66 Leading with NLP
At the beginning of 1997, I was part of a consultancy team
that worked with a corporate client on establishing a new
vision and direction. This media company had grown up by
taking over half a dozen smaller businesses, but had never
really formed itself into an integrated unit. It had no overall
identity, consequently it consisted of half a dozen fiefdoms,
each with its own director, all pulling in different directions.
Sometimes they worked with each other, sometimes against
each other, but all were concerned about keeping their
position. Everyone was good at their job, but their efforts
often worked against what other groups were doing. The
leaders were not all leading in the same direction. The whole
group had just appointed a new managing director and she
was determined to get the company into shape. Without
a radical restructure, it was clear that it would not last an-
other year.
We spent several days with the leaders of the company and
set out to confront limiting ideas and to be honest with each
other. Vision setting will not work without honesty, so every-
one was encouraged to say what they knew to be true, yet
feared to say, within a framework of mutual respect and a
shared search for a solution. The directors and top managers
worked with us as a group for a number of days to
establish a shared vision and the new CEO worked as an
ordinary member of the group, with no extra influence, al-
though her presence was a powerful reminder that the group
had to change and of her commitment to that process.
There were several ground rules – first, no blame! I have
been to meetings where managers start by analysing what is
wrong in great detail and this is usually a mistake, like com-
plaining about the airport food and missing your holiday
flight. When companies get into trouble there is usually too
much internal focus anyway and the only justification for
spending more time at it is to find a way of breaking out of
that trance. So we began not by raking over what was wrong,
but by clarifying the leaders’ destination. What did they
want? Some parts of the business were doing very well and
the directors of those parts needed some convincing that