Introduction

This chapter explores an approach through which change leaders may build a culture of psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) through NLP to enable the development of the diffusion model of change leadership. In established management practice there remains a disproportionate reliance on the transmission model of change leadership fuelling the ‘disengagement epidemic’. The ideas that I am advancing regarding what is required to build psychological safety throughout a change management community are not commonplace in the change management literature. Therefore, it was welcomed that Google, through Project Aristotle, positioned psychological safety as an important aspect of change management processes at the forefront of leadership thinking, at least within the boundaries of California, and Silicon Valley. It is also advantageous that scholars such as Alvesson and Sveningsson (2016) have adopted a cultural and social lens through which to study fault lines in change management projects and have identified what happens at a social and cultural level across an organization if psychological safety is not built into the fabric of the operational culture. Building psychological safety is akin to coating a wall with a primer before you paint it with the surface coating. The primer ensures better adhesion of paint to the surface, increases paint durability, and provides additional protection for the material being painted. Psychological safety functions as a sense-making primer which helps the change project attach to the established culture and provide lasting effects and protection from being undermined.

Don’t take short cuts

This chapter approaches change leadership from a critical presupposition which asserts the view point that modern managers know how to design change management programmes. They are proficient as technical engineers of change projects. Throughout Europe and the UK there are over 1,700 business schools offering post graduate management training and which emphasize in total, or in part, strategic change leadership and management. Also, it is generally accepted that there is an abundance of accessible literature that offers well-constructed frameworks for structuring a change programme. These models are immediately retrievable via search engines on the internet. However, the critical literature overwhelmingly points towards a need for change leaders to build upon their established knowledge and skills regarding the micro social process required to build an atmosphere of psychological safety. This point is not new and as far back as 1969 in the Addison-Wesley series on Organizational Development Warren Bennis wrote about the need for leaders to create climates of psychological safety to enable progressive OD practices. However, regardless of this recognition it appears that there remains a disproportionate reliance on rational planning techniques with less importance given to behavioural science ideas and methods. Yet, clearly, people are curious as there are over 770 million references to change management on the internet as people seek solutions to their change problems. However, perceptions of complexity often lead to shortcuts as managers attempt to reduce the core concepts into manageable agendas. This over-simplification of the diversity of change work appears to generate the following change management framework (Alvesson, 2002).

The challenge in the practical application of the above framework is the Black Box of social interaction. What is really going on between the people involved in the operation of this model of logical change management? What is really happening at the level of micro sense making that either enables the emergence of psychological safety leading to high performing change leaders and teams or disables such outcomes? NLP offers models of interaction that operate at the micro level of sense making and which address gaps in competency frameworks that enable high performing change teams and leaders. Our model, which enables the building of psychological safety, shows at a very practical level just how a change leader may approach their role with the aim of creating a climate of psychological safety in their operational domains.

It appears that there is an imbedded presupposition in many management communities that advances the idea that managers only have to apply these prescriptions and successful change will occur. The problem with this view, according to Alvesson and Sveningsson (2016), is that rational and linear models imply a simplicity that does not exist. The sequential model does provide a framework to guide change management efforts; however, if the change manager has no underlying model of understanding and working with social sense-making processes and interactions then the likelihood is mediocre success or relative failure (Collins, 1998).

The conclusion arrived at is that the main problem facing those who are involved in leading change work is a lack of relevant language and ideas rooted in social interaction processes that are specific to change projects.

Mindset and state management

The first stage and central element of our approach is mindset and state management. This is the process through which the change leader develops self-reflexivity and conscious leadership skills. The former involves building competence by reflecting upon one’s emotional, behavioural, and cognitive strategies and questioning the resourceful nature of these in terms of goal achievement and intra- and inter-relationships. The latter involves the development of competencies which enable the change leader to select the emotional, cognitive, or behavioural state they deem to be the most resourceful. These competencies are the core enablers of effective soft skills development in change leaders.

Caretaking

The second stage of our approach starts with the most basic yet fundamental aspects of a change project which is caretaking. This stage involves the change leaders taking care to build fundamental environmental conditions that are supportive towards change participants’ psychological condition. This stage involves managing the psychogeography of the venues that meetings are to take place, managing one’s own internal states and enabling the emergence of highly resourceful emotional states in others. This stage has the meta-objective of change leaders being able to elicit COACH state in their teams when approaching and experiencing social interactions. The name we give to this process is ‘building a coaching container’ which is an aspect of leadership and relationship management that is often overlooked. Part of the role as a care taker is to generate a coaching container within which people can feel confident in their relationship with you to express themselves without fear of any attack on their sense of self. This involves building a relationship through which we, as the ‘lead influencers’, act as ‘caretakers’ of the environment that our audience is to operate within during their interactions with us. This involves accepting our responsibility to ‘calibrate’, ‘pace’, ‘elicit’ and ‘lead’ the others into a state of psychological safety within which they feel no threat to their established identities. This involves providing a safe and supportive environment.

