Introduction

In this chapter I will address the foundations of a change leader’s role which involves caretaking and guiding change participants’ experience of the change work that is to unfold. Guiding involves directing change subjects along a journey of generative change from one state to another, whilst caretaking involves providing a safe and supportive environment for this process to emerge successfully. This means that change leaders must insist that the venues they plan to use as coaching containers are environmentally sound, psychologically safe and have a physical set-up that enables generative dialogue. Change leaders should not perceive these details as pedestrian, or factors that should be addressed by others. Change leaders must be able to meta-reflect on their own states and the energy they are giving off and the generative field around them that they are co-creating with the participants.

NLP and psychological safety

The main reason that NLP can help build an atmosphere of psychological safety in a group or between two people is that its originators modelled the work and practices of leading psychotherapists. Bandler and Grinder (1975) wanted to understand how these psychotherapists achieved their successful change outcomes when working with clients which included family groups. Now before you think… ‘oh dear; therapy’ please bear in mind that the work of Rogers (1965) into client centred therapy heavily influenced the founders and early pioneers of the OD movement (French & Bell, 1999) and OD developers such as Merry and Brown (1987) also used Perls (1973) Gestalt Therapy to examine neurosis as an organizational dysfunction. Whenever you get people coming together over time you generate localized cultures and within cultural groups you experience psychological challenges that are susceptible to therapeutic approaches.

Bandler and Grinder (1975) identify the ability of the therapists they were modelling to build rapport with their clients as a core competence behind successful change work. As we will discover in Chapter 14 rapport involves creating a generative field between people based on trust and acceptance.

As an essential element of both caretaking and guiding, the NLP trainer is taught to acutely respect rapport-building processes. They are very sensitive to the energy they transmit and generate; to the setting for a client meeting or a training session; the presentation of self; the meta-programmes they use; the spatial arrangement of a training venue; the environmental factors that affect emotional states; and the meta-messages that can be toxic if not managed effectively. They are also sensitive to the potential influence of both mirror neurons and emotional contagions (Hatfield et al., 2014) being generated by influential participants who may be in CRASH state and who may act as role models for other participants. We match instinctively the behaviour of the significant other.

Emotional contagion involves one person’s emotions and related behaviours directly triggering similar emotions and behaviours in other people. When people unconsciously mirror their colleague’s expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those colleague’s emotions. They model their colleagues. This process is also enabled by the idea of the ‘significant other’ as developed by Mead (1934). When we have significant others in our social field we are susceptible to unconsciously modelling their emotions, cognitions, behaviours, values, and beliefs. The NLP trainer is very sensitive to these ideas and processes and will use techniques to ‘disrupt’ the patterns if they are toxic to the wider field.

A technique that is incredibly simple is to involve the audience in participative exercises. It is understood that emotion follows motion. Simply inviting your audience to participate in an exercise which involves movement and introspection can disrupt the emergence of a non-resourceful energy field. For example, you could use a powerful NLP exercise called ‘the getting to know you exercise’. This NLP pattern involves the following steps.

The trainer will invite everyone to choose a conversational partner for two minutes. Each participant will take one minute to explain to the other:

The conversational partner guides the question and answer sequence. The guide is to deliberately match the body language and posture of their conversational partner and backtrack with them thus pacing their experience and demonstrating their attentiveness.

The trainer blows a horn and that is the signal for the pairings to break and find new conversational partners. This exercise is completed three times.

This kind of pattern interrupt has the potential of distracting the cynics and engaging with the wider audience and establishing the basis for a generative field. The great therapists understood that this getting to know you process was a fundamental strategy to create the conditions required for successful change work.

Toxic meta-messages

When building a climate of trust, a significant challenge for change leaders is managing the corrosive influence of toxic symbolism generated by meta-messages gone wrong. This is significant because it naturally involves confronting activities enacted by managers which are incongruent with the espoused intentions of the change project. In NLP terms, we call these variables meta-messages which can be defined as messages conveyed to others either consciously or unconsciously through non-verbal communications. For example, a manager claims, verbally, to support the change programme whilst shaking their head sideways as they talk, or delivering extensive monologues when they are supposed to be actively trying to generate dialogue.

