THE POWER AND CHALLENGE OF BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking intangibles is not easy. If it were, others would have already invented it and would have developed processes for streamlining it. But they have not. As far as I can tell, my book on Benchmarking Intangibles is still the only book in the field of Coaching —as well as in the other fields of personal development, communication, leadership, training, etc.

I based the benchmarking model on the NLP Communication Model and especially on the NLP Meta-Model of Language. Starting with a word like “listening,” “supporting,” “leadership,” etc., the first task is to take a false-noun (a nominalization, like “leadership”) or an unspecified verb (like “listening) and make it more specific. You do this by identifying the more specific actions or behaviors that you would literally see or hear or sense. That leads to sub-skills and sometimes sub- sub-skills. For listening, a sub-skill is being able to repeat back a person’s exact words with no paraphrases.