The Hands-Off Manager (10 page)

Listen to Coach Brown further and you realize that he does not have low self-esteem at all. Quite the contrary: A true and powerful humility is not thinking that you’re less than; it’s knowing that you’re phenomenal. But so is everybody else! So you raise the bar, not only for yourself, but for all those around you when you come from this powerful perspective.

“Sometimes great coaching is knowing what not to do,” he said.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Hold a meeting with your people that is not about the future or the past. Make the meeting be about the here and now: What talents and skills and loves do we now possess? Are we using them well? Center the whole meeting on what’s already
great and how we can better use and express it. Just the way a football coach would after a game. Are we all playing the right positions?

2. Look at the next two or three decisions you think you have to make. Sit and write them down. Are you adding stress to these decisions by continuing to think,
I’ve got to make a decision!
Any stress you add to your day is getting in the way of your team’s—and your own—success. So challenge the stressful thought that says you “must” make a decision, and learn to let decisions make themselves. Look at the three decisions you have to make and write notes about the pros and cons of potential choices and notice how your inner vision will make it obvious which choice to make. You didn’t have to superimpose the stress of “having to make” a decision on top of this process of allowing the decision to make itself.

3. In your next interview with a candidate who wants to join your team, look at the time you have allotted for the interview and add an hour to it. That extra time will allow you and the candidate to drop all the role-playing that goes on in interviews and simply allow the inner vision to emerge. If the candidate is a good fit, the extra hour will only confirm that for you. If the candidate raises red flags, they will multiply in the next hour and you will know not to make the mistake made by Jack and Melissa earlier in this chapter.

CHAPTER EIGHT
REVERSING YOUR PROCESS

The oak sleeps in the acorn, the bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.

—James Allen

Chuck sat in the conference room fidgeting and nervously asking for coaching about a problem he had with Jodie, the young woman he was teamed with on a customer appreciation project.

“My problem is what Jodie did to me last week,” Chuck said. “She hurt me and disappointed me by taking our written proposal to the boss and acting as if it was all hers.”

We sat with Chuck for a while as he described his alarming and disappointing outer world and its untrustworthy inhabitants. We then guided him back to the moment. How would you like to feel moving forward? Because, the most wonderful thing about the past is that it’s finished and done with forever.

Soon we had invited Jodie into the room with Chuck and we were allowing a new mutual understanding to arise between them by keeping our hands off their conversation and letting them relate to each other in a new way. Jodie had given Chuck a lot of credit in her meeting with the boss, and the two of them began to see that they could support each other in more ways than they’d realized. Chuck’s outside world of danger was actually less of a threat than he believed.

After a while the process of mistrust was reversed.

What if all that’s going on in the outer world is nothing more than feedback? Opportunities to meet with people and understand them better? Maybe we can, through this reversing process, look at things differently. We can look at situations not for what’s wrong, but for what they’re telling us about what’s possible.

Therefore all of this “opposition,” “negative things,” and “what we don’t want” is merely beneficial feedback in disguise, showing up to help us understand and come to know ourselves. If we fear and judge this feedback, it becomes a barrier to that understanding. It becomes a resistance that blocks the very understanding it’s here to reveal.

I am a pilot and I fly a process

Duane Black meets with his people and defuses a stressful situation by saying:

I am a pilot, and therefore, I like the metaphor of flying a plane to explain this process. On a flight, a pilot is always off course. And therefore it’s continuous realignment that gets him to his destination. And if there were no such thing as “off course,” there could be no flight. Because a flight is a series of realignments from off course to on course. Every step of the way. Even an autopilot operating on a GPS (the technology that keeps you almost perfectly on course) is designed to constantly monitor any minor course deviation and correct that in order to keep you on course. So the way the autopilot functions is also the way a pilot functions, in a constant process of course correction, of altitude correction, of turn and bank correction, until you come into alignment with the correct space. And then as soon as you notice yourself a little bit off course, you make a correction and come into alignment again.

Notice that an autopilot does not get depressed or angry when it’s off course. It welcomes that feedback from the environment, because “off course” puts the plane on course.

But a person similar to Chuck will think, merely out of superstition, that there’s something wrong with being off course. So he negatively judges that feedback from the environment and gets so upset about it that he can’t take in the information it’s trying to give him.

A real feeling of being off course for a lot of people on your team will happen whenever there is change. They have a natural resistance to change, and generate a deep inner fear of it. They don’t see that change is synonymous with a happy life and a vibrant organization.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

—Charles Darwin

The hands-off manager treats change as the joy and pleasure of living in a four-season environment. You probably enjoy a rainy day once in a while. It nourishes the Earth! The mix, the newness, is what keeps life fresh. Change is what keeps life interesting and what keeps us growing.

The hands-off manager helps her people see that life is a process of becoming and evolving (in other words, changing). And when her people can accept change as a friend, not as an enemy, they’ve completed another successful reversal.

Look again to the inside

Most managers look outside themselves, at the organization and the world, to see what needs to be fixed. Then they look outside again to see what they want to aspire to. Then they try, through judgment, to change what’s in the world to what they think it ought to be.