Meta-messages are messages about other messages, usually expressed through nonverbal cues. A meta-message can reveal the difference between what a person says and what they mean. Meta-messages are unconscious expressions. For change leaders, being aware of meta-messages helps to understand the audience and to ensure that they, themselves, do not communicate messages that are not congruent about the change programme. Being aware of the potential of meta-messages to creep into our presentations of self as a credible change leader is very important regarding caretaking and guiding.

Other ways that we send out meta-messages are through the process of tonal marking where we underscore key words or phrases with voice tones that are not congruent with the verbalized message. Many meta-messages are delivered using very subtle cues and some are rather blunt. The way a manager sits in a meeting can convey a meta-message regarding their commitment to the change project, and the physiology, thinking styles, voice tone, breathing patterns and whom they choose to sit beside, can all function as meta-messages that reveal the nature of relationships, identifications, and levels of commitment regarding the sponsor’s change agenda.

A particularly toxic symbol that can be mediated through the meta-message is silence. If change leaders, or rather expected change leaders, do not regularly talk up the change programme, this is a meta-message. If they simply communicate with a regular voice tone with little enthusiasm for the alleged message of support, this is a meta-message. If they arrive consistently late for team meetings, fail to meet deadlines or deliver tasks, then these are meta-messages. If they do not follow up agenda items with change teams, then this is a meta-message. Can you imagine these things occurring during a change project and the mini narratives that morph into toxic symbols that change participants co-author? I can…. I have fully experienced such a dynamic. I can assure you that whilst senior managers derive an immediate gain of emotional safety and false harmony through blindsiding these kinds of meta-messages, they are doing great harm to the organization’s capacity for change and self-renewal. Caretaking involves managing the toxic impact of meta-messages.

NLP greatly enhances our sensory acuity and, thus, our ability to notice and read meta-messages. For change leaders to be successful, they need to communicate the idea of meta-messages throughout the management community and build an atmosphere where they can be identified for what they are and confronted and addressed. This is not an easy thing to do. It is a leadership act involving both caretaking and guiding processes. Yes, leaders will claim that it is important to maintain harmony in a team and confrontation is a bad thing for team spirit. NLP helps us explore the substance of these beliefs, to identify the weaknesses in them and the secondary gains produced by holding on to these on the part of managers in charge of change projects. NLP also provides a philosophy through which we can filter our emotional states when we recognize meta-messages which are manifesting as toxic symbols and hurting the change programme.

Building a coaching container

Part of the role as a caretaker is to generate a coaching container within which people can feel confident in their relationship with you as the leader, and with the rest of the group, so that they may express themselves without fear of any attack on their sense of self. Therefore, a meeting room is no longer a meeting room, instead it is to be understood as a creative space through which difficult feelings may be held and channelled safely. This is a style of leadership that involves building a relationship through which the lead influencers act as caretakers of the environment that their audience is to interact within. This involves accepting our responsibility to calibrate, pace, elicit and lead 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.

Managing our energy

When, as change leaders, we bring people together, we generate a presence in the room. This presence has a significant influence upon the wider generative field that resonates between the full audience. A generative field can be understood as an energy that is mirrored between an audience and which enables each person to enter and hold a highly resourceful state. The model COACH state is a good example of the mindset that the participants should enter once a generative field has been established.

If the change leader is perhaps over-anxious about meeting and engaging with their audience, they may be slipping into CRASH state. If this is the case, then the energy they will give off will most probably be unsettling and incongruent with their actual intentions. This negative energy can seep into the unconscious minds of audience members who will model the CRASH state being actualized by the change leader. This process is known in psychology as an emotional contagion and was developed by Hatfield et al. (2014). As previously discussed, people literally catch the emotional states and energies from other people through unconscious modelling. Thus, it is incumbent upon the change leader as a guide and as a caretaker to critically reflect on their emotional, cognitive, and behavioural states and adjust these if they find themselves moving away from COACH to CRASH state.

