Leaders, Watch Your Grammar!

Introduction

Are you facing the relentless pressure of decision-making, with every choice carrying the weight of your team's future?

I know I have.

The experience of trying to be a trainer and business leader, while serving the marketing and operational needs of the company often prove to be too much. As much as I would like to be superhuman, the reality is that it takes a good team, a good team system, great leadership skills and a great business model for this pressure to be manageable.

You might ask - what has this got to do with grammar?

As a corporate leader, the challenges are multifaceted: effectively communicating complex strategies, navigating through resistance to change, and driving constant innovation while maintaining productivity. It's a delicate balance between leading with conviction and adapting to the dynamic needs of your organization. Amidst these pains, how often do you find a tool that promises not only to alleviate these burdens but to elevate your leadership entirely?

The answer is in language: how you process information given by other people, how you actively listen, comes from the structure of language consumption.

I've been using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for almost 37 years. I learnt it as a child where I was applying elements of it to my studies (and enabled me to attain academic gains). Today, I use this for other things like communicating intentionally, studying and understanding my prospects' needs when I do business coaching, articulating the logic behind my thinking so that my team can understand me better, provide more effective and motivating feeback, and more.

What is NLP

NLP is a technology for modeling and replicating human excellence, and it might just hold the key to unlocking new levels of performance in all the areas where you've hit barriers.

Let's take a look:

1. By addressing communication barriers, NLP can transform the way you articulate your vision, ensuring clarity and resonance with your audience. It offers methodologies to sharpen your decision-making, allowing you to lead with assurance even under the most strenuous conditions. When it comes to change management, NLP provides frameworks for understanding and guiding your team's responses to transition, smoothing the path for new initiatives.
2. Leadership isn't just about driving performance; it's about inspiring it. NLP techniques are modeled and structured to tap into the motivations that propel your team members to excel, creating an environment where productivity thrives organically.
3. When conflict arises, as it inevitably will, NLP equips you with strategies to navigate these situations with finesse, preserving team harmony and fostering a culture of accountability.
4. Perhaps you're questioning the personal cost of leadership—the work-life balance that seems ever elusive. NLP doesn't ignore this. Instead, it offers tools for managing your own state, so you can set a sustainable example for those you lead.
5. With NLP, innovation isn't just a buzzword; it's a tangible outcome of a culture where communication, collaboration, and adaptability are enhanced, addressing biases and enabling multi-stakeholder empathy.
6. As for talent retention and attraction, imagine being the leader who not only draws top talent but also develops and retains it. NLP can help you create a compelling narrative around career development, expanding the capabilities of mentors and coaches within your organization, and upgrade the employee value proposition and employer brand.

Skepticism is natural when faced with a solution that promises lift across such a broad spectrum of leadership challenges. I'm not saying you can do it alone either. But NLP could be the catalyst for your leadership transformation.

Demystifying NLP

Despite its somewhat enigmatic reputation, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is grounded in practicality.

If someone can cook well, we could apply NLP to study his behavior, self-talk and mental representations. We can then try this blueprint and clarify our doubts to narrow gaps in experience. You then get a blueprint of his model of reality.

Simplistically, this is modeling (hint: you'll need more than just one role model to have a robust frame of reference).

It's not so much about psychological techniques as it is about mastering the structure of the mind.

Imagine having a user manual for the brain that allows you to decode and model leadership excellence; that's the essence of NLP.

It's a structured approach to understanding how verbal and non-verbal communication affects the human mind and, in turn, how this understanding can be harnessed to achieve specific and desired outcomes.

Origins of NLP

In the 1970s, Richard Bandler, a graduate student of mathematics, and John Grinder, a professor of linguistics, crossed paths at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bandler was conducting experiments on hypnosis, and Grinder noticed that there were special nuances in the language that could be seen as a pattern. He is quoted as saying "if you show me what you do, I'll tell you what you've done".

So, Bandler and Grinder's work was not rooted in traditional psychology but was an interdisciplinary endeavor. They drew inspiration from transformational grammar and linguistics, aiming to understand the cognitive structures that underlie language and how language can influence a person's experience of the world. They also incorporated insights from general semantics, a field that explores how language shapes our perceptions, and from system thinking, which examines how parts of a whole interact.

The duo began to observe and model therapists who were excellent communicators and effectors of change, such as Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson. By studying these pre-eminent professionals at that time, Bandler and Grinder sought to distill the essence of their communication and transformational prowess into transferable techniques.

Thus, NLP was conceived not as a branch of psychology, but as an applied method in linguistics for understanding and utilizing the cognitive-behavioral patterns that make people excel in their fields.

This approach to modeling excellence laid the groundwork for what NLP would become: a toolkit for personal and professional development, aimed at helping individuals refine their approach to communication, leadership, and change.

Aligning NLP with Leadership

In the contemporary leadership landscape, the ability to connect with and inspire people is paramount. Leadership is no longer about simply issuing orders; it's about fostering trust, encouraging collaboration, and embodying a vision that galvanizes your team.

NLP in Communication and the Meta Model

NLP first garnered attention in the corporate realm through its revolutionary approach to communication. It emphasizes sensory perception and calibration—paying close attention to the non-verbal cues that provide insight into a person's thinking and emotional state.

