Introduction

In this chapter I will introduce my definition of the change leader and the specific idea of Conscious Leadership that will form part of the conceptual and practical framework to connect with the overarching themes of the book. I will introduce the practical activity of meta-reflection as a core change leadership capability. I have designed a short reflective statement regarding my own change journey as an explanation regarding the motivations behind this book. This chapter is intended to encourage the emergence of the reflective practitioner that lies within all of us involved in leading change initiatives.

Defining the change leader

The change leader can be understood to be any manager who has been tasked with leading a change project to a successful outcome within an organization. The change leader as a job title is usually implicit rather than explicit. It is normal for the change leader to hold a foundational job title such as HRM manager, operational manager, IT manager, general manager, team leader, or head of department. The secondary title of change leader is rarely written on the person’s job description. Rather, it is an implicit expectation that the manager in question will (A) provide leadership to followers when required, and (B) lead their followers through episodes of planned change management interventions on behalf of their employers. The change leader often inhabits two worlds, (1) the world of managing established processes concentrating on making variables predictable and controllable, and (2) the world of unpredictable social outcomes imbedded within change leadership processes. The change leader may, or may not have been formally prepared for their role and therefore may hold impoverished maps in relation to the complicated task of change leadership and thus have fewer options regarding the strategic choices required in terms of behavioural, conceptual, and emotional flexibility.

We need a more specific understanding of the identity of a change leader. The current term is too general, and it implies an external focus where the manager leads others in the execution of their work. When we review the literature on the causes of failure rates associated with change projects, we identify the emphasis is on weakness in soft leadership skills rather than hard leadership skills (Parkes, 2011; McCalman & Potter, 2015). The latter involves the technical skills associated with an occupation and associated analytical skills. The former involves the inter- and intra-personal skills necessary to build collaborations and dialogues with others. By intra-personal skills I am referring to the capabilities we have for managing our emotions, behaviours and thinking styles and reflecting upon the ways in which these expressions impact on our external relationships. By inter-personnel skills I am referring to the capabilities we must build to maintain open and co-operative relations with others.

The change leader needs to be comfortable with hard analytical change techniques such as ‘mapping out change’ (McCalman et al., 2016), and the softer cultural side of change which involves managing one’s own inner states and building a generative field of dialogical exchanges between stakeholders (Dilts, 2017). This book mainly addresses the latter skill set.

As the world of work changes it is important that those in power who are charged with the strategic development of organizations are equipped to manage both first and second order change. The former deals with incremental changes in established methods, structures, and systems, for example, replacing one IT system with another; the latter deals with the ability of organizational members to critically reflect on the way they do things, why they do things the way they do them and to generate a productive state as a group phenomenon and a critical leadership competency.

Many change leaders are stuck in the ‘transmission model’ of change management (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2015) employing broadly transactional methods. This model relies almost exclusively on hierarchal power and reward and punishment systems to motivate change teams. This model, I feel, is outdated and redundant relative to a modern workforce. A cultural shift is required towards the ‘diffusion model’ embracing coaching and transformational leadership techniques utilizing intrinsic reward systems as key motivators. The diffusion model relies on an approach to change based on principles of organizational democracy and generative collaboration and stakeholder dialogue. The intrinsic rewards are based upon building a shared identity, common and compelling vision, and a shared sense of mission throughout the change network. Anderson and Anderson (2010, p. 3) recognize the need for this and they argue that managers need to “transform their beliefs about people, organizations, and change itself; they must view transformation through a new set of mental lenses to see the actual dynamics of transformation; and they must alter their leadership style and behaviour to accommodate the unique requirement of transformation.” A conceptual and practical model of change leadership which meets with our requirements is that of ‘Conscious Leadership’.