Building COACH state

For change leaders engaged in building a climate of psychological safety this process of managing one’s mindset and privileging COACH state and avoiding CRASH state cannot be underestimated.

Robert Dilts of NLPU along with his colleague Stephen Gilligan developed the acronym COACH and CRASH to enable clients and NLP trainers and coaches to identify discreet emotional states that were generating attitudes and behaviours that were either enabling positive or negative experiences. The method is straightforward. One simply identifies an experience they have had that generates, by association of thought, the state of mind implicit in each COACH state variable. For example, a time in one’s life when one felt really connected to a project or to an audience. They anchor these experiences by associating them with a personal symbol, then link them together under the heading of COACH (described below) and when the person needs these resources they simply ‘collapse’ the anchors one after the other to experience COACH state.

Once each person has built their chain of anchors and internalized their own COACH construct then before each meeting change leaders can invite all participants to enter COACH state through group participation in an exercise led by the facilitator for the meeting. In my experience, when this is undertaken without inhibition and with sincerity, the climate for the meeting is creative, and generative. One does feel psychologically safe because I have stimulated a state of mind that is Connected with the project and the people in the room, Open to the ideas and thinking strategies of others and open to introspection and trust, Attentive to the needs of others; feeling Centred and confident and, finally, bringing my full sense of self to the meeting so that the others know that they can trust me to Hold challenging feelings.

Stacking emotional states

When building a coaching container, we are involved in the process of stacking emotional states on top of each other. For example, we may stack negative emotional states on top of each other and end up in CRASH state, which is a super toxic negative state or mind set. CRASH stands for:

C: Contracted: feelings of isolation, lack of connection with the organization and one’s colleagues.

R: Reactive: not having time to reflect and survey one’s culture and work-based events and learn and share the learning from reflective experiences.

A: Action paralysis: struggling with information overload due to difficult relationships and toxic emotions.

S: Separate: feeling alone and lacking in trusting relationships within the workplace, lack of perception regarding the vision and mission of the organization.

H: Hurting: feeling undervalued, underwhelmed, regretting not having the chance to really make a difference at work.

Many management cultures are in CRASH state and simply do not know how to transform this unproductive state of mind and enjoy far more productive team-based relationships. NLP rapport-building skills can enable the smooth transformation of individual and group states from CRASH state to the more productive COACH state.

If the change leader is in COACH state then they will be able to access their unconscious mind and explore the characteristics of their shadow self and review the ways in which it influences their emotions, behaviours, and cognitions and, thus, the social strategies that generate their results. This is a safe technique that presents no threat to the public version of the change leader and it is a technique that is easily modelled and self-administered. When you are in state of internal rapport you are in a high performing state. When you are in this state of mind other people sense this and if you then build rapport with them you have both internal and external rapport, and this is a very powerful resource state to be in.

You can programme your mind to adopt a meta-programme that privileges COACH state orientations as a change leader. This involves building your COACH state. The operating principle behind building COACH state involves identifying a unique prior experience from either the first or second position that generates each specific element and anchoring this against a symbol of your choice. By firing each anchor, you can release each resourceful state or specific elements and bring these with you into any social situation that you feel would benefit from these. The following example is a typical exercise developed by Robert Dilts which is based upon the NLP techniques of perceptual positioning, anchoring, state elicitation and somatic reinforcement

Exercise building COACH state

The trainer is to invite a participant to join them on stage.

COACH state audit

A COACH state audit simply involves moving to a meta-thinking state and critically self-reflecting on one’s state of mind by asking the following questions:

Connected: Do I feel connected to my co-learners and my trainers?

Centred: Do I feel confident that I belong in this social space and that it is psychologically safe for me?

Open: Do I feel open to the ideas of others, curious and secure in being open about my own thought?

Attentive: Am I attentive to the needs of my co learners, trainers and the learnings being generated?

