The Hands-Off Manager (14 page)

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

—Napoleon Hill

In
Good to Great
, Jim Collins contrasts companies that have been consistently great over long periods of time with companies that have had their ups and downs. What he found is that over the long haul, the great companies outperform the companies that have the ups and downs by multiples. He didn’t even look at companies that hadn’t been in business for 50 years or more. The fundamental difference between the two is that the companies that have the ups and downs are the companies that are committed to results only. And the companies that consistently grow and outperform over time are the companies that are committed to being great companies. To taking care of their customers, offering great products, and providing great service. Over the long haul it pays off in multiples. These companies have perfected the inner process, and the outer takes care of itself.

This concept applies to our personal lives, as well. We don’t need a goal for how big a house we’re going to have. We don’t need a goal for how much money we’re going to make. If we really want those things, then what we really need is a goal for how good a job we’re going to do right now in this hour we are living in.

We can allow the results to emerge in the world outside of us if we take care of our world inside. And there’s so much less stress. You never need to be disappointed when you have a “down month” in results. Down months happen. There’s nothing wrong with them. But if your quality of work keeps evolving upward, better and better results over the long run will show up. They have to. The universe cannot resist that. It can’t help but reward that.

A friend of ours who was a banker said once that banks should not resist high interest rates and economic downturns, because it provides a chance for them to retrench and retrain their people, build new branches, and grow their human capital—in other words, to flow with reality rather than oppose it. Then, when the market turns, they are positioned to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Imagine a life in which you breathe out but you never breathe in. Imagine a life in which you’re awake all the time, and you never sleep or stop to rest. Such a life, both physically and mentally, could never work. You have to have your ins and outs and ups and downs. They are part of the dance of life. Down time and up time are both good.

There will be times when you go all out to keep up with the activity. And then there are slower times. One time supports the other. It’s the rhythm of life. But people want to make the down time bad and the up time good. That’s what throws them off their rhythm and creates professional stress and failure. Rather than resting during down time, they stress out, and a stressed out person does not perform well.

Everyone knows that you are more productive during the day if you get your rest during the night. Everyone knows that if you get a certain level of exercise and a certain level of nutrition, you have the ability to perform at a higher level, because you feel better.

That’s all we’re talking about here. Allowing success is merely learning to be the kind of person who feels better! Get your rest. Focus on inner things that produce results, then let the results show up naturally. Take away the expectation of outcome and just let things show up. Your every act of relaxed kindness to others will connect down the line.

Throughout this process it helps to allow yourself to see and realize the inner connectedness of all things. To see how one thing relates to everything else. As Duane says:

When you sell a home, it affects not only the person buying it, but also their family, the people who come to visit them, and the subsequent owners of that home. It affects the people who work for you who get to build it, the subcontractors, the people who work for them, the city that provides the plan reviews and the inspection process, and the utility companies that deliver the
electricity, telephone, and cable TV. So many people are affected by that one, simple transaction. It’s amazing.

In this success process as it applies to an organization, it’s very helpful to eliminate all forms of internal competition. You’re not in an organization to do better than the guy two doors down from you; you’re in an organization to
work with
the person two doors down from you.

Duane had someone ask him once, “You’ve been pretty successful inside of a corporate environment; I wouldn’t have expected that, because you were self-employed for 17 years before you went there. How did you do it?”

“You know, it was amazingly easy,” Duane replied. “I thought of other companies in our industry as my competition, not other people in my organization as my competition. I just chose to focus on how I could do a better job, not on who was getting more attention than I was.”

Most people compete internally. They focus on who’s getting more recognition from their boss than they are. They obsess about who got a raise that they didn’t. They want to point out who took more vacation time than they did. Who left for lunch early.

Whereas to really succeed all they would have had to focus on was:
What can I do to help us be a better company?
They would then be the ones getting all the raises and all the promotions.

All you need to focus on to get ahead is:
What can I give?
Recognize that this isn’t a competition, it’s a cooperation. You get further ahead by working
with
people. You honor your imagination and theirs. That’s how you create results—in this new global society more than ever before!

“The sun is setting on the Information Society,” writes Rolf Jensen in
The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business
:

...even before we have fully adjusted to its demands as individuals and as companies. We have lived as hunters and as farmers, we have worked in factories and
now we live in an information-based society whose icon is the computer. We stand facing the fifth kind of society: the Dream Society.… Future products will have to appeal to our hearts, not to our heads. Now is the time to add emotional value to products and services.

The hands-off manager is the appropriate person to lead people through the coming shift from information to imagination.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Rather than listing external goals you want to achieve, start listing inner qualities you want to cultivate and grow. What makes a great leader? List those qualities and score yourself on each so you can track inner progress.

2. Study the interior workings of your team so that you can meet with people about inner strengths instead of outer objectives. Have a meeting to discuss the internal tune-ups needed, and allow people to brainstorm fearlessly.

