Positive Intention

Late one night, me and more than a dozen friends of mine from the coaching profession walked into a small coffee shop in Greenhills, Manila. All of us, ready for a jolt of caffeine, gathered up at the counter. The attendant, who seemed to be cleaning up the place, went aghast at the crowd in front of him and declared the shop was closed.

“Wow, what time do you close?” said fiery Susan, the wealth coach.
“Uh, 10:00pm, ma’am” replied the attendant.
“But, it’s only 9:55 now!” she said with an edge to her voice.
“Yes, ma’am but one of our rules is to close at exactly 10:00pm and I don’t think we will be able to achieve that and yet serve all of you” he replied.

Now here was a clash of goals and ideals. Should the man have focused on specific goals or think big picture and ring up additional pesos to his daily sales goals.
For the attendant to think big picture and to make a decision in light of the Coffee Company’s strategic intentions he’d have to be fed with a lot more meaningful information rather than just a few regiments against which his performance would be measured. He’d have to juggle his decision making between the six generic performance indicators that every business strategist leans upon, namely; competitive advantage, flexibility of action, financial performance, resource utilization, quality of service and innovation. He’d have to choose between being excellent with resource utilization and increasing the financial performance of his outlet.

Now, the thrust of Leadership Conversations is not so much about strategy and decision making but more towards providing quality feedback and coaching others. The thrust is towards eliciting, through conversations, leadership qualities out of self and others.

So, imagine, a month later, the attendant is sitting in front of you and you’ve got to talk him about the evening a dozen or more customers lined up in front of him five minutes before closing and the fact that he’d let them know that the outlet was closed. Here’s an NLP [ Neuro-Linguistic Programming] presupposition that you can utilize, “There is a positive intention motivating every behavior, and a context in which every behavior has value.”

You’ve got to realize that his choice at that moment was based completely on the knowledge he had of the issues involved in that scenario. The outcome of his decisions may or may not have been in alignment with the company’s overall strategy but his intentions were absolutely positive. You could then, through questioning and dialogue, upgrade his decision-making skills for the future. You’d have to start with the presupposition that behind his behavior was a positive intention and then work your way forward and upward. That would be your leadership in action through NLP.

That evening in Greenhills, Susan, the wealth coach, gently influenced the attendant into taking our orders. He failed at closing on time but succeeded at raising his financial performance for the day.