You may have the talent. Do you have a team? asks Phil Hayes

Picture this: a team of powerful executives is engaged in a session on strategic purpose. The egos are strong, but the lines of authority and even their central task are unclear: an air of frustration pervades. These high-flyers – used to individual success – are struggling to find their way forward as a group and tempers are fraying. Meanwhile the team coach engaged to help them to work well together considers his next move . . .

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can help by providing a very useful skill set. Recognising that a philosophy that assumes excellence in any human field can be modelled and learned, NLP has gathered an array of powerful working attitudes and practical techniques for learning and development.Aware that people are able to access powerful states of resourcefulness NLP has created the tools to help them do it. This essential philosophy is enshrined in an ever-evolving set of presuppositions that chime remarkably well with the foundation principles of coaching. So, NLP and Team Coaching fit hand in glove. It is when a team is facing barriers to its own effectiveness that the coach needs all the tools he or she can muster. And an essential tool here is that of being able to create strong rapport with whole groups of very diverse individuals, some of whom may not be behaving at their very best. Clearly this ability is not confined to NLP practitioners – some people have strong natural gifts in this area – but even for the most instinctively gifted, NLP offers an extra edge. Skills gained from NLP in this area can, for example, help the team coach maintain strong, authentic and trusting relationships with both parties engaged in argument, whilst maintaining the wider group’s energy and commitment. Again, when their energy is beginning to flag, the coach can use rapport skills to lead the team to more resourceful and energetic states. Since there is little limit to the application in team coaching of NLP enhanced rapport skills, this has to be the key foundation skill a team coach needs.

We have the tools

Beyond rapport there are many other NLP tools that can help in given circumstances. For example there is the well-formed outcome framework, a powerful aid in helping a team define for itself fully thought-through goals that will work ecologically and systematically in the team itself and in the wider organisation led by the team. Other examples: there is a enjoyable, upbeat tool drawn from NLP, sometimes referred to as Alter-Egos which allows members of a team to share their personal and professional values in a way that opens up conversations around how the team could behave more effectively; there is a conceptual tool known as the logical levels framework that can assist a team in long-term strategic planning; and as an aid to team process facilitation, the meta-model language tool allows the team coach to challenge in a totally respectful way members’ statements or assumptions that may need clarification or modification. The list of tools, and the ways in which they can be effectively combined through the actions of the team coach, is very extensive.

Back to the battle

So what of our original team, lost in argument with tempers fraying? This particular team coach felt they were losing perspective – one of the team had said as much in the heat of the argument. The answer, adapted from an NLP technique called the meta-mirror (itself drawn from the tradition of Gestalt Therapy), was to ask the team to look at how they were working, only from a different perspective, literally. This involved getting them up from their seats and moved to different positions in the room whilst imagining ‘themselves’ still at the table locked in argument. The insights they shared from this disassociated viewpoint were converted into advice to themselves and each other, resulting in a far more productive conversation. Of course the team would consent to this unorthodox intervention only once a sense of trust and rapport was established with their coach – hence the fundamental usefulness of the enhanced rapport skills referred to above.

The next step for the team coach was to work on those issues of unclear lines of authority and purpose that had caused the conflict in the first place!

On another day, with another team, the NLP Team Coach may have gone for this issue earlier, of course – just one of the myriad dilemmas that present themselves in every moment of team coaching.