The conscious change leader

Dean and Linda Anderson (2010, p. 3) advance the idea of conscious leadership as an identity construct that I think best fits contemporary change leaders. Dean and Linda describe conscious leaders as “a new breed of leader for a new breed of change”. They describe conscious leadership as involving “a required shift in both leaders and consultants consciousness regarding how they view change, themselves, and their roles as Change Leaders.” Conscious change leaders are people who set out to master their own internal resources and the art of change leadership in general. They have a model of human nature, especially motivational drivers, and they understand the butterfly effect, i.e., a slight change in the values, beliefs, cognitions, behaviours, or emotional strategies in a potential leader can and often does create a ripple of change throughout the client’s socio/cultural system as others model the new expressions.

Conscious leaders are sensitive to their own inner world views; they are deliberate regarding their choice of social strategies and are habitually self-reflective regarding the feedback they get from social interactions. A key capability of a conscious change leader is the ability to meta-reflect on the part that their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural strategies in use played in generating their social results. Conscious leaders lead their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural strategies; these do not lead them. This means that they are self-disciplined at a level of meta-reflection. They minimize their tendency to react impulsively and unreflectively and they make a real effort to build empathetic competencies and the skills required to understand people. This book aims to share the ideas and skills required to build conscious leadership capabilities. A key conscious leadership skill is that of meta-reflection.

Conscious leadership skills involve mastery of the following variables:

All of the above can be regarded as states of being. Anderson and Anderson (2010) describe states of being as ‘ways of being’, and argue that the ability of a person to meta-reflect on their way of being is a critical conscious leadership skill. They define this concept in the following way: “It (Way of Being) can be used to describe how leaders are ‘being’ and expressing themselves at any point in time or how they are relating to others in various circumstances and situations. While mindset causes emotions and behaviour, the combination is the source of a leader’s way of being” (2010, p. 169). For me what is useful about this definition is that it implicitly points internally towards the inner sense-making dynamics of the conscious change leader. I prefer the tag ‘state of being’ to ‘way of being’ because it allows me to be very specific regarding the state of being I am meta-reflecting towards. Therefore, throughout this book I will refer to states as social strategies we employ to create our social results. NLP applications are geared towards managing and changing our states of being. The ability to self-calibrate at the level of meta-reflection and change one’s state of being if it is not generating resourceful results through NLP applications is the subject of this book.

Meta-reflection

Meta-reflection involves the potential for conscious reflection towards meta-cognition; meta-emoting and meta-behaving. These are all meta NLP techniques that are arguably foundational constructs supporting and underpinning the broader repertoire of NLP patterns and interventions. A NLP pattern is the specific process-led activity that generates changes in our beliefs, attitudes, emotions, behaviours and thinking strategies which results in a shift in our social results. The term ‘meta’ means something that stands above something else. For example, if one is frustrated at a change management meeting, meta-emoting would involve the process of accessing a state of active curiosity to define the primary state (frustration) and enquire into how resourceful this emotional state of frustration is in this moment. This process of reflexive thinking is also identified as a critical competence for the conscious change leader and, indeed, the general team leader throughout the organizational change literature (Schon, 1984).

The conscious change leader needs to develop their meta-thinking capabilities as a critical tool. To be effective, they need to be able to critically reflect on their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural strategies, and how their choices are influencing their competence as a practitioner. Importantly, the conscious change leader needs to be able to identify the way they are generating their perceptual maps and the processes they employ that delete, distort, and generalize their experiences. The NLP technique developed by Bandler and Grinder (1974) known as ‘The Meta-model’ which is a set of language-based questions can be used to calibrate one’s filters and access deep structure sense making to generate richer and cleaner perceptual understandings or maps. Importantly, for conscious leadership to be authentic it naturally involves the conscious leader being able to honestly reflect on how they lead in practice, not in terms of their ideal socially desirable model but, rather, their model of leadership in practice (Argyris & Schon, 1978).

