318 Part V: Integrating Your Learning
As you emerge from the change, integration then follows. You settle into the
new way of doing things and are more flexible because you’ve had to learn
to cope with a new environment. Your perception of your own competence
rises and is likely to be measured more accurately. The change can be
incorporated into the identity of the company by constantly referring back to
it, until it becomes unconscious.
People react differently to change. Each person spends different lengths of
time at each stage and each person has to be dealt with differently by
team-mates and manager. A manager’s role, therefore, needs to change as they
deal with the different stages that different people are at.
When you’re leading or facilitating a team, experiencing the team’s emotions is
quite normal. For this reason, managers can feel a rollercoaster of frustration,
fear, and anxiety as they experience the different phases themselves. So they
may need coaching, mentoring, going for a beer, or whatever their release
mechanism is, to gain space and perspective.
When people are under stress, their behaviour may need to be excused.
Before reacting to someone, adopt the second position to, metaphorically,
‘walk in that person’s shoes’ in order to get a better understanding of how
the person is feeling (check out Chapter 7 on understanding other people’s
perspective). This process gives you the ability to move up and take the bird’s
eye view when ‘trouble’s on the ground’.
NLP logical levels
The NLP logical levels are a powerful way to think about change by breaking
it down as a model into different categories of information. (Turn to
Chapter 11 for more on logical levels, which are sometimes known as
neurological levels.)
As you begin to consider the kind of changes that you experience, you find
that logical levels can help you to find a route forward in confusing times.
To do this, having alignment through all the logical levels of identity, belief
and values, capabilities and skills, behaviour and environment is particularly
important, because having an incongruity at one or more levels stops the
desired result from happening. This model can be as useful when experiencing
personal change as for understanding corporate change. The model’s key
value is that it provides a structured approach for understanding what’s
happening. This enables people to make a decision about choosing how they
want to feel about the change and how they’re going to behave.
