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If you are going to stand in front of a group of people and teach them about any subject, you had better be quite sure that you are a master of that subject! Nothing gives a class more joy than to catch the teacher out.

It is this requirement for a high level of learning that pressurises me (in a good way) into ensuring that I master subjects that I know I am going to have to teach.

When I say I am a devoted life-long learner I mean it and teaching others is part of the reward that I get from that learning. Of course, the real reward is seeing my clients releasing themselves to be themselves and then achieving more than they ever believed themselves capable of, just by using their natural talents.

When you teach you learn all the time. That is why I will be spending the next two weeks in the South West Indian state of Kerala with a studying with a group of NLP enthusiasts.

You may not hear much from me until my return. But you can be sure that I will have raised my game by the time I return.

Spheres of Influence (Photo credit: Lorianne DiSabato)

To be a good manager you must, of course, know a lot. But that does not mean that you have to know everything about every single job and activity that comes within your sphere of influence.

The critical point for any manager is that you should have a good attitude towards your work and the people in your team. It is not procedures alone that create good results but the attitude of the people implementing those procedures.

As a leader you should be working to develop your people so that they have a good attitude towards their colleagues, their work and their clients. They should be striving all the time for standards of excellence that will make your company a by-word for a standard of service that is unsurpassable.

Encourage your people to do well, encourage them to learn, encourage them to study excellence, encourage curiosity, “how did they do that?” would be a great question for them to be asking all the time.

Nothing, on my experience is more rewarding than watching members of your team grow into themselves. This is a core philosophy of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

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When I was a young manager a senior manager who had befriended me gave me a piece of advice. He said, “become a life-long learner. It will keep you up with the game. It will stimulate your thinking. It will open your mind to new possibilities. It will give you a lot of fun.”

My experience is that it has been a lot of fun and very stimulating. Personally I look upon everything I do as a learning opportunity. Even when I am watching TV I take note of the way characters behave to see if there is anything in what they do that is worth modelling for the benefit of my clients.

When I am working with my clients I find that I am learning all the time. Yes, I do know that I am supposed to be the coach, but that does not mean that I cannot learn at the same time. Sometimes I find better ways to communicate. Other times my clients say things that I see instantly are new truisms for me to learn.

Being a lifetime learner has keept me interested and stimulated and it has opened a whole host of new doors for me.

For me it is particularly important that I use all of the learning processes recommended in the visual beside this article. I definitely do need to read-it, talk-it, write-it and do-it in order to be quite sure that I have really understood the lesson well enough to be able to benefit from it.

I also make sure that the people I coach have fun when I am imparting information in my coaching or on my Effective Manager course.

If you want to manage a crisis successfully and to learn the lessons so that you can manage all future crises successfully you need constant feedback.

Leading NLP life coach Anthony Robbins coined the phrase “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. He is right. The best way to learn is by others telling you that you are on the right track, or not, as the case may be.

You will learn more from what others tell you about your performance and your team’s performance from other people than you will ever learn from analysis or research. Well, feedback is a form of research.

The best time to go in search of feedback is as soon as the project has started. Don’t get in people’s hair by being forever “on their case”, but do manage by walking around so that you can keep in constant touch with progress and pick of any hot-spots before they blow up into further crises.

No more oil rig pictures. But I hope they have served as a mnemonic for how to manage a crisis.

The most effective way to do this is covered in detail on our Effective Manager one-day training.

You have now reached the stage where you need to implement your strategy in order to achieve your outcome. This is where you need to gather around you the people who are going to be responsible for doing.

You need to communicate to them clearly what each member of the team needs to do in order to solve the crisis. Remember that amongst your team members there will be those whose learning style is visual, those who are feeling and those who are auditory. Take care to ensure that you have catered to each type of learning style and that they have all clearly understood what is required of them.

As you make your presentation check continually that everyone understands their role by asking them for feedback. Ask them to tell you what they need to do.