3. Create a survey for everyone you work with (including yourself) that allows them to identify internal improvements that can be made. Reward the best ideas.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WAKING UP TO THE WHOLE SYSTEM

Miracles are a retelling in small letters the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

—C.S. Lewis

Hands-off success is enhanced by feeling your connection to everything. It comes from feeling all the support you are already getting.

You don’t need to put your hands on anything to wring out that support. It’s already everywhere. Almost a miracle.

Duane told me:

I had a friend challenge me once. He said, “Show me anything you possess that came to you solely from your own resources. The shirt on your back? Your belt? Your house? Your car? Anything!” I couldn’t come up with anything,
even when I thought in terms of my physical body. My body came to me from my parents; I don’t remember having done anything to put that together. I could not think of a single thing. Although I have done things to contribute to the manufacture of products, they all involved other people. I could not think of one single thing that was created solely and individually by myself. Even if I went out in the woods with a pocket knife and cut off a tree limb and carved something, it was contributed to me: the tree from nature and the knife by the knife manufacturer. I couldn’t think of a thing.

Most people live completely unaware of how supported they are! They think they are relying on themselves. In their offices they have signs that say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

They also think they can only make money if they take it from someone else. In their contracted view of life it’s a zerosum game. But the universe’s evolution outward toward infinite expansion since the Big Bang is not a zerosum game. And any time you try to create a system around the finite zerosum premise, the system collapses, because it isn’t in agreement with nature.

Marxism, just such a zerosum system, was based on the paranoid concept of the finite limitation of wealth; in other words, there’s only so much wealth in the world. It was the ultimate hands-
on
system of micromanagement taken to the extreme. Marxism holds that there are limited, finite resources and we must take these limited resources from the rich and redistribute them. What destroyed Marxism was the recognition in the free market system that wealth is infinite and unlimited. So, over in the Soviet system they kept redistributing their limited, finite amount of wealth, while in the Western free-market systems, wealth kept expanding. No wonder the socialist system collapsed and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The finite loses to the infinite every time.

The micromanager works with finite amounts of power and information, and the hands-off manager works with infinite imagination.

Wealth itself follows the path of a decidedly hands-off evolution and expansion, so that even “valueless” grains of sand have now been used to become the most valuable computer chips in the world.

To see the world in a grain of sand and to see heaven in a wild flower is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

—William Blake

And so, with imagination, resources are infinite, not finite. They’re only limited by thought. They’re not limited by the social structure you live in, as Karl Marx erroneously concluded. So the idea that
to have something, you must have taken it from someone else
is simply not in alignment with nature. And every time you try to put that idea out there as a system, the system collapses. Every time you try to follow it personally, your career suffers.

This limitation and finite thinking can also destroy an organization from within. For example, a lot of people think that if they deliver extraordinary customer service they’ll have to give up something else: profit. They think that providing service the right way incurs an unnecessary expense. They don’t have the imagination to see how huge a contribution great service is to their long-term bottom line.

And then they wonder why they’re not successful in the long run.

To make certain you never fall into this zerosum black hole, simply focus on what you’re giving. Not on what you
get back, nor on the results of giving or goals for the giving. Trust the system. Know that it will work. Because you are giving into an interconnected system. By doing this, you will get results.

The hands-off manager can enjoy keeping her hands off the process because she can see how big a process it really is. She can see how supported she is by good people everywhere. So she begins to function as a part of a whole, instead of being just a frightened, defensive individual.

Feeling that interconnection with everyone in your organization spreading forth to vendors and to customers, you realize that you get back what you give out, that what goes around, comes around, and that this hands-off mentoring style creates a circular path: The things you give out circulate through the world and come back to you.

The cynical person believes a capitalistic society functions because it promotes doing what’s best for the individual even if it’s at the expense of the whole. So if it’s at the expense of the environment, that’s okay, because you individually benefited. But then in the long run all of society has to pick up the tab for the damage that that particular individual or group did to the environment.

That cynical, individualistic approach is not going to work.

Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away.

—H.R. White

The higher your consciousness is, the more you can see the interconnectedness of all things. You see that it’s not possible to damage the environment without damaging yourself. And people who try to accrue things without benefiting others end up as the Enron leaders did: dead or in jail. People who damage the environment, as in the case of the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill, damage themselves financially. And there’s no way out of the connected web of life. There’s no way to disconnect from the interconnectedness of all of life and the universe.

Is this too mystical? It’s better described as
waking up to reality
. It’s just waking up to the physical reality of the interconnectedness of all things. What it’s waking up to is sometimes described as the “butterfly effect.” We live by the butterfly effect in our company, whether we know it or not. (It’s more fun when we know it.) What is the butterfly effect? Chaos theory states that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. If a butterfly in Peking flaps its wings it will affect the weather in Des Moines, Iowa, a week later.