Reading through the business world information on NLP, it seems the focus remains at the manager/leader level. What about the employees? Being passionate about NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and its possibilities, I recently offered some free NLP session at a local company. I was delighted to see many people jumping on the occasion, as I know once you start understanding the concepts behind NLP, you can start using them on your own, but I did not expect then that most of them will come forward with a specific item, linked to their work (from difficulty in performing team work or fitting in with the team, to simply completing a report or a project 100%). So here we went, one session (sometimes two) and a few weeks later a follow-up. In all cases feedbacks received were really positive and except one participant that wanted an extra session, all employees clearly noticed an improvement in their performance at work related to the simple item we discussed during our sessions. Now many would say ‘but this is the work of the manager. S/he should address these issues during 1:1 with the employee or during team exercises.’ I guess, this has been the approach so far, to put the emphasize on the manager role and rely on the manager capabilities to address those issues. However based on the content of the sessions I shared with those employees, I know this was simply not possible, each session highlighting a personal issue as the main factor in the issue faced at work. Whatever good can be our relationship with our manager, this remains a professional relationship and for sure, we do not want them to know that much about us.
How could we them import NLP in the business world to focus at the employee level as much as at the manager level? We all know that however good leaders are, without employees and teams behind them, their successes are more than limited. This small experiment, I was lucky enough to undertake, clearly shows that NLP did help those employees improving their own performance, and as a result made them more confident in their work. The key word seems here to be performance. Remains to identify if businesses would be willing to take onboard external NLP consultants to work with their employees in improving their performances. On top of my head I can see this at 2 levels 1) offer NLP sessions for employee that have identified recurrent issues they have not been able to resolve with their manager (or are not comfortable to resolve with their managers); 2) most company have a rating system, and they can decide to use NLP to address performance issues. Some people may think here that this may not worked as the employee may have the impression to be forced onto it, I would disagree, however one thing is clear, for this to work, the NLP consultant has to be dissociated from the team/manager s/he will be working with, either as an external or internal consultant.
© 2011 Florence Dambricourt – talking4good.com/
talking4good.com 
course there are systemic problems with all performance rating at the individual level and these need addressing far more than so called under-performance at the individual level (usually it cannot be statistically shown to be under-performance anyway)
Andy, thanks for your comments, I would agree that performance rating needs to be reviewed, often employees are actually performing more than good however being rated against each other they may still appear as low performer within their team. This would confirm that the best approach in using NLP to assist employee performance is then the first one where employees come forward rather than being sent following a performance rating.