NLP At Work : The Difference That Makes the Difference in Business

Consistency in performance

Refining the strategy

than not, trainees were left to their own devices to adapt these

skills to their unique environment. There are unique patterns

that work in one company, one department, or one market

segment, and that will not work in another. Modeling enables

you to elicit these context-specific patterns in order to

reproduce excellence in a place of your choice. By choosing

the people who excel within your organization, not only will

you be able to reproduce their levels of success, you will also

be able to help those same people achieve greater

consistency in their own performance.

When PricewaterhouseCoopers wanted to reproduce the

outstanding performance of some of its top project leader coaches,

it decided to use NLP to model the strategies that worked. It

selected its outstanding performers and I was invited to model

them to find out how they do what they do. I watched them in

action working with groups of trainees and talked with them about

their beliefs, their values, and their sense of identity and purpose.

What emerged was a consistent pattern for the ones who

achieved results significantly above the norm. All had a quality

of selflessness, a purpose that was beyond themselves, and all

had values that included love and care for others. At the level of

behavior they were all skilled in the way that they used

metaphor and visionary thinking. And they were so dedicated to

meeting the learning needs of their trainees that if they did not

do that to their satisfaction (in one case especially) this resulted

in the coach’s temporarily feeling physically sick. (I did not

necessarily want to others to have to reproduce that!) However,

once we knew what some of the key pieces were in the

strategies (and there was much more), I was able to present this

to others who had not yet achieved the same level of excellence.

The joy of modeling is that you can refine the model by testing

which elements add to excellence and which detract or make

no difference. By taking away one element at a time, you can

determine how this affects the overall result. This enables you

to generate the most effective model, which you can use to

teach others, including the person you modeled.

This process applies when modeling anything, whether an

individual, a team, or a complete organization. The skills it

162 NLP AT WORK