The Hands-Off Manager (4 page)

Many surveys and almost all anecdotal inquiry show that managers get their best ideas in the shower, when doing easy yard work, or while on vacation. Why is that?

It’s because you’ve stopped trying to control your thinking. You’ve taken your hands off your mind and allowed the wisdom within to emerge.

It always will.

At a mental level, this is similar to the difference between talking and listening. People have taught for years that if you listen, you will learn more than if you were talking. But people have always assumed that “listening” only means listening to another person, an all-too-narrow interpretation of the word. Hands-off management starts with listening to yourself, tuning in to your own heart and mind, because if you will learn to listen to your inner being, you will learn more than when you’re always trying to talk to yourself about how things should be.

Most of your thoughts are created by fear. Have you ever noticed that? Especially if you believe them without question. They are centered on your survival as a manager, so they are worried thoughts, scanning the future for possible problems and catastrophes. You function as a human scanner all day long. The problem with that approach is that it leads to hands-on micromanaging. It leads to trying to manipulate your people out there in the external world. It also leads to a life of worrying about your own future, and therefore a life of always feeling anxious and distracted.

The people you’re dealing with may feel as though you aren’t there. And you feel it, too. It is the very definition of stress. It is the very source of workplace fatigue and burnout.

To try to get relief from all this anxiety, a micromanager will often dip back into the past. But that’s not much better, is it? When you’re in the past you are spending the majority of your time thinking about what you feel guilty about. Shift to the future and you’re back to what you’re afraid of. How can you mentor someone from that sort of “bipolar” mood swing? How can you be present to the task at hand and the person in front of you?

To truly mentor someone you must be at peace. When you are not at peace the other person will be contaminated by your stress. So find the peaceful place inside you that tells
you what success really is. Then go forth and model the same peaceful efficiency and creativity to others. That’s the beauty of hands-off management in a nutshell.

True success is less about reaching the final goal and more about using each moment to make progress toward the goal. Focus more on how you can be constantly moving forward and what the next step is. It will make the ultimate goal that much easier to achieve.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Make a list of all the external, material goals you have in your life. Then ask yourself about each object (a car, a boat, a vacation home): Why do you want it? How will it feel to have it? Write that feeling down as the true goal, with an openness to the possibility that the feeling can be achieved without (or prior to) achieving the material goal.

2. Write down your financial definition of success. Give it a number. What does success mean to you financially? Then ask yourself why you want the money. For what purpose? What feeling do you want that you don’t have now? A feeling of security? A feeling of power and freedom? When you’ve written it down, allow yourself to be open to the possibility that you can have that inner feeling without (or prior to) receiving the money in your life. Then open yourself to the possibility that wealth may even flow faster into your life when you are at peace and feeling secure, powerful, and free.

3. Write down your relationship and family goals. Why do you want these things? How much of what you have written down depends on other people acting in certain ways?
Then rewrite them focused only on what you want to contribute to others regardless of how they behave, or their “loyalty” to or “appreciation” of you. Make these goals within your capacity to reach now, right now, and not at some future time when the world corrects itself.

CHAPTER THREE
USING THE POWER OF NEUTRAL

Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface.

—Confucius

Kerry was a division leader obsessed with creating a new incentive plan for her major telemarketing teams. This obsession was causing her anxiety and stress.

All her focus in the past had been on negatives. She wanted certain guarantees that her people would not betray her. She resented certain past behaviors that she was now trying to eliminate. The more she fretted, the more she micromanaged, and every time she tried to negotiate a new plan there was a war between the two sides. She couldn’t see that she was creating the war. She was creating havoc every time her irritated voice proposed a new plan.

I met with Kerry for a coaching session prior to yet another meeting she was about to have with her top people.

“I’m worried about this meeting,” Kerry said.

“Why?”

“I know they’ll argue against this plan and ask for more guaranteed salary, which I don’t want to give them because they will all get lazy on me if they don’t have to work for commissions.”

“You don’t trust them.”

“They haven’t earned it.”

“People have to earn your trust?”

“Of course. I’ve been burned too many times not to know that.”

“I’m not surprised that you’ve been burned so many times.”

“Really? Why?”

“You don’t trust your people.”

Kerry was silent. She said nothing.

I took more time in the coaching session than normal because I wanted to introduce Kerry to a new concept called hands-off management. I wanted to teach her what I’d learned from Duane Black—that if she didn’t trust her people it was because she didn’t trust herself. Her entire mind was filled up every day with stressful thoughts about worst-case scenarios. No wonder she was struggling and filled with anger.

Her first step in the journey from hands-on to hands-off would be to meet with her people for two hours with no agenda on her side of the table.

“No agenda?” asked Kerry. “You can’t have a meeting with no agenda. We learned that in our leadership training.”

“Right. And that training was first developed in the 1940s for companies run on the old-school military model of management. It counted on a workplace of people hoping for 30 years of loyal service and a pocket watch at the retirement dinner at the Holiday Inn.”

“What would I look like, having no agenda?”

“Someone who cared what their lives were like as telemarketers. Someone who wanted to listen, someone who was neutral about how this final arrangement would look.”

“Neutral?”

“Neutral.”