A central presupposition that guides the writing throughout this book is that conscious change leaders are fundamentally working within cultural and social systems. The socio/cultural system is dynamic, it is not static. Conscious change leaders have the potential to function as significant others and stand as role-models for desirable capabilities in their organization. Therefore, change leaders are, as Alvesson and Sveningsson (2015) claim, meaning-makers. They are important and active sense-making agents and they do have free agency to change the internal drivers that generate their attitudes, emotions, cognitions, behaviours, and relationships. When they exercise this generative power for personal change they cannot avoid disrupting the wider socio/cultural field that they operate from. Thus, they create the butterfly effect which, taken literally, means that they will stimulate shifts in the meaning systems and related social strategies in others throughout the wider socio/cultural field.

Within the above lies the essence of NLP as a conscious change leadership resource. The changes start from within. If they are perceived to be successful, then the strategies generated by conscious change leaders that produced the results will be unconsciously modelled by their followers. Modelling involves the analysis of the success factors that enable someone or a group to generate success and to adopt these success factors into behavioural, emotive, and cognitive resources to generate similar results. However, the change process must start with the conscious change leader acknowledging their shadow self.

A confession

As a conscious leadership practitioner, I have composed a confessional to demonstrate to the reader a very powerful technique you could employ that will greatly enhance this book as a conscious change leadership toolbox. This technique is known as ‘Auto ethnography’ which is basically a ‘letter to self’. It is a deeply personal account of the challenges associated with change leadership that are part of what Timothy Gallwey (1982) refers to as ‘the inner and outer game’.

We all have two models of self that we internalize and which keep us company as we undertake our life’s journey. The first is our socially desirable image of self. This is the ideal version of self that we adopt and try to emulate or at least convince others as being the authentic us. This version of self is particularly relevant front stage as we enact the role of professional managers. This version is the one which is seen to be:

The second version of self, which can be described as our shadow self is the private self that we think others cannot see, hear, or feel. This is our authentic self, which is not to say the desirable self is not authentic, rather it can be manufactured for public consumption whereas our shadow self lives inside of us and is arguably incompatible with the image of the socially desirable self-identity that organizations advance as core competencies in change leaders. Our shadow self may include the following characteristics:

We are always in conflict internally with the various parts we associate with our socially desirable self and our shadow self.

My confession has two purposes: (1) to use my own experience as a device to illuminate the focus of change that will be the subject of this book; and, (2) to introduce the colourful conceptual language that forms the discursive space within which NLP operates. In the chapters that follow I shall define all of these terms and locate them for you in their functional context. I took the time to apply myself to decoding NLP language and when you also do this the field will shed its mysticism and be accessible to you in both practical and thoughtful ways

I invite you to think about your own journey as a manager and as a change leader. Write down your own confession, and explore the areas of social interaction that, on reflection, you acknowledge have hindered your ability to build rapport with others. This is the first step to be an authentic conscious change leader.

Origins

My interest in NLP started during my initial management experiences as a much younger self – although I had no idea that I was interested in NLP as I have come to understand it. I experienced management as an incredibly challenging and rewarding occupation. I found the apparently rational side of management which involved planning, labour scheduling, report writing, business planning, and analysis of all kinds of information all very straightforward. However, when it came to people management, a term I now understand as relationship management which involves building and maintaining rapport, my experience was not so straightforward. Regardless of whether I was dealing with customers, direct reports, colleagues from other departments or line managers, I sometimes struggled in my interpersonal interactions. As I progressed throughout my career I think I improved my relationship management skills. Many relationships became so institutionalized that if I maintained cultural convention and did not stray from this position then, on the surface, relations looked both stable and productive.

The map is not the territory

Through time I developed my own assumptions, beliefs and value system that welded together to form my map of the world. I also developed models of what social experience should look like; sound like; and feel like. These models became ossified as my own mini experiential models which I used to evaluate social experience. Thus, I enriched my map of the world and developed my own idiosyncratic programme of mind, using it to navigate through personal experiences. I judged all social experience against my internal models and maps of what reality should look like. I was not curious in my approach to colleagues; in contrast, I was mainly judgemental. This is not particularly surprising given that a major problem with western management is that we are implicitly trained to judge others. As a result, when my map and associated models were incongruent with those of others I engaged in both implicit and explicit social conflict with this person, or with that person. I attracted people to me whom I felt I had rapport with, and drove away those whom I felt incongruent with.