In fact, the reason why this is emphasized is because your leadership is related to grammar. And I don't mean from the grades you got in grammar either! A fundamental concept in Transformational Grammar (as theorized by Noam Chomsky) is called deep and surface structure.

Here's an example:

• "She was tired. She left the networking session early."
• "Because she was tired, she left the networking session early."
• "She was tired because of the networking session and left early."

As far as an observer is concerned, the only thing you can tell with absolute fact is that she left early. But how many times do we, in reality, distort the cause of the fact? What if this unintended distortion created more confusion or animosity? It seems leaders must contend with their own biases and assumptions. But it seems easier said than done.

Model of the World

The concepts of deletion, distortion, and generalization are particularly relevant to leadership communication. These terms describe the ways in which our minds simplify or alter information:

• Deletion refers to the omission of details from our perception.
• Distortion involves twisting or interpreting information in a way that suits our beliefs or expectations.
• Generalization is the process of drawing broad conclusions based on a few instances.

These processes can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunications within an organization.

Take for example giving directions.

Someone had given me directions that don't lead me anywhere. "Go left, then go straight, then turn right, then turn left" is not a really good example of clear directions!

Imagine this kind of instruction on your GPS. You'd crash your car before you knew it!

But taking it further, imagine you are actually doing this in your leadership. You were just not aware of it because it never really struck you that the grammar of your leadership communication is an element that contributes to the already complicated world we live in.

The Meta Model

The Meta Model, developed by Bandler and Grinder, is a linguistic tool that helps leaders address these issues. It provides a set of questions designed to clarify, challenge, and expand the information being communicated. This way, we can recover information from deletions, clarify distortions, and challenge generalizations.

For instance, when a team member says, "We can't meet this deadline," the Meta Model encourages a leader to ask specific questions to uncover the omitted details (deletion - 'deadline for what specifically'), challenge assumptions (distortion - 'meet based on what criteria'), and specify the generalization to understand the actual constraints and resources needed ('what might happen if you did', and 'how else can this be configured so that we can meet this deadline'.

Because there are so many unconscious biases, the use of these questions to probe at the underlying deep structure of communciation enables leaders to maximize clarity so that better decisions can be made.

I remember an incident once. A sales team lead was telling a team member to "be punctual" for a client meeting. The team member set all the necessary reminders and timings to the correct time. On the day of the meeting, half the team showed up at one venue, while the other half showed up at another venue. This was because the name of the venue was the same (think: hotel brands), but the street name was different. And they were almost an hour away from each other. This was probably a minor problem. But imagine, it stemmed from an assumption that was really not obvious.

In another case, I remember coaching a CxO who was highly energized. Her manner of speech was enthusiastic and rapid. She was a genius who would think through things quickly, decide fast and delegate instantly. Her model of the world was centered around efficiency.

However, knowing that she had to deal with multiple different cultures from different regions in her organization, I asked "how do people receive you when you are doing things at this level of efficiency?" The challenges poured forward. Others were feeling inadequate. Some whose first language was not English dismissed her as someone who was too task-oriented. Still others might interpret her gravitas as 'fleeting' rather than providing 'assurance'. She had, all this while, not considered that her energy and enthusiasm might actually be working against her!

Once she was able to view from alternative perspectives, her view of 'speaking with energy, efficiency and enthusiasm' became less of a priority. She was more aware of the bigger picture and allowed her communication to become more inclusive. The assumptions about ourselves are hidden in the deep structure of our experience. Until someone is able to uncover that and be aware of them, many of these assumptions lead to results that we, as leaders, would not want.

Basic Examples of The Meta Model In Action

How is this any different to asking "powerful questions"?

Again, the problem is that telling someone to ask powerful questions leads them nowhere. The questions is "how??" You need a model and framework that allows you to determine what makes questions powerful in that context.

First, you need linguistic markers (details of that come from my NLP training - DM me if you want to learn to powerfully level up your leadership game with NLP).

That's what happens in the first column. These are based of an understanding of language and their surface structure. You can examine it more deeply if you know which are deletions and distortions from generalizations.

Second, you need a direction in your question. Are you uncovering missing information? Are you challenging boundaries of belief? Or are you clarifying an abstraction?

There's no other model that enables a systematic approach to clarification and listening as the Meta Model!

But having taught the Meta Model for decades. I can say safely that the Model is not the Manner. What do I mean?

Deletion: The project was supposed to have a 30% profit margin.

Meta Model Qn: According to whom? Which project?

As you can tell, applying the question directly and bluntly without incorporating the right level of connection can completely spoil the message.

This is where other models of NLP come to support the use of these questions such as the sensory calibration and rapport building approaches in NLP, that can support connection .

Conclusion but really just the beginning

If you follow me so far, you're a genius!

The NLP Meta Model is one of the core linguistic models that forms the basis of my practice. Yet, it takes a lot more practice to be able to learn NLP. So while I endeavor to share more about NLP, it takes a practical setting to do it well.

If you'd like to learn more about NLP in the context of personal mastery, click here to get access to a 2-day webinar I ran . It gives the basis of some of the constructs of NLP in order for you to decide if you want to learn it more deeply!