Rapport building

The third approach, building rapport between the change leader and their teams, provides the social glue which holds a climate of psychological safety together. To build rapport with an individual, or with groups one can either operate instinctively, cross one’s fingers and see what happens, or one can model the rapport-building processes of highly successful change leaders and internalize these social strategies to a level of unconscious competence.

Detailed, in Figure 9.1 is the NLP Model of Rapport Building which involves multiple interactive strategies, the sum of which enables generative rapport between stakeholders. I will review this model in detail in the chapter on rapport building. I will argue that establishing a state of rapport between stakeholders is a critical leadership process and that, in the absence of rapport, effective and authentic change leadership may not be possible.

Framing experience

The fourth stage involves change leaders operating as meaning makers. This active identity involves the daily framing of experience in ways that generate collaborative social construction through dialogue between the change leader and their stakeholders. Put simply if the reality frames constructed by the stakeholders are very different from those of the change leader a state of ontological incompatibility will develop which will create social distance between the members of change teams and disable the potential for collaborative working at an authentic level. The change leader needs to be able to pace the world view of different stakeholders and hold the challenging feelings that will be stirred because of ontological incompatibility. They need to aim towards a state of ontological congruence which involves holding two frames simultaneously; the one that you are initially committed to, and another that is in the making.

The meta-objective during this stage of our model is to avoid stakeholders conflicting over reality frames and being open to reviewing the merits of their frames based on empirical evidence and through dialogue, constructing a common frame of reference that the team can all agree upon which serves as a basis of collaborative action.

A final aspect of building psychological safety that can be enabled through NLP applications is the sensitive art of giving feedback.

Giving fish and stretch

In NLP language we refer to feedback as ‘providing fish and stretch’ (Dilts, 2003). The idea of giving fish provides us with a way to re-programme our attitudes towards providing feedback. The idea is to see the positives in someone’s work or behaviours and to acknowledge these. For example, if someone prepares a document or a presentation and shows it to a colleague and the colleague provides no feedback other than to point out spelling errors or aesthetic opinions this is an example of someone imbedded in a critically judgemental model of the world. This does not encourage a relationship of psychological safety between the people involved and impairs rapport building. This is not to say that errors should be ignored, rather that if this is the only feedback offered it is unquestionably unbalanced in the extreme. Thus, it is good practice to learn how to give fish; to detect aspects of a performance or a task achieved that the other person is emotionally and egotistically invested in and acknowledge these with positive affirmations linked to their identity. Only then can we expect the other person to be open to the judgement of the other. This state of openness can only occur if both parties are in a state of rapport. Once we have rapport then we can gently provide stretch to another person. This involves coaching them to build their social, emotional, and cognitive capabilities.

Giving fish

Giving fish is a metaphor for rewarding, recognizing, and encouraging excellent behaviour, attitudes, and performance. The principle behind this strategy in terms of engagement building is that human beings have a psychological need for recognition and positive feedback. In the absence of this, the social glue that connects team leaders with their teams and vice versa is very weak. Giving fish is more than a functional task, it is a state of mind, an operating philosophy towards leadership and human nature and a key element of the psychological contract that cements open, trusting, and resourceful relationships.

Importantly, psychologists have come to realize that the psychological contract and its relative the state of psychological safety are only possible if rapport is built between people. It takes time to do this. Yet, in a second, one can break rapport and thus break or fracture the climate of psychological safety one has carefully built up in a project team over time. The fish that the change leader presents to their team must be genuine, from the heart, and the recipient must feel that this is, in fact, the case. Simply performing excessive compliments is a superficial activity that lacks authenticity and will not stimulate rapport; in fact, it can do the very opposite and break or prevent rapport.

Giving fish involves recognizing and emphasizing an aspect of a team member or member’s performance in a detailed way that acknowledges best practice. Now let us look at the opposite of giving fish which is giving stretch.

