Leading with NLP

On the Road 83

know when their values are being violated? The best rewards
are value equivalents and they will be different for each person.
For example, your companion wants to be recognized for
their contribution. You might ask a question like, ‘How do
you know when you are recognized?’
They might reply, ‘I’ll be praised and my work will be pub-
licly acknowledged.’
Then you could ask, ‘What lets you know when you are
not recognized? What would happen or what has happened
in the past?’
They might say, ‘I did good work and my boss took the
credit.’
So, for that person, public acknowledgement is important,
but being praised in private is not enough.
I witnessed one such argument, where a supervisor main-
tained he did recognize his colleague’s work (‘But I told you
it was good!’) and she maintained he did not (‘You never
told anyone else, no one else knows!’) Unless the rules for
the value are brought into the open, both parties can retire
to their corners feeling aggrieved. When you know about
value equivalents you can avoid those pointless arguments
that settle into a ‘Yes, I did’ ‘No, you didn’t’ holding pattern
that just circles round and never gets satisfactorily resolved.
When you have asked these value questions a few times
you will never again assume you know what people value or
how they decide they have got it. The questions are personal,
but rightly so – they treat each person as an individual, with
their own wishes, hopes and goals. You may be surprised how
quickly people will tell you what matters to them when you
are genuinely interested. They are often delighted that
someone has taken the trouble to ask. Occasionally, they will
regard you with suspicion, wondering if you have an ulterior
motive, or they may expect to have to justify what they say.
But never ask people to justify their values. Like everything
else that affects us deeply, they are not logical. They are not
illogical either – logic is irrelevant.
George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘Reasonable men adapt
themselves to the world. Unreasonable men adapt the world