I justified my entrenched position through a process of honest criticism. I was well-intentioned and everything I did was motivated by positive intentions. The fault generally rested with the other person. It was their world view that was wrong, not mine. They had to change, not me. They lacked this or that personal quality. I did not appreciate the world view of the other and I did not appreciate the fact that they were also coming from a place that they felt was well-intentioned. I would not take personal responsibility for the feedback I was receiving unless it affirmed my world view. Again, I stress the premise that such pathology is not uncommon in managers and it leads to problematic issues when one engages in change management activities.

As I engaged in many mini struggles with those whom I was incongruent with, I played repeatedly the sub-modalities of my experiences and elicited the associated negative emotions which reinforced the incongruent relations I was building around me. I would delete, distort, and generalize empirical experiences to fit with my map, modalities, and models. This process of re-playing the sub-modalities generated not only emotional anguish but I’m sure they expressed themselves through my physical demeanour. I literally became a physical reflection of my state of mind.

I had developed over my lifetime a series of meta-programmes which guided my sense-making processes and forged my perspectives and generated my social strategies. The problem for me, though, was that I was unaware of the concept of a meta-programme, its influence on my social results and the idea that I could intervene in the subjective process and change the nature and structure of my meta-programmes and, thus, change my social results. I assumed my personality was fixed rather than dynamic and that I could change aspects of it if they were proving to be non-resourceful to me.

For long periods I was not a reflective practitioner and I was oblivious to the sensory systems that people adopted as sense-making devices. I had little appreciation, if any of the kind of predicates people employed through their talk that pointed towards their lead sensory system. As a result, I did not engage in matching or mirroring behavioural or communication strategies that others exhibited to expand my rapport building skills. I did not calibrate well. Subsequently, my skills at both pacing and leading the experience of others were, at best, underdeveloped. I had no concept of modelling effective social strategies demonstrated by others. I was, apparently, a mind reader who could calibrate the symbolic gestures of the other with such high proficiency of sensory acuity that I had no need for the meta-model as a means of accessing the sense making of the other.

I received no training or education regarding these critical leadership skills and I believe this is not an uncommon situation in many management communities. It is simply assumed that we, as managers, possess such skills. This is a presupposition that I suspect is seriously flawed. I failed to appreciate the idea that all people have their own world view that is based upon their personal paradigm or meta-programme; that this meta-programme was constructed of their cultural ecology which consisted of experience filters such as beliefs, assumptions, values and attitudes, and that these filters were bespoke to the individual. It was natural for people to use their filters to distort, generalize and delete experience data as they made sense of the world around them. They used their filters to build and protect their meta-programme and to compose mind maps of the world as they understood it. These maps of the empirical territory they inhabited were, to them, concrete realities and could often be quite different from my own. This was a hard concept to grasp as I, perhaps like many others, had an ethnocentric perspective on things. I rarely adopted the second person position. I was unfamiliar with the NLP technique of perceptual mapping which could have transformed my relationship management skills.

The birth of the reflective practitioner

Was I alone? Was I the only person who had these limiting behavioural competencies? The answer is, emphatically, no, I was not alone. However, I can now recognize my failings. I can now evaluate them and, more importantly, do something about them. This is because I knew something was wrong, I just could not explain it to myself. Thankfully, I was developing self-reflective competencies as I matured, and I knew that I wanted to change, I just did not know how I should go about changing. I do know that my experience is not abnormal. The great Dale Carnegie, who published How to Win Friends and Influence People, admits that he wrote the book because he, himself, was so poor at human relationship management and he realized that as far back as 1937 managers were trained on rational management activities but that soft skills, which are a critical component to management practice, were ignored or, even worse, simply assumed to be appropriate. He wrote his book to address this problem.