It took Kerry a full year of coaching to make the trip from micromanaging to mentoring. A full year of internal reprogramming. But she did it. It was a great year for her and her self-esteem as a leader. And listen to her today, in her words from a recent e-mail:

It’s funny how much I look forward to work every day. It’s such an adventure not knowing. I’m so happy to explore and open up in new ways every day. There’s no rigid way I have to be anymore, because I’m no longer obsessed with doing it right. Or not getting in trouble. I think our society does that to little girls. Little girls fear getting in trouble. Making daddy mad. Little boys are given more leeway. Boys will be boys! They get to fail a lot and make tons of mistakes growing up. Girls better get it right the first time! You’ve showed me that as true as that scenario might have felt in my past, it’s just a story now. I can cling to the story or let it go.

What I like most about the past is that it’s over.

—Byron Katie

Organizational life is a constant process of negotiation and sales. It’s an ongoing opportunity to promote a particular perspective in order to accomplish a purpose you are working toward.

There’s no way around it: You’re always selling.

Whether it’s selling ideas to your team, a concept to your own supervisors, or a new service to a customer, your day is spent selling. As the author Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everyone lives by selling something.”

But not everyone sells the same way.

Not everyone sells from the same position. In fact, what really sets a hands-off manager apart is the position that Kerry learned to take: neutral. Managerial mastery is simply an unusual mastery of the neutral position.

Not positive, not negative, but neutral.

“If you and I were negotiating a land acquisition structure, my strategy, my way of being, would be not to resist anything that you bring to the table,” Duane says, “it would be to accept it, to acknowledge you for having brought up that issue and then to focus our mutual attention on the benefit of the position that I came to sell in the first place. And that way, you have an invitation to shift your position. If I resist your position, then my challenge to you is to defend it, not look at an alternative to it. Because we can’t operate completely outside ego; it wouldn’t be human. We each have a little bit of a tendency to want to defend whatever position we have taken.”

Reality dances best with someone who is flexible. Success flows toward an open (neutral) position. The best negotiators have an open, neutral mind—not a closed mind.

Sales and negotiations will occur internally, too—inside one mind at war with itself.

We were communicating with a friend this morning who’s a professional golfer, and he was having such a hard time getting into tournaments and doing well, even though he’s a great golfer,
because negative thoughts keep coming into his mind as he’s about to hit the ball. Throughout his career he’s been trying to force them out and force positive thoughts into their place.

What I recommended was that he step back from both positive and negative thoughts to what he might call a neutral position. Simply observe the thoughts, let them pass by, and then hit the ball with nothing in mind whatsoever. Not by forcing a positive:
I can do this, it’ll be great, it’ll go in
. And not by being worried:
Oh no, I’m going to blow this
. But to just step back and allow thoughts to pass like clouds. And when there’s an opening, hit the ball. From neutral.

Everything improved. “Neutral” is powerful.

Learning negotiation from physics

As I sat in Duane’s study early on a warm Arizona Sunday morning discussing the amazing power of neutral, he told me that he deepened his understanding of its power by observing the structure of the atom.

In atomic structure there are always three forces: there’s an electron, which produces a negative force; there’s a proton, which produces a positive force; and there’s a neutron, which remains neutral. The neutron and the proton create the nucleus of the atom, and the electron travels around that nucleus at very high speeds. Electricity is a function of the negative electrons transferring through a conductor from one atom to the next. So the negative is very elastic; it’s very moveable throughout all of physics. A negative force moves easily from one place to another.

On the other hand, the neutral force and the positive force are much less moveable. When you separate the nucleus—the neutron and the proton—you unleash violent atomic energy; that was the basis of the atomic bomb.

“So that connection,” says Duane, “that bond, in my opinion, which is based on physics, simple physics and chemistry, has been proven to be where the real strength is in business. The connection between the positive and the neutral. Although the negative has to
be there to sustain balance, it’s very easily swayed and moved and transferred to another atom. In the case of human beings that means to another person, with little effort. We’re almost too open to it. But you can’t, without a severe response, separate the neutral and the positive.”

That brings us back to the hands-off manager’s respect for neutral observation as the ultimate vision. As a true and artful observer, one must be without judgment and without a position. A true observer gains power from seeing all valid positions from a neutral spot.

Those of us who are managers deal every day with opposites. We deal with up and down, success and failure, hard and easy, fast and slow, happy and sad. What we don’t always understand is that those opposites go together and need each other. We can only experience easy because hard exists. We can only experience up because down exists.

Yet we’re always anxious to remove the opposite of the experience we seek! In reality, it’s impossible. The experience we seek could not exist in a relative universe (and workplace) where everything is understandable only because its opposite also exists.

So a worried, fussy micromanager’s resistance to opposition, and to the opposite of that which he seeks, blocks him from getting to where he was trying to go. He gets good critical feedback, and instead of being open to it he’s immediately defensive.

He ends up more worried about the negative he wants to get away from than the positive he wants to move toward. And ultimately he can’t get to success from there. The “there” he is stuck in has too much worry to gain traction and move.

The hands-off negotiator has power

The real power is pure neutrality, in any aspect of negotiation.

When you want to achieve “good,” you can’t get there by resistance to evil. When you want to achieve “right,” you can’t get there by resistance to wrong.

You win by realizing that hot and cold are the same thing—they’re just opposite ends of temperature. Win and lose are essentially the same thing—they’re just opposite ends of the experience of the game. In and out are the same thing—they’re just opposite ends of movement within or movement without.

In a good negotiation, you’ll learn to give up the resistance and the judgment of the opposite of that which you seek. You’ll accept the opposite and incorporate it into your own position.