to all I have” – that would be why you tend to have big weight losses in the first few weeks of a regime, and then struggle further into it. Your body will let go of all it can BEFORE it will let go of its reserves. You need mental stamina to persevere.

Now I’ll mention FEAST – Another major challenge to successful weight management is the eating habits we have acquired recently. I say recently because you only have to go back to beginning of the 20th Century to see a radically different set of eating patterns. For the average person back then, there was no abundance of food. They ate what they could afford. Up to 50% of the working class diet was made up of fruit and vegetables. Lunch was usually a sandwich made from leftovers, or a pie bought when funds allowed. If money was short, cheap soup was available in the street. Evening meals followed a cascade approach; what was cooked on a Sunday was served again on Monday, as a stew and for Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday could be a rice or a lentil based dish served with bread. Friday was traditionally fish. Even beer was watered down! No fast food. No supermarkets. No choice. No abundance.

So, let’s recap – we are denying ourself things we have come to like (dare I say love) and we are working with our system, that has taken ages to design itself to survive in harsh environments and in the last 50 years we have changed its eating habits. Is it any wonder that we are gaining weight?

Habits or patterns are the key to change.

We have built up patterns of behaviour that, in some way, work for us. They serve a purpose. They may make us feel better, help us deal with certain situations, provide comfort or reward. Whatever the reason, we do them for a reason. The fact that their may be better ways of doing things, or that may be better for us is inconsequential. To change we need to alter our patterns.

What is it that motivates us to loose weight, or start exercising (preferably both!). You might catch a view in a mirror that is less than flattering, you might have a specific occasion that you want to look your best for, or it may be that someone else suggests it. Many times, people diet because of external influences and pressures. We are not really doing this for ourselves, but rather for someone else, or because of a social construction of what healthy, fit, sexy etc. To make it work – We need to change for us.

Typically, when we go on a diet, we change our patterns of eating. BUT we don’t change us. I am the same person before I go on a diet, I am me whilst on a diet, and I will revert to me after a diet. How many times have people stuck to their regime for months and then, once they come off, they put weight back on?

To truly change you need a holistic approach; you need to deal with all aspects of your system; to redefine you. A balanced and nutritious diet will go a long way to improving your overall health, and clearly exercise is important to enable us to remain fit and active. However, we need to have the right mindset to fully capitalise on our successes and ensure future ones. The skills and knowledge of NLP offer processes to enable you to develop the winning mindset that ensures that fitness and wellbeing to become an integral part of your life. Have a look at our Harness your Inner Power workshop to see how NLP can assist you towards health and wellness.

MIND AND BODY – DEVELOP THE WHOLE, NOT THE PART!

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In pursuit of happy, healthy, stress-free employees, psychologists urge companies to allow employees to rate their managers’ ability to manage.

The research, co-funded by the Health & Safety Executive, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and Investors in People, is presented today 13th January 2010, by Emma Donaldson-Feilder, from Affinity Health at Work, at the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference.

The research focused on the line-manager-employee relationship, which has been found to be the most commonly reported cause of stress in the workplace. One hundred and 50 managers were asked to self-rate their own management skills whilst almost 500 employees were asked to rate their managers’ management skills. The managers were split into two groups, one group received training and/or feedback on their management skills whilst the other group received no feedback. Both training and feedback focussed on management behaviours that are known to be important for the prevention and reduction of stress in staff.

When managers received feedback from their staff, they were more likely to change their management style and subsequently be seen as more effective line managers. Effective behaviours in this context include: managing their own emotions and having integrity; managing and communicating existing and future work; empathetic management of individuals within the team; and effectively managing conflict. Those managers who did not receive any feedback were less likely to change their management behaviour. Feedback was thus found to be a significant trigger for change.

Ms Donaldson-Feilder said: “Without holding a mirror up to a person, they can have blind spots about how they come across and if they think they are already good enough, why should they change.

