The Hands-Off Manager (12 page)

They don’t realize that a better approach would be to
stop thinking
and grow rich.

Even Galileo knew that the answer was not in outside knowledge. He said, “You cannot teach a person anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.”

Galileo’s words are the heart and soul of hands-off management.

Let’s say you’ve cleared your mind and learned to disarm all the negative thoughts in your life as they arise. Now you’re free to discover who you are. You’re free to realize the best that’s in you. Soon you begin to see what you can really accomplish and bring into the world.

What’s really happened?
You have become available to yourself.
And in this freedom from all those burdens and baggage you’ve been carrying, you’re able to follow your instincts. Because you listen to your instincts now. You’re not worried about what Susie three cubicles down might have said about you today. You’re available for inner ideas. You’re available for insights. Your mind is quiet and open to new ideas. You’re available for inspiration.

It will feel like you’ve taken down the Great Wall of China. You’ve erased that wall you have built in yourself
through a lifetime of criticism, self-judgment, anger, and disappointment—all the thoughts that have blocked your potential from coming through. You no longer grab and hang on to thoughts that say to you,
Life isn’t fair
,
Gee, I’m a victim
,
I’m not responsible
, or
This shouldn’t have happened to me
.

Now you let those thoughts pass. You give them no life or credibility. You laugh at them now because you know they’re not true.

In fact, you attach your beliefs to none of your thoughts; you just continue to learn to go deeper than thought, and listen.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

—Albert Einstein

Perhaps you’ve heard the admonition “You can’t listen while you’re talking.” That’s even more true for your inner dialogue. So you learn to reverse your patterns so that your mental process is much less about thinking and much more about listening. Soon you grow quieter. You don’t need to share all your ideas with everybody, because you’re no longer trying to fix everybody. You’ve moved on from that. You’ve accepted them for who they are, and you’re accepting without judgment their weaknesses and their problems. In fact, you don’t even label them “problems” anymore. They’re just energy patterns in life as fascinating as anything else.

People don’t have any power over you anymore because a deeper you is in control now. Not the shallow, scared ego.

Now you’re available to receive intuitive insights from deep inside yourself. You’re not going over and over in your head how you wish you would have responded to that criticism. You don’t prepare your defense every time you get a difficult e-mail from your supervisor.

You’re not overloading your mental bandwidth with how you wish you had come back with some coarse remark that would have made someone feel as bad as they “made” you feel. You understand that’s a waste of time. They can’t “make” you feel anything. Only your thoughts can do that. You laugh at the idea of indulging those kind of thoughts now.

You’re only interested in realizing your potential—becoming who you already are! You realize that your potential lies within you; it is not out there in the future. You don’t have to
get anywhere
to have realized your potential. Your potential is yours to feel inside you, right here and right now. Beating like a heart.

When you’re living the hands-off life, the outside world will begin responding to you differently because you’ll be more open to opportunity. You might be in that quiet place where a person just pops into your mind, and you will go to your computer and send that person a nice note. The next thing you know, that person is calling and saying, “I have some business for you. I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

That’s
allowing success
instead of trying to force it to happen.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Take out a notebook and write down a negative thought you had today about someone at work. Challenge the thought as if you were that person’s defense attorney. Is it really true? Is the negative feeling you get when you think that thought really worth it?

2. Give that person a call and talk for a few minutes in an open and warm way, finding out what life is like for him right now. (If you can do this in person, all the better. Drop by his workstation just to ask how he’s doing and how you can help.)

3. After you’ve met with him, go back to the negative thought you initially wrote down and see if it has any truth or power left. Notice that negative thoughts isolate you from people, while positive thoughts connect you with them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
LETTING GO OF JUDGMENT

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

—Mother Teresa

Doug was a top-level salesperson who had just lost a huge deal. He was selling corporate training programs and the company he was selling to was suddenly being purchased by another company. Fortunately for Doug, his manager, Tony, who was a friend of ours, was also a hands-off master mentor.

Tony listened to Doug’s story about what had happened for a while but refused to mirror Doug’s long face and sad voice. When Doug expressed his final frustration about losing the big contract, hands-off Tony just winked at him.

“You’re great,” said Tony, “and this is not bad news.”

“Not bad news? We had a $700,000 contract disappear and it’s not bad news?”

“It’s just what happened.”

“Well, I’m tired of this Zen stuff or whatever it is. I was counting on that commission.”

Tony said, “Let’s work with what is. Let’s look at all news as good news. At least potentially.”

Doug said, “But how can I close a deal with them if they are in negotiation to sell the company? The company won’t even be theirs. They can’t sign the check!”

“How is this good news?” asked Tony.

“It’s not,” said Doug after thinking for a while.

“What if the training you are offering them could help them get a better price for their company? What if the fact that they’d contracted for transformative training and begun to implement it increased the perceived value of the company?”

Doug said nothing, but his demeanor suggested that he was getting interested.

His manager, Tony, continued, “They’ve done our pilot training trial courses for two months now and the employees got a real boost, so they want to roll out the big program, right?”

“Until the sale of the company, yes.”

“Right! So now they can go into negotiations having invested in a powerful training boost to productivity. It allows the buyer to perceive this company as thirsty for ongoing improvement. It also allows the seller to suggest that the bottom-line numbers are about to get much better because of what this training can produce. They can increase their price in the sale of the company. Everybody wins.”