Holding: Can I hold onto to difficult feelings in a resourceful way?

If your answers are mainly yes, then you can confidently say you are in COACH state. And you can most definitely feedback critical observations to your significant others from COACH state if you are being authentic regarding the positive intentions lying behind your feedback data. The challenge with this dynamic involves the ability of the significant other in building a climate or culture of psychological safety that enables this dynamic to emerge. As previously stated, in NLP terms we call this generating a coaching container; a meeting room or a training room or an office becomes a dedicated space to hold challenging feelings and to express these in constructive ways confident that they will be received absent of defensive routines and with a sincere welcome.

Another key element of building a coaching container is thinking through the spatial content of the venue being used. Robert Dilts calls this process ‘psychogeography’.

Psychogeography

Robert Dilts (2003, p. 9) states that “Psychogeography refers to the influence that micro geographical arrangements and relationships exert on people’s psychological processes and interpersonal interactions.” Thus, if you want to build rapport with an individual, a group of two, or a group of more than two then how you arrange the room is very important. Also, how sensitive you are to cultural norms regarding the protective space people expect to be respected around them has implications for rapport building. If you stand alongside someone then this can help build feelings of support. If you can sit next to someone this indicates togetherness and a sense of acceptance. If you sit directly facing someone this could indicate a contest. If you sit opposite yet distant this can indicate resistance between the interactors. The dynamics involved in group formations also impact considerably on the degree of rapport one can achieve. Thus, sensitivity to spatial arrangements is important regarding rapport-building processes.

Nancy Dixon (1996), who has generated an enormous amount of insight into dialogical practices, advances the idea of conversational circles as a core psychogeography technique. As circles of chairs have no starting point and no end and no corners then the group will feel a reduction in hierarchical symbolism and perhaps feel safer. It may be the case that people feel a little strange at first in a circle; however, through time they will start to demonstrate their involvement as they adjust their body language, heighten their sensory acuity, and actively engage in a dialogue.

If you, as a change leader, bring an audience together in a classroom-style format, using PowerPoint as the main medium, this is fine if all you want is to deliver a personal monologue. It does not create a generative field though; it disables dialogue and it is unlikely that your audience will feel connected to your case for change or psychologically safe.

Concluding thoughts

This chapter has considered the role of change leaders building a climate which values acutely recognizing and making space for acknowledging the authenticity of all individuals involved in the change space. It also has paid attention to the identity of change leaders as caretakers and guides in that they have responsibilities to ensure that the environment provides a supportive structure for change teams to operate within. Thinking about our own states and the energy we generate and the way in which rooms are organized and psychological safety is built up are very important issues that, if left unattended, will most definitely undermine the change leadership process. NLP pays attention to these details and offers a well-formed model for managing them effectively.

We must first practice NLP on ourselves and this means being open to the way our own maps act as filters and barriers to collaborating with others. Can I build rapport with someone whose map conflicts with my own? Can I tolerate well-intentioned interventions into my map? For me these two skills are at the very heart of NLP practice. The absence of these simply undermines my core identity as an NLP developer. I try to be the best version of myself and I will continue to do so. The next chapter will address a model of rapport building

References

Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. (1975) The Structure of Magic, Science and Behaviour Books Inc.

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

Dixon, N. (1996) Perspectives on Dialogue, Center for Creative Leadership.

French, W. L. and Bell, C. H. (1999) Organizational Development, 6th edn, Prentice Hall.

Hatfield, E., Bensman, L., Thornton, D. P., and Rapson, L. R. (2014) New Perspectives on Emotional Contagion: A Review of Classic and Recent Research on Facial Mimicry and Contagion, Interpersona.

Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society, from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist, University of Chicago Press.

Merry, U. and Brown, L. G. (1987) The Neurotic Behaviour of Organizations, Gardner Press.

Perls, F. (1973) The Gestalt Approach: An Eye Witness to Therapy, Science and Behaviour Books.

Rogers, R. C. (1965) Client-Centered Therapy, ABE Books.