You might think that like the essence of entrepreneurial flair real leadership skills are born and not made but the truth is that leadership can be taught and can be coached, in you. What we will look at below are three aspects of great leadership and some of the NLP tools that you can use to enhance your leadership skills
LEADING YOURSELF
To enable you to lead others first you must lead yourself, so that you are able to get out of life what you want and so that you can be a model of excellence for others. The first step in leading yourself is to learn to live at cause rather than at effects. This means taking total responsibility for the results you get rather than blaming others for what happens in your life.
One aspect of learning to live at cause is to choose to be in a resourceful state of mind where required. Being able to manage your state is core to NLP and there are many techniques for allowing you to access resourceful states from the past so that you can access them in the present. A useful tool to help you access these states is anchoring, based on the work of Pavlov, it is hugely beneficial to leaders to be able to draw on positive experiences to help them handle difficult situations.
Learning to live at cause and being able to select resourceful states when you need them will help you achieve some fantastic results. NLP also offers many other techniques which allow you to align yourself consciously and unconsciously and then learn how you enhance your communication to make your message of leadership resonate with others.
LEADING OTHERS
When leaders are at their best, they challenge, inspire, coach, support and enable others to act, they model the best way, and encourage great performance.
To lead others you certainly don't need to be perfect yourself, take a look around how many leaders today have exemplary attributes and behaviours, not very many. But to be a great leader there are some essential features which can help you.
Vision - know where you want to lead people to? If you don't have a good sense and understanding of this in your own mind then how can you expect others to follow you?
Coach don't just manage - in bringing others with you it is important to develop and encourage them in the way that a coach would. Create a space where it is possible to make mistakes without causing significant damage, thereby allowing people to take manageable risks and through that they will learn and grow.
Working Relationships - All the above points are easy if you have built good relationships with your team. But good relationships aren't necessarily about 'liking' people, they are about two-way communication. If NLP is about anything, it's about helping people communicate more effectively.
Modelling the Way - Leaders who say one thing and do another have very little credibility and rarely generate a willing followership. Some people will take the time to evaluate how consistent your behaviours are with what you've identified as your core business values. So pay particular attention to how well your actions reflect with what you say you believe is important, your actions must be congruent with the values.
Unless you show people how you value their efforts motivation will fade. There are many ways to recognise individual contributions and one of the most simple is to say thank you and provide feedback. What people want from their managers is to understand how well they are doing, which means providing constructive feedback as well as acknowledging what they do well.
LEADING ORGANISATIONS
Leading larger groups of people requires you to be able to 'lead yourself and your team'. To succeed in today's business environment, leaders also need to ensure that they demonstrate flexiblity and the flair to adapt to change positively and quickly when reacting to market demands. In addition, leaders need to understand how to communicate effectively with shareholders and have the ability to build new partnerships to grow and maintain their business for the future.
To be an effective leader, you don't need to necessarily hold the spectrum of competencies required to run your whole business, but we do believe that if you are skilled in the foundations of NLP, lead your own life according to a set of principles and have the ability to motivate a team, you are probably capable of being able to select and inspire a group of senior people who have the diversity of skills to complement your own.
By driving a team who collectively have the skills to succeed in today's economy, who share your vision and demonstrate the company values, you will have set yourself up for success and will be an inspirational leader of the future.
Suggested free e-books to read:
Kevin Hogan - The Psychology Of PersuasionIn10se - Symbolic Morphology
Joseph Matthews - Charm School
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