The wider context

Before I explain how I discovered NLP, what it is and why it was so helpful to me, I would like to consider my confession in a wider context. If there are so many ‘how to do’ books on leadership, team building, customer service, motivation, high performing teams, staff engagement, influencing people and a plethora of other human relations books, surely this means that not much has changed in management since the 1930s and many managers struggle to avoid developing some of the bad practices that I recognized in myself. Management, perhaps, is still dominated by the orthodox thinking of Scientific Management. The dominating assumption in the West, perhaps, is that managers are specialists who have the right to manage and they are in their positions as it is assumed that they are subject-matter experts. Managers tend not to operate as generalists anymore. There is a tendency to specialize in some occupational practice or another, say, accountancy, computers, HR, operations, marketing or procurement. Silos develop and organizations become segregated into mini organizations populated with a network of sub-cultures.

A form of expressive hegemony envelopes organizations and mutates into a socially toxic force which inhibits social development and change. It almost strives to remove the essential element of what to be human involves, which is to co-operate with others for the good of the tribe; to find one’s authentic voice whilst respecting the voice of the other; to respect one another. Modern organizations have, arguably, morphed into pseudo tribes. They use the language of respect, dialogue, and collaboration as their theory of action but their theory in action often produces a significant mismatch between talk and actual behaviours (Argyris, 2010). What is even more concerning is that these kinds of organizations manage to convince themselves that this kind of psychotic behaviour does not exist, thus confirming organizational psychosis (Merry & Brown, 1987). The people simply suffer and the dysfunctionality that underpins the pseudo tribe continues to develop and dominate.

Since the 1940s well-intentioned behavioural scientists, psychologists and management gurus have collaborated to develop an alternative theory of management practice which confronts Taylorism. For over 70 years extensive research has been applied to industrial settings to unpack human behaviour and to develop models of intervention into management cultures aimed at improving organizational performance. The problem with much of this research and the practical interventionist models that it produced is that it often avoids naming the real problem. To target organizational performance is to nominalize a noun. Organizations do not have conscious minds and active reflective social identities, yet the literature implicitly treats them this way. As Anderson and Anderson (2010) in their advancement of conscious leadership capabilities for change leaders argue, the focus of attention needs to be sharpened. The focus of attention must start with the individual who is in a position of significant influence. It must start with the manager. The social skills of managers together with the influencing impact of their cultural paradigm and meta-programme determine the kind of organizational culture that is going to manifest. The social skills of managers determine the change management competencies of an organization. This is because, as Dale Carnegie so adequately asserted, if you cannot influence people by appreciating their individual humanity and their peculiar psychology, you cannot run a business successfully over time. This need can be addressed through NLP education, training, and intervention.

Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter has been to offer a model of leadership as a basis for connecting NLP techniques to change leadership processes. I have presented a view that the established model of change leadership based on transmission and transactional systems is outdated and what is required is a cultural shift towards diffusion and systems of intrinsic rewards. The role of the change leader has been defined and the concept of conscious change leadership introduced. The starting point in the development of one’s conscious change leadership skills is the ability to meta-reflect and auto ethnographic self-confessions are practical catalysts to aid you on your journey.

References

Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2015) Changing Organizational Culture, Routledge.

Anderson, D. and Anderson, L. (2010) Beyond Change Management, Pfeiffer.

Argyris, C. (2010) Organizational Traps: Leadership, Culture, Organizational Design, Oxford University Press.

Argyris, C. and Schon, D. (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Addison–Wesley.

Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. (1974) The Structure of Magic, Science and Behaviour Books Inc.

Dilts, B. R. (2017) Conscious Leadership and Resilience, Dilts Strategy Group.

Gallwey, W. T. (1982) The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House Trade Paperbacks.

McCalman, J. and Potter, D. (2015) Leading Cultural Change, Kogan Page.

McCalman, J., Paton, R. and Siebert, S. (2016) Change Management: A Guide to Effective Implementation, Sage.

Merry, U. and Brown, G. I. (1987) The Neurotic Behaviour of Organizations, gic press.

Parkes, P. (2011) NLP for Project Managers BCS, Chartered Institute for IT.

Schon, D. (1984) The Reflective Practitioner, Basic Books Inc.