“The consequences of stress are pervasive; those under stress may experience psychological symptoms, such as anxiety or depression, physiological symptoms, such as palpitations or raised blood pressure and/or cognitive symptoms such as reduced mental capacity. Stress is a significant cause of sickness absence and this puts pressure on those left behind to run the business, creating a cycle of uncomfortable pressure with costs to the individual and to the company.”

Ms Donaldson-Feilder and her colleagues are currently developing a number of tools for businesses including a questionnaire that staff can use to rate their line manager and learning materials for managers. These will be available later in 2010 as free downloads on the Health & Safety Executive website, www.hse.gov.uk/stress see also www.affinityhealthatwork.com

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A target-driven approach to leadership is less likely to result in a strong performance compared to a more people-centred one, research has highlighted, says The Work Foundation.

By Nick Howard

The study saw managers at six high-profile employers, including Tesco and BAE Systems, interviewed about their leadership philosophies and practices over a two-year period.

It emerged that there were three common themes among ‘outstanding’ leaders; thinking and acting systematically, seeing people as the route to performance and being self confident but not arrogant. ”Outstanding leaders focus on people, attitudes and engagement, co-creating vision and strategy,” commented lead author Penny Tamkin. ”Instead of one-to-one meetings centred on tasks, they seek to understand people and their motives.”

She added that such leaders manage their teams “holistically” and focus on the mood and behaviour of employees in addition to organisational objectives.

Research presented earlier this week by the British Psychological Society highlighted that managers are more likely to alter their leadership style if they receive feedback from their staff.

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Much of the field of NLP is focused on how we all see the world in our own very specific way – our model or map of the world. For advertising to fully have the impact a company or individual desires, it needs to appeal to a wide audience. In many instances, the text will have a generic appeal; using terms and phrases that are common, to ensure the widest target audience ‘gets’ the message. Using NLP enables the writer and the graphic designer to construct the messages and images to appeal, not just to the general audience, but to the specific way each member of that audience takes on information. One of the foundational models of NLP also provides insights into the elegant use of language that enables the writer to communicated at a deeper level with their reader. We have begun to work with some of our business clients to support both their inbound and outbound marketing and communication strategies using NLP principles.

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We were forwarded a link to a Times On Line publication today entitled ‘How to forget fear’. You can click here, as we have posted the full article on our site. Having read through the article, it highlights the neuroscience studies around chemical intervention on phobic type memories. The article implies that this is new science, and that, with the right (chemical) intervention, an individual can ‘re-write’ scary memories.

As always, there is no reference to any other work relating to re-writing, re-imprinting or scrambling unwanted or unuseful memories. We seem to recall that a guy by the name of Richard Bandler came up with a technique that provided similar results – all be it without the introduction of chemicals. Dr Bandler had noticed the way traditional therapy dealt with phobias was by trying to establish Why a person had a phobia, and then attempted to “Desensitise” the phobic reaction. This was (and is) typically by making a person face the situation that caused the reaction again and again. Bandler also noticed that the success of this type of intervention was not great.

By using NLP, Bandler modelled those who did have a phobia, but had managed to get over it. He was looking to identify what they did differently that enabled them to stop having the severe reaction. Eventually he arrived at a model of the thoughts and behaviours or characteristics that was common amongst this group, and then developed and refined the technique that became known as the “NLP Fast Phobia Cure”.

This technique was field tested on hundreds of people with phobias, with positive results. Instead of taking many sessions to desensitise the phobic, sometimes with drugs, Bandler was achieving success in as little as one session. This technique has been part of the classic training in NLP, and so many NLpers have helped many thousands of people around the world to overcome phobias of Flying, Confined Spaces, Spiders, Snakes, Lifts and Elevators, Public Speaking, Crowds, Driving and many others. We, at Quantum, have had major successes using this technique, some of which are highlighted on the Testimonials page. Once again, it would seem that science is catching up with and validating where NLP has been.