Giving stretch

Giving stretch is a social strategy that is only possible if psychological safety is in place between team leaders and their team members mediated through rapport-building processes. Giving stretch involves inviting another person to accept and consider advice based upon observations concerning the performance or capability of the other person with the aim of stretching their abilities. This is a very difficult activity to perform without clashing with the inter-subjective model of the other. Everyone has their internal model of what good practice looks, feels, and sounds like. These internal models are deeply personal, and we guard them from criticism with emotional force. Often, we connect these models with how we behave or perform and, thus, self-validate our own performances. This means that, inevitably, when someone is giving another stretch they are comparing an aspect of the other person’s capability against their own internal model of best practice. This has another thorny element in that to give stretch one assumes that one’s model is the correct model and that you, as the provider of the stretch, practice what you preach. As we all know, sadly in management circles, this is not always the case.

These sensitive issues make the practice of giving stretch more challenging. It should be clear that you cannot simply jump in to a new relationship and start freely offering stretch. This will certainly ensure that you do not build rapport and will disable well intentioned leadership activities. The problem is that, often, experienced managers can do just this, unreflectively and habitually. It may be the case that the secondary gain they obtain from this practice is the self-validation of their own perceived worth as management experts in their area of practice and maintaining a perception of personal control on the work and identities and subjectivities of others. This is a toxic psychology that NLP aims to dilute and reverse.

To give stretch competently one needs to be perceived by the team members as a role model of some kind or another. They need to understand and appreciate the skills and experiences you have that give you credibility to offer fish and stretch. This identity as a role model needs to be earned. These challenging variables evidence just why the time required to build rapport is so critical to achieving successful and productive project team member dynamics.

Style is important

An important aspect of giving fish and stretch is our choice of words, voice tone, body language, and emotional state. These resources need to be thoughtfully selected. As one can appreciate we need to be skilled at matching to build the initial rapport required to open the channels in others to be receptive to accepting our fish and stretch as authentic, sincere, and well intentioned.

The end game behind rapport building in our NLP model is the generation of leadership. Once rapport is in place then if you are to lead, i.e., invite others to accept your fish and stretch then you must be able to elicit a state of mind that is open to your leadership. If rapport is in place, and if psychological safety has been established then you can experiment with giving fish and stretch. If the team members accept your contributions without aggravation and remain open and connected and perhaps even act upon your feedback, then this is evidence that you may have established a leadership/follower relationship within the change project team.

In the exercise that follows we provide examples of how to give fish. Let us say you were attending a team presentation on a change project and feedback was invited. The approach that is aligned with the principles of giving fish would involve the careful framing of feedback statements which start with language patterns such as:

“What I observed in your performance was…”

“What I really liked about it was…”

“What you did that I really appreciated was…”

“The reason that I really appreciated it was because…”

“For me what was particularly impressive about your performance was…”

“The reason for this was…”

The above language patterns are examples of fish.

The above reinforces capabilities that are strengths. This is an essential aspect of leadership; however, we do also sometimes have to ‘stretch’ the capabilities of our team and we do so using the following language patterns:

“What I observed that could be further developed was…”

“The reason for this is…”

“I really liked when you… and if you were to… I think it could be even more effective.”

“The reason for this is…”

“When you… what I noticed was… and if you… I think you would…”

“The reason for this is…”

These language patterns should always be used in total sincerity and when done this way are powerful at building positive engagement and, thus, rapport with team members and encourage a state of learning by being open to the feedback.

Concluding thoughts

This chapter has described an approach that can create an atmosphere of psychological safety in an organization and support the change leadership strategy of diffusion as opposed to the now largely redundant model of transmission. As Google has demonstrated (Duhigg, 2016), if change leaders cannot build an atmosphere of psychological safety then they cannot effectively lead a change programme with integrity. Finally, I briefly reviewed the NLP approach to giving constructive feedback to both re-enforce existing strengths and to stretch certain aspects of our capabilities as change leaders. The next chapter will review the NLP applications one can use to manage stage one of our model Mindset and State Management.

References

Alvesson, M. (2002) Understanding Organizational Culture, Sage.

Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2016) Managerial Lives: Leadership and Identity in an Imperfect World, Cambridge University Press.

Bennis, W. (1969) Organizational Development, Addison-Wesley.

Collins, D. (1998) Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives, Routledge.

Dilts, B. R. (2003) From Coach to Awakener, Meta Publications.

Duhigg, C. (2016) What Google Learned from its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. New York Times Magazine, 25^th February.

Edmondson, A. (1999) Psychological Safety and Learning Behaviour in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.