The Hands-Off Manager (19 page)

Seem obvious?

Not to Mariano! And not to most managers. Most managers know nothing of coaching. When a person underperforms, they don’t coach them; they do other things, all of them toxic and dysfunctional. They become sarcastic. Or they ignore their employee, playing the time-worn game of “Guess Why I’m Mad.” They reduce the logical process of business into an emotional battleground. Tension fills the workplace. Morale suffers.

“I don’t know what else to do!” an angry CEO named Mark said when I talked to him about a team leader who wasn’t getting the job done. “I’m caught between a rock and a hard place! I am furious with Gordon, but the nightmare of finding a replacement is too much to think about.”

“How do you think he feels?” I asked.

“Frankly, that doesn’t concern me right now, he has totally betrayed me.” This was getting to be like a scene out of
General Hospital
for me, so I looked for a way to introduce coaching as an alternative to the daily drama.

“Have you ever coached him?” I asked. “Have you ever mentored Gordon?” Mark stared at me like I’d asked him whether he’d ever given him a pedicure. His face was twisted with confusion.

“What do you mean by coaching?” That was a valid question! What is this coaching process we’re talking about? What do we do, exactly, when we coach someone?

Stop giving unsolicited advice.

A lot of people think that coaching means giving advice; that you give advice in kind of a nice way so that you’re giving advice but you can call it “coaching.” That’s not really coaching. That’s advising.

When you are coaching, the first thing you do is seek to understand the other person. You do not first seek to be understood. Understand where your person’s heart is. What are they thinking? How do they see things? Because if you saw life the way they saw life, you’d likely be doing just what they’re doing. You’d be behaving the way they were. You’d be communicating exactly the way they are. You’d be them.

It’s really important for you to see what your people want to achieve and how they see their situation. Ask questions and let them talk. Keep your hands off their answers.

Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive.

—St. Francis of Assisi

In the old model of managing, people tried to be understood, period. End of communication! They had all their communications going out and nothing coming in. They were thinking,
I sure hope I’m being understood!
And then if somebody was messing up, that micromanager would sit down with them and say, “Let me tell you what you’re doing wrong,” or “Let me tell you what I expect of you, here.”

And it wasn’t working.

In today’s organization the young people being hired are much brighter and more knowledgeable than ever before. But what comes along with that? They’re also more independent and personally complex than ever before. They’re not going to fall in line like people on the assembly line in the 1940s and just follow the orders being barked out and move like sheep through the organization.

About a decade ago, I worked for a company called TimeMax. We delivered productivity training and sold time-management products. Our company was struggling financially when it brought in a business coach by the name of Steve Hardison.

Hardison was dynamic. His coaching went through the company like a hurricane and it wasn’t long before empty classrooms were converted to “standing room only,” and major Fortune 500 companies were writing six-figure checks for our training.

Hardison’s coaching sessions opened people up to levels of performance and creativity they never knew existed. I’d never seen anything like it.

And the best part of the company transformation was that it included me.

Not since I’d transformed from a hopelessly addicted person to a happy, clean and sober person had I changed so much.

Do people change?

Because of Hardison, I started teaching classes, giving seminars (I’d previously had a public speaking phobia), and writing books. I was 49 and had never written a book before. I’ve now written 16—some of them bestsellers. So, do people change? Does coaching work?

More than anyone can imagine!

“But you’ve got to have someone willing to receive,” says Hardison. “Coaching can’t be imposed from one person to another. It’s a two-way street. It’s an exchange of life. Both people learn. Both people grow.”

Hardison has now coached some of the top celebrities in the entertainment industry and personal growth field and says that everyone’s “problems” are the same.

“There’s no new problem,” Hardison said. “People are afraid to really express who they are. That’s all that’s going on. My only job is to listen and connect.”

Hardison likes to quote one of his own clients, Byron Katie, who says, “If you have a problem, you have a solution. There’s no problem without a solution.”

When Hardison started coaching me a decade ago, fear dominated my life. Especially my professional life. But he was able to connect to me on such a deep level that I knew he had the same fears I had. And his growth to transform fear became my own. His commitment to me was total, and I could feel it in every coaching session. I was no longer alone. I was connected now to the whole universe and all its energy.

I have seen Hardison give so much of himself away in a coaching session that he emerges physically drained to the point of almost not existing.

“It’s an exchange of life,” he says of coaching that works. “It’s almost like giving a blood transfusion. But when the people you coach can see what they’re afraid of and then meet it, it’s exhilarating!”

Exhilarating financial transformations occur, too. I watched Hardison coach TimeMax from deep debt to exhilarating, staggering profits. I experienced my own professional life go through the same change. His coaching was not just some New Age amateur psychotherapy—it combined the very best of sports coaching and business consulting to produce astonishing quantum leaps in productivity.

Hardison taught me to create from the present moment. He showed me the startling leverage we have in the present-moment actions we take. He taught me to let the past dissolve away. He showed me that my future was just an anxious anticipation. Did I want to spend my whole life swinging between memory and anticipation like a bipolar monkey in a jungle of fear? Or would I like to swing on a star?

To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

—Walter Chrysler

Hardison introduced me to Duane Black a few years ago and told me that Duane was one of the few leaders in the corporate world who was fearless about bringing love, nobility, and integrity into the workplace, treating work itself as a sacred act.