Doug was lit up. He thanked Tony and left the room ready to make the pitch of his life. The end of this story was a happy one for Doug, because the client bought the training as a bargaining chip in the sale negotiation, and ended up
not selling after all. The employee base was so rejuvenated by the training that the original owners decided to keep the company and grow it.

Had Doug’s hands-off manager Tony not shown Doug how to drop the negative judgment and just work with what happened, gloom and doom would have been in Doug’s life for weeks after the “bad news” arrived.

Tony was unusual. Hands-off managers are one in a million. Most employees are led by ineffective micromanagers who suffer from their own habit of continuous judgment.

The common theme of most managers is that they are always at least mildly upset about what’s happening. You see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, read it in their e-mails.

But what’s happening is not upsetting them. Their judgment about it is.

Anything that bothers us only bothers us because we have a judgment about it. We cling to passing thoughts that say,
This is wrong! This shouldn’t be happening to me!
But we don’t stop to realize that the upset we’re experiencing is caused by our judgment.

If we could be open to all things and see them as the
flow of the marketplace
and get away from
what should not be
, we would release ourselves from a monumental amount of dissatisfaction, upset, stress, and blame.

This ability to dismiss judgment when it pops up is a critical skill for the hands-off manager to cultivate. It takes daily practice, but the practice is rewarding beyond measure.

In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy.

—Albert Einstein

If you drop this negative judgment long enough, it will produce peace at your center and a gentle surge of relaxed intelligence that can deal well with any issue.

We aren’t saying you should be in denial. We aren’t recommending that you not evaluate. You can evaluate without passing personal judgment. You can be an expert evaluator of performance, without being disappointed in or upset about a person’s actions.

Knowing the difference is vital.

A coworker in a top managerial position was recently going through a lot of stress about a circumstance her son was in. She thought her state was caused by her son and his circumstances, but it wasn’t. There was only one thing that was really a problem for her: her judgment. But she couldn’t see it. She was looking at his illness, his financial struggles, and his marital struggles as things that
should not be happening
. It was reality, but to her, reality was wrong.

And that
belief
was the cause of her stress. Not her son. Her son had nothing to do with it. Her thoughts were the only “bad thing” that was “happening to” her, but she was old-school judgmental and could not see it.

Her stress was fundamentally triggered by her belief that what she was going through
shouldn’t be happening
. She had placed herself firmly in non-acceptance, resistance, and judgment. And that self-placement was creating her suffering.

The beauty of seeing all this is that it allows you to release yourself from stress. When stress leaves you, your physical well-being improves dramatically. You don’t need as much rest. You’re naturally more optimistic and hopeful. You look forward to the day!

Your direct reports will be grateful. Wouldn’t you be if you were them? If you were an employee, what kind of manager
would you want? One who looked forward to her day? Or one who was always stressed?

We recall a recent coaching session with a young IT worker starting with this question, “How stressed does your manager get?”

“It’s off the charts.”

“And what does he do with this stress?”

“He takes it out on us.”

How much relaxed and happy productivity will emerge from that employee?

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

—Carl Gustav Jung

As a hands-off manager you can be different. You can start your day centered in the peaceful, present-moment awareness of infinite possibility. And that’s because you no longer imagine all the things that are going to go wrong. There is no “wrong” way in which things can go. They’re just going to go where they’re going to go. There’s no more judgment about what’s going to occur. This allows you to be much more in the moment.

Notice that all the challenges you’ve faced that you judged negatively at the time ended up contributing to your strength and growth. The “bad breaks” all eventually contributed to your understanding. When you get enough time and distance to see the big picture, you almost always see this.

“When I was getting divorced I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” a company engineering
manager named Brent said. “But looking back…it was the best thing. The very best thing.”

All these “bad things” that happen at work have helped us mature and become more understanding of how to run this business well. And it’s “bad things” that can open up this eventual spirit of acceptance. So how “bad” were they? Did we really need to judge them at all?

We are not saying to take a passive attitude. This is the opposite of passive. It’s an active embrace of what is. It frees up energy that had previously been trapped in internal conflict and distress. You are ready to act sooner. This is the path of action. It’s only passive when you imagine it. It’s active when you use it.

Manage agreements, not expectations

You’ve seen the energy toll taken on stressed-out managers. They are trying to manage their own chaotic universe. They are constantly being pulled back and forth between expectations and disappointments. How much energy is left over to create agreements? How much energy is left to innovate? How much energy is left to bring people together and forge new understandings? Practically zero. Stress has taken the energy away.

Non-judgment opens you up to respond to situations in creative ways. You don’t have to settle for anything mediocre. You can change all the things you want. Only now you can change them in a spirit of cooperation instead of a spirit of opposition to the way things are.

Just for today, don’t try to fix the world outside. Get busy evolving the world inside. You’re working on the joy and freedom that arise when you practice releasing yourself from judgment.

Judgment will always come to your mind now and then, but now you just let it pass through without clinging to it or believing the judgment to be the truth. It’s not the truth. It’s just a passing stressful thought. As the clouds pass, so can your thoughts.

Life is not so much about what’s going on but how we’re choosing to interpret it. When someone greets you with, “What’s happening?” a more accurate greeting might have been, “How are you judging what’s happening?”