It’s time to reverse this process. Not just at work but in your whole life.

It’s time to look at the world only to see your own reflection. The world without is a mirror of what’s within. Only by seeing it as a mirror can you learn to alter your internal approach from micromanaging the world to hands-off harmony with its forces.

The first step toward this is to stop thinking so critically. Stop comparing. Stop judging others. Stop trying to determine what people “should” do.

Instead, first discover who they are.

Then discover who you are.

The world outside will act as a mirror reflecting back to you. As you go into it and attempt different things, it will show you what works best for you. Listen to the compliments coming from other people. Listen to what people say about what you’re doing. Do they acknowledge how good you are at it? Look to the world almost as a sounding board to give you feedback to help you understand and come to know better what’s inside you.

Then see what comes to you naturally. See what you don’t have to work so hard to be good at, because that’s your gift. Mozart started composing when he was a child. He found it early. And his parents and those around him gave him immediate positive feedback.

There’s a gift similar to that in all of us.

So it’s time to stop looking externally for what we need to fix out there. Instead, we can look externally for what we align with inside ourselves. And then we can let what we experience communicate to us. Our practice becomes a practice of trusting life. Just as a beginning swimmer learns to trust the water.

Some people we introduce to this practice don’t believe that such natural ability is there. Some of them say, “I’m not good at anything. Everything I’ve ever tried I’ve failed at.” But soon they find out, after careful self-observation, that they have consistently tried to be who others thought they should be, which will almost always end in frustration.

That process must be reversed.

The next thing to learn to reverse is the process of overcoming problems. Most managers believe that overcoming problems is their whole reason for existence. They come to work looking for them and if they don’t find them, their
superiors soon will. Especially if those superiors are old-school, hands-on micromanagers.

But there’s no benefit in trying to solve a problem by focusing exclusively on overcoming it. One must be willing to first look at the bigger picture, the whole system.

The world of micromanagement today has an opposite and dysfunctional approach. Most managers judge their people on noncompliance with the rules, or noncompliance with the dress code, or noncompliance with the amount of vacation time or the amount of work they should have done by the end of the day. It pigeonholes people into a very structured, manipulated, and controlled environment. They do this to get the best out of their employees. But they’re getting the worst instead. They are imposing a lockdown mentality in the workplace.

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is nostalgia, and the other is paperwork.

—Frank Zappa

To truly get the best out of your people, you want to get your hands off their lives. You want to let what’s naturally in them come through, not force them into compliance with a predetermined program.

Better communication at work

We enjoy being with people when they’re comfortable, natural, and spontaneous. Not when they’re trying to be something they’re not. We like seeing the real person there.

People who are themselves bring the best out in you. You connect to that relaxed vibration and all of a sudden it helps
you be yourself. Because when someone else is putting on airs, you get a little defensive and start to think, “I wonder who I should be?” And then there are two false and competitive egos clashing. But when somebody can relax into the pure being of who they are, it helps you relax into who you are and it creates a great relationship. The workplace settles down. You look forward to coming in.

When you’re in alignment, you have come to know who you are in the bigger scheme of things. Your company is no longer an alien object because you have come to know what your company values. You know who your company wants to be in terms of the product it delivers. You know the reputation it has for customer service. So you’ve already established that principle in yourself. Not a goal to get to, but an inner principle from which to operate. You now have a direction and set of values that define who you are as a person and a company.

From this position it’s easy and natural to evaluate work projects skillfully. You endeavor not so much to analyze whether a project is good or bad, but whether it’s a fit. You look to see if something is in alignment with what you and your company stand for.

Again, the company Duane works for is about creating midrange to upper-end housing in quality areas. It has become a principle and a place from which to operate.

“We know what we’re about,” Duane says, “so it is easy and natural for us to look to see what kind of projects might fit into that category. We can make our professional lives about looking to see what we align with. Not what’s wrong with things.”

That’s another reason it’s so important to discover and understand who you really are as a team. Because if you don’t
know that, it’s hard to find out what you align with. You don’t know what is or is not the best fit for your company’s culture.

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

—Arthur Koestler

Just start giving them your time

Many of us in this society grew up learning about the concept of tithing, the idea that if I give 10 percent of my income to good causes I will actually have more. But you can’t make that work on an adding machine! You can’t make that work out analytically.

Yet our experience has been that when we are generous and giving, we do somehow seem to end up with more instead of less. That’s a true principle of life. But it will not work analytically. It will only work as an inner awareness. But most people go through life on guard. They go through life with a need to protect themselves. They try to limit their risks and watch out for who’s trying to hurt them. That’s their barrier to this hands-off process of discovery. They don’t know how to let the world communicate with them to show them what’s inside themselves, because they’re too busy protecting themselves from the world.

This is even more true in companies. I was recently coaching employees at a Fortune 500 superstar company, and most of the people I spoke to thought the company itself was the enemy. They started their sentences out with “This company doesn’t…” or “This company never....”

One of the ways you know your hands-off management is succeeding is when you hear your people say, “Our company is...” or “We always….” It’s an inclusive “our” and “we” versus an exclusive, antagonistic “they” or “them.”