I was
very
interested in that. And after meeting with Duane and coproducing seminars and workshops for his leadership teams,
I knew Hardison was right. The extraordinary financial success of the company Duane worked for was no accident.

Duane was genuinely excited about his team of people. And I recalled that Hardison had always told me that most of what is called coaching today is not really effective. There is no commitment to relatedness, and if a “coach” has no excitement about listening to the other person, no change will take place.

After Walter Chrysler had built a dramatically successful automotive company against great odds in the 1940s, he said, “I feel sorry for the person who can’t get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile.”

This kind of excitement is not passive or limp. That’s a big mistake people make when they first hear about hands-off management. They think it’s soft. It’s the opposite.

Coaching is about what’s possible

Coaching is all about allowing what’s possible to emerge. It’s moving a person out of being stuck in a mindset where they think they are limited. The coach maintains what the Zen masters call a “beginner’s mind” in which nothing is impossible.

Because as an effective coach you never want to seem to be saying “I’m better than you, I’m your superior, and that’s why I’m coaching you and telling you how it ought to be.” That would be the expert giving advice, not a professional partner delivering coaching. Expert advice will not bring change. It is more likely to bring humiliation. And that’s only because we are dealing with human beings.

Lasting behavioral change is always the ironic specialty of the hands-off manager. By not micromanaging, more things change. By keeping your hands off the process, the process improves more quickly.

Would you pull a flower up from the ground with your hands to help it grow?

Why try to do similar things to an employee?

When you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti

The hands-off manager has the added benefit of time. She is not spending all of her time looking over the shoulders of her employees. She has hired good people, she is passionate about what her company is up to, so her people feel inspired. She addresses problems as they occur.

She uses this time to stay up to speed on market trends, to monitor the market, to move her people in strategic ways that anticipate what is coming next. She has a clear mind and can access new ideas easily. The market is always changing. In today’s world, those changes can be dramatic and devastating to those who will not listen to the marketplace.

Listening to the marketplace is as important as listening to your people. A true leader and manager simply must have a sense of what is ahead and be prepared to change to address it. If you don’t, your organization has little hope of withstanding the test of time.

A salesperson we knew named Trina was down on herself for not making enough cold calls during the day. She said, “I just need to prospect more. I don’t do enough prospecting. I know that’s my greatest flaw, I don’t enjoy it and I put it off and handle things that I think are more important, and then the prospecting never gets done.”

“Great. So how does that look to you when you come to work?”

(We asked that because we really wanted to see how prospecting looked to Trina. Why it looked a little scary, unpleasant, and
uncomfortable, and why the other work Trina did looked really fun and enjoyable. A coach seeks to understand how a thinking system—“this is the fun part, this is the not fun part”—is leading to low performance. In fact, it’s guaranteeing it.)

When we were with Trina for a while in the coaching session, we had a few breakthroughs. She began to see that if she were to create an interesting routine for cold calling, she wouldn’t have to try to decide whether she “felt like” doing it. She would simply follow her routine. She wouldn’t have to feel that pit in her stomach as she drove to work, wondering if she was going to be able to get herself to prospect. She would now have a rather fun routine to cover that for her.

A system at play in every workplace

In the uncoached, micromanaged organization there is an unconscious default system of judgment and reprimand.

We learned it in families when we were growing up. We surely learned it in the military. Most people in American corporations default unconsciously to a 1940s system of military management combined in some unhealthy way with parent-child discipline.

And hands-off coaching is the way out of that.

Because hands-off coaching is a mature partnership—two grown-ups with a common goal—not Mad Dad criticizing Bad Child (how most teams are run).

A great coach is more committed to the success of the team than he is to the success of any individual. So his mission when coaching his people is to show them that success comes from what they can contribute to the whole, not from how they can stand out as individuals. And this allows him to apply some very tough love to the individual in the name of the team win.

“The hands-off manager has to be absolute,” says Duane. “He or she can’t be wishy-washy when it comes to excellence. There must be an unwavering commitment to everyone becoming the best they can be at what they do.”

And these results are not numbers or money (although they will be nice side effects, in the long run). These results are the ever-improving quality of work. They are the process of great work, not just the financial outcome.

Know when to fold ’em

A coach with true commitment to the vision can light you up even when he’s fictional! My wife, Kathy, was working for a large organization whose leader was taking hands-off to a negative extreme. It was no-hands-at-all, no head, no heart, no leadership, no direction, and no vision. Kathy hadn’t figured out exactly what felt so wrong at work each day, but she knew she didn’t like it.

Then one afternoon she and I went to a movie called
Any Given Sunday
with Al Pacino playing the head football coach of a team in disarray. In one brilliantly dramatic scene, Pacino calls his team together in the locker room and allows himself to burst like a fountain of passion and fire. He pours his heart out on the subject of team and the beauty of all-for-one and one-for-all.

In the movie, Pacino’s team—like Kathy’s team at work—had become demoralized. There were jealousies, politics, and drama going on all day instead of a single unified mission.

“We’re in hell!” Pacino yelled to his team in the locker room before the final game of the season. “Either we heal as a team or we crumble. But we can heal. We can fight our way back into the light…we can climb out of hell one inch at a time. What will it be? Look into the eyes of the person next to you. Either we heal now—as a team—or we will die as individuals.”

Kathy was in tears. She knew right then and there what was missing in the company she worked for. And she knew the missing leader wasn’t just going to appear. There was no Al Pacino to pull them all back into a team.