The other essential ingredient of your briefing is that it must motivate, energise and enthuse your team. You need to put a lot of energy into your briefing in order to ensure that they “catch” your enthusiasm for the project.

The most effective way to do this is covered in detail on our Effective Manager one-day training.

Now that you have broken state, analysed the situation, set a well-formed objective and developed a strategy for solving your problem, what’s next? Feedback.

This is a good time to check whether you are about to set off in the right direction. Does it not make sense to check with your mentor or your business coach whether they have ever encountered a similar situation and, if so, whether they consider your objective and strategy are sound?

It is well said that “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Feedback is often the only way that you can get a third party opinion about what you are proposing to do. It can save you from making hideous mistakes. It is also often a quick way to check out your thinking so that you set off down your chosen path with the confidence of knowing that you have a supporter.

Feedback is one of the major NLP techniques that is regarded as an important way to check that communication and thinking are effective.

So now you have broken state, analysed the situation carefully and thoroughly and created a well-formed outcome. The next step is to devise the route by which you will reach your objective.

The question to ask yourself is: “how are we going to get there?”

At this stage it is often a good idea to call in your main lieutenants. You may need to call upon multiple skills, abilities and experiences to create your strategy.

As you listen to the input of your colleagues you should start to write your strategy. Begin each bullet point by writing the word “By”. If you cannot do this it is unlikely to be a good strategy point. You might want to mind map your strategy on a white board or flip chart so that everyone in the strategy session can keep focussed on where you have been and where you are going.

This might be a good time to call upon some of your NLP techniques like modelling.

You have now finished your situation analysis and you know what the issues are. The next step is to decide what outcome will solve the crisis and allow your team to move on in a constructive way.

This is where your intuition can be of great help. Sometimes it will just take a giant leap and show you exactly where you should end up. But it does not always work, particularly if you have not trusted it in the past. If your intuition won’t come to your rescue you need to work on the answer to this question: “What will this situation look like when it is solved, no longer a crisis?”

Now here’s the trick to producing a well-formed outcome. You have to bear in mind that some of the people in your team will have thinking patterns that are visual, others will be feeling and still others will be auditory. Therefore, in order to communicate your outcome to all of them in a way that is meaningful to them you need to accommodate all their thinking patterns within your description of your desired outcome.

If our oil rig photographer was an NLP Practitioner he would probably come up with a well-formed outcome like this: “I see myself lying in an underground shelter feeling safe and secure even though my heart is pounding to the sound of the tornado passing overhead.”

OK, so you have now broken state and you are ready to get to grips with the crisis. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you fully and clearly understand exactly what is going on.

The oil rig worker who stepped out into the night to take a photograph thought that he was going out to take a snap of some dramatic lightening. It was only when the lightening lit up the sky that he became aware of the much more imminent danger posed by the tornado.

Developing a clear understanding of the situation that you are about to have to manage is an essential step in managing any crisis. Watch a fire engine arriving at the scene of a fire. As the crew tumble out of the vehicle and start to prepare the hoses the leader of the crew immediately goes in search of information. He needs to know where the heat is most intense, are there any people in the building, how long the fire has been raging etc.

Every experienced and well qualified NLP Practitioner will advise you – don’t start to do anything until you are clear about what it is that you are managing.

It seems highly likely that the oil rig worker who stepped out into the night to take a photo of the lightening was stunned to find it lighting up a fast-approaching tornado.

Even in such a moment of panic the first step of a good manager should be to “break state”. This is one of the essential NLP Techniques for managing a crisis.

Breaking state allows you a short time to adjust from what you are doing before you start to do something else.

When you change gear in a car or on a motorbike you go through neutral before engaging a new gear. It pays to do the same thing when managing a crisis.

If you try to change your system from one state to another without pause you create confusion which often results in overheating of your system.

Can you recall instances when you have been quietly working away only to be suddenly interrupted by someone informing you of a crisis? If they were excited did they transmit their aggravation to you? Did you remain calm? Could you have managed the situation better if you had allowed yourself a moment to “break state” before you developed your strategy for managing the crisis?