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We have chosen to review some of these books for a few reasons. Firstly, many people will tend to review the ‘classic’ NLP books and we thought this might be different, in that we will focus on the classics as well as new examples of NLP literature, and some books that are not specifically NLP, but are on the periphery or support NLP in their text. Secondly, Sensory Acuity, is a skill that the NLP practitioner needs to enable their practice of the art and science of NLP, and thirdly, I have been reading more and more into the role of the unconscious in things we think we are consciously doing: decision making and communicating being just two examples.

We have reviewed the following books so far, with a view to adding to this as we move through the year. The postings will be on this page, with links to a more detailed version of the review. Our map is not the territory, so, whilst our views are valid they are not gospel. If you like the review and accept the thoughts – great! If you have an alternative perspective – great! The world is as we experience  it. You can add your comments or discussion points on the blog page.

You can buy these and other NLP and related books at our bookshop

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ISBN-10: 1904424252
ISBN-13: 978-1904424253

We have both the first and second editions of this book in the Quantum library. The reference materials are well written and the processes well described, and it is great to find most of the patterns of NLP in one place. You could look at the title and say that it can’t be the source, in that the patterns covered have differing genealogy, and, as NLP by nature should be continually developing, what is the source today is not the source tomorrow.

However, we would liken this text to a good cookbook; first you stick to the recipe like glue, ensuring all the aspects are covered and the ingredients are in exact quantities. Then, when you become more confident, you begin to relax and just know what goes where. Finally you become confident enough to experiment with the structure and form of things to come up with a new dish of your own.

That being said there are some things that need to be mentioned. The step-by-step approach is great for the new explorer of NLP in a safe (training?) environment, however, each process is treated in isolation and gives no guidance to ‘what if situations’ – what is the session with a live client is less than perfect? So, while we would say that this is an excellent reference material for the more seasoned practitioner, in our opinion, if you are new to NLP get schooled in the art and then get cooking with the patterns in the book. We would also say that, based on some feedback that we got from someone we gave the book to; the introduction is a bit heavy. Again, great if you have a grounding in NLP but a bit daunting for some new entrants.

As we mentioned earlier, we have both editions of this book and, to better enable us to train others in the techniques in the cookbook, we would like to have seen the originator of each patterns referenced, so that we can offer a preamble that includes the originator, the application and the process.  We like this book and, of all the NLP on the shelves, this is clear, concise, accessible and possibly the best value for money NLP reference book in our collection.

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ISBN-10: 190543054X
ISBN-13: 978-1905430543

This is one of our contentious reviews. We saw this book and thought that it may an example of one of the things that give NLP a bad name, with its focus on ‘getting what you want’. We weren’t disappointed, however, for us the book still has merit.

The book is, on the whole, well written and concise, and the content does address the topic as advertised in the title. However, we feel that this type of book is really an advertisement for the author, their other material and the trainings they offer, rather than a complete end in itself.

The author has a disclaimer in the opening chapter regarding the power of the language patterns contained within the book, and he states that the techniques should be used for mutual benefit, whilst acknowledging that some may use them for manipulation (as per the title). He implies his best intention whilst using terms such as ‘before you unleash this pattern on the unsuspecting public’. There are also references to the application of the patterns in sexual contexts. Hmmm.

There is a great amount of repetition, of both the techniques and the ideas they come from. This means that we reached the end without feeling that we had covered very much ground. That being said, the author does cover significant language patterns and shows how they can be integrated into both conversation and text easily – without the recipient necessarily noticing. We liked the way that the author explains the pattern, provides examples and then asks you to go forth and practice. Much of the elegance in language usage comes for fully integrating the pattern into your style.

For us, if you can ignore the less favourable aspects of the application of NLP and are have an interest in the language aspect of NLP you will get some nice examples of the application of Reframing, Milton model and Slight of Mouth language patterns.

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3. NLP (and other subjects) book reviews