I was recently looking over some program materials for a two day workshop on ‘Leadership’. Under the ‘what you will learn’ section they had, amongst other items, listed:

  • You will learn
  • How to evaluate workplace relationships for maximum productivity
  • How to lead with integrity and earn the respect of your co-workers while getting the job done
  • How to influence the most persuasive person in your organisation
  • How to align a team towards a common direction
  • How to motivate the unmotivated
  • The 5 steps that successful leaders use to develop other people
  • How to achieve results through relationships

All very important competences of course.

Open up any marketing guide and you will come across references towards the importance of ‘building rapport’ with prospective customers. Dictionaries refer to this as ‘sympathising or getting in tune with the other person’. The guides frequently suggest that this involves fresh learning for the sales person, and could be directly correlated with building self-confidence.

I remember taking a cold call from a salesman last year. “Hello John, how are you right now, did you have a great weekend?” His handbook had advised him to construct rapport early on, prior to continuing with his presentation. I didn’t know him and quite frankly took exception to a total stranger getting so familiar and patronising. I cut the call short.

What occurs when you walk into a place filled with strangers? Unless you’re intending to spend the remainder of the evening on your own, eventually you will gravitate to a specific individual (or group of individuals). To the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’ it might nicely look as if you’ve known each other for a long time, since you’re getting on so well.

From the neuro linguistic viewpoint you’d be demonstrating rapport with the other individual by matching or reflecting their own actions or postures and even matching their rate of breathing. How do you do that? Well, unless you’ve studied and applied some of these methods purposefully, you will be fairly unaware that you are doing it.

As humans there exists a natural capacity to build rapport. I understand there are tools and methods for examining this and building on it so that we can do it a lot more efficiently. I personally use them with my own clients. However by working with what’s there, by just being yourself and trusting yourself and being honestly interested in the other individual, you’ll construct rapport without being patronising.

John Sproson operates as a enterprise coach and coach to build self-confidence in expert enterprise people and in organisational teams. He writes extensively on-line and blogs on the best way to create self confidence and utilizes a remedy focussed technique.

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