Leading With NLP: Essential Leadership Skills for Influencing and Managing People. Joseph O’Connor

can still be ‘close’ to their followers and many military leaders create fantastic loyalty in their troops because even the lowest ranks feel their commander understands them. It also helps if a leader has ‘risen through the ranks’. Then they really are more likely to understand the concerns of the people they lead and it also gives them a credibility with their followers that an outside leader lacks. The more authority you have, the further up the hierarchy you are, and organizations with many levels of management risk creating too great a distance between the leaders and the followers.

      

      We are not usually aware of how we think about leaders, but our view can affect how comfortable we feel about being a leader ourselves. If you think of a leader as large and looming over you, for example, you may feel uncomfortable about being a leader to others, because that would mean looming over them. When leaders are put on a pedestal, not only are their feet of clay more visible, but it’s further to fall!

      Consider what being a leader means to you. You will not want to go on the leadership journey if you believe that a leader has to be manipulative or superior.

      Your ideas about leaders will be influenced by your experience of them. In 1997 I gave the first public NLP and business seminar in Prague in the Czech Republic, and the subject of leadership came up. I do not speak Czech so I had a translator and it soon became clear that the language did not have a word that adequately translated the concept that I was using the English word ‘leader’ to describe. They had two words: manazer, meaning ‘an administrator’, and vudce, meaning ‘a Communist Party leader’. The seminar participants said a Communist Party ‘leader’ had no authority of their own (it came from Moscow), no vision (they did as they were told), little knowledge and was certainly no role model as they would consistently go home first at the end of the day’s work! Such was the Czech cultural experience of their erstwhile Russian ‘leaders’ that we had to coin a new word to even begin to discuss the concept. In the end we decided to use the English word ‘leader’. So a new word and a new concept entered the Czech language that day.

      Our culture influences how we think of leaders. Some cultures, France for example, put more distance between leaders and followers. The social hierarchies are more pervasive. The greater the distance between leader and follower, the more difficult it seems to be a leader. You have further to ‘climb’ and more risks to take, because ‘the nail that stands up gets hammered down’. In egalitarian cultures, such as America, the social landscape is flatter and leadership appears to be within the reach of everyone. It’s possible for anyone to become US President (at least in theory, although a lot of cash helps).

      Explore your own ideas about leadership with the following exercises.

      Exploring Mental Perspectives 2: Leaders

      Think of a person you regard as a leader.

      

      How far away in your mental picture do they appear?

      Change the picture to make them recede further into the distance. Do you feel any differently towards them now?

      Make them further and further away. How do your feelings change about them as a leader? Is there a threshold point where they do not seem to be a leader any more?

      Put them back as they were and now bring them closer to you. How does that change your feelings about them? Is there a threshold where they are too close and it feels uncomfortable?

      Put them back at a comfortable distance. Now notice how high the leader stands relative to you. Make them higher than you. Do your feelings change? What is it like as you make them higher and higher above you?

      Now move them below you. How does your feeling about them change? Do you still think of them as a leader? Is there a threshold where they do not seem to be a leader any more?

      Try these exercises with a number of different leaders. Does the height and distance vary depending on who you think of?

      Leadership Exercise

      A leader’s influence comes from the relationship they create with their followers. How we represent that relationship in our minds determines what we think of leaders, how we respond to them and what sort of relationship we in turn create with others when we become leaders.

      Use this exercise to explore how you think about leaders and how you see yourself as a leader.

      Think of one or more people you respect as leaders.

      Make a picture of them in your mind’s eye. Imagine people around them whom they influence and who follow them.

      When you think of these leaders in your imagination, where do you see them – in front of you, behind you or to the side?

      In your mental picture, is the leader a long way in front, in the middle distance or a short way in front of the other people?

      Is the leader larger, smaller or the same size as the people they are leading?

      Are they above, below or on the same level as the people they are leading?

      Does the leader seem more vivid, colourful or ‘larger than life’ than the followers?

      If another person were to look at your picture, without knowing any of the people in it, how would they know which person was the leader?

      How vivid is the picture?

      Does it have colour?

      Does it have movement?

      Now listen for any sounds in your mental tableau. Are there voices?

      

      Imagine the leader speaking. What quality does their voice have?

      Now listen to the other people speaking.

      What quality do their voices have?

      Is there a particular voice quality that marks out the leader?

      If a stranger were to listen to the voices without seeing the scene, would they be able to tell which voice was the leader’s?

      

      Now, keeping the rest of the picture the same, see yourself in the company of these leaders.

      Make yourself the same size and distance as the leaders and put yourself in the same position relative to the other people as the leaders.

      What does it feel like to see yourself standing there as a leader?

      Adjust the picture until it feels comfortable.

      

      Now step into the picture, be in your body, in the group of leaders, looking out through your own eyes at the people around who are following.

      

      How do you feel there?

      Metaphors of Leadership

      How we see leaders in our mind shapes what we feel about leaders, our relationship to them and, of course, how we speak about them. Here are some examples:

      

      ‘ahead of the field’

      ‘on a pedestal’

      ‘a cut above the others’

      ‘close to the people’

      ‘distant’

      ‘out of touch’

      ‘the common touch’

      ‘in touch with the people’

      ‘hands-on style’

      ‘a towering leader’

      ‘larger than life’

      ‘head and shoulders above the rest’

      ‘in a class of their