The Hands-Off Manager (2 page)

If you do not love what you do you will never be a real success. You may make money at it, but it will not make you happy. The only real source of happiness comes from serving others and making a difference in the world. And when properly applied, it is also a path to financial success and a life to be proud of. When one is focused on how best to serve one’s customer, one naturally attracts more customers. When one is looking to take advantage, they lose customers. Love also applies to your employees. If you do not care about their success, they will not care about yours. People want to be a part of a company that they are proud of, one in which they feel valued and appreciated. That is what will bring you loyalty and people who stay with you even when they are offered more money somewhere else. Love your people and your role in the company and watch success naturally unfold from people who love being at work.

Freedom is so innate and natural to being human that there is a long history of people who have sacrificed their lives to maintain it. Many would choose death over slavery, yet everywhere we look we see work environments that are so encumbered by rules, regulations, and micro-management that they resemble modern-day sweatshops. I am talking about the freedom to be creative, to be unique, to be exceptional, to try something different. We live in a world of ever-increasing pressure to never make a mistake, yet mistakes are happening everywhere we look. Put your people in roles they align with, let them know how much you appreciate them and their good work, and then get out of their way and give them the freedom
to be great at being who they are. Watch how they make you successful.

Please read on to discover in more detail how these management concepts can be applied in the workplace to create success beyond anything you have ever imagined possible.

CHAPTER ONE
TAKING YOUR POWER BACK

In everyone’s life at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the human spirit.

—Albert Schweitzer

Most management activity today is what was alluded to by the Peter Drucker quote at the beginning of this book. Managers make it difficult for their people. They unknowingly kill, or at least diminish, the human spirit by their old-school micromanaging and critical judgments.

But there is a new kind of manager emerging in companies today, a manager devoted to rekindling the human spirit by keeping their hands off their employees and allowing success to happen. We’ll just call these enlightened people “hands-off managers.”
Managers have these two primary communication styles from which to choose:

1. Hands-on: They can criticize, control, threaten, and judge their people.

2. Hands-off: They can mentor, encourage, coach, and genuinely care about their people.

This choice presents itself many times throughout every day. Every interaction with one of your people is going to be a version of this choice.

If you choose judgment (and criticism, implied or otherwise), you will provoke defensiveness and withdrawal—not creativity and productivity.

When we judge our people and find them coming up short, we then start to criticize and micromanage them. In this age of the sensitive, knowledge-based worker, that’s a self-destructive cycle. It engenders nothing but resentment and push-back.

Also, when we judge and then hold a grudge, we are giving our power away. When we resent a team member, we are giving our power to that team member. We are giving that power to the very person we are angry with by allowing him or her to occupy and dominate our thinking. We are focused on the problem and not the solution.

Real power in leadership comes from partnering, not criticizing.

The hands-off manager sets himself apart by retaining all his power. His practice is to understand everyone he meets, to see more in his people than they are seeing and to invite them to that vision.

By doing this, he is reducing his own stress level at work. He is completely aware that every time he judges someone he alters his own well-being.

So he refuses to assign the responsibility for negative feelings to the person he is tempted to judge. He assigns the responsibility for these feelings to his beliefs regarding that person.

Only thoughts cause stress; people do not. People cannot.

But for the old-school micromanager the stress never quits, and the harmony in the organization never holds.

If you are micromanaging in the old style of shame and blame, you will recognize this example: You’re pulling into the company parking garage and suddenly have to slow down because there’s an old person in front of you going slower than molasses. If you then decide you don’t like older people who drive slowly, you start to suffer. And you will suffer every time this “happens” to you. Even though it’s not really happening to you, it is being caused by you—the stress comes directly from your thought. The older person has no power to stress you out. You think you are suffering because this oldster is driving poorly, but the truth is you are only suffering because of your judgmental thought about him or her.

We all want to be powerful and in control of our own well-being, but we continually give away the very power we seek by our inability to forgive and let go. The only way out of this trap of constant suffering is to cultivate the open-minded, hands-off skills of letting the actions of others roll off our backs and letting other people’s negativity go in one ear and out the other.

Anything we cannot let go of has control over us. But once we can let go, we’re in control. We can laugh and enjoy how we are unaffected by what other people might be doing.

That’s when you change as a manager.

That’s when people see you as an island in the storm. A person to go to for peaceful resolutions of crises. In other words, a true hands-off manager who gets results from a relaxed, enthused, and highly productive team.

One does not “manage” people. The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.

—Peter Drucker

How to open your energy field

The hands-off approach allows you to learn to take your power back and live in a world of quiet action and non-judgment. If you do this, you’ll soon be living with an open mind, forgiving effortlessly and taking back control of your energy and enthusiasm for doing great work.

Discovering your natural gifts and learning your true nature is not about learning how to force yourself upon your team. It’s about allowing success to emerge from within you, and then from inside others. It’s an inside job. And once you see that all real power comes from the inside, you can start to become powerful.

There is a story about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that illustrates what we mean. A young would-be composer wrote to Mozart, asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding musical form, and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested: “But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now!”

Mozart replied, “Yes, but I never asked how.”

Mozart’s point was that he simply let the symphonies emerge from within him. He didn’t have to figure out how to force something outside him to work.

Duane has a saying he uses at work, although it doesn’t apply only to work; it applies to life in general. His saying is, “Find them, don’t fix them.” It’s a policy that encourages finding strengths in your employees that already exist, and allowing those strengths to come forward. It also applies to finding the right people for the job, people whose natural skills and interests align with the work you are asking them to do.

When they do what they love the success will follow. Once you know what they love to do and help them do it, they’ll do it for you all day long. Keep finding ways to match their talents with the tasks ahead. Find them, don’t fix them.

And there will always be employees for whom you don’t find a good job match. Nothing seems to make them happy. Soon, you know in your heart they aren’t a fit for the team you have.

Old-school managers have a hard time dealing with this realization. They keep trying to fix things. They keep trying to fix people. They go through endless inept exercises to try to find ways to motivate mismatched employees to get them to do what they really don’t want to, and are not interested in or excited about doing. They try to find ways to make them change themselves into someone they are not. This is a waste of everyone’s energy!

Our hands-off manager’s commitment to finding how our people can fit rather than fixing people who don’t fit has been the central factor in the success of teams. Take the case of Barry.

Barry was so stressed by his financial debts at home that he pushed hard for a sales management position early in his employment, and got it. (Barry was very persuasive and a crafty communicator.) However, Barry simply did not enjoy the responsibilities of leadership. He was easily frustrated with salespeople who didn’t have his natural love of cold-calling and meeting new people. Even though he tried to learn our principles of coaching success instead of forcing it on people, he was still unhappy, and the results showed it.

We finally identified the mismatch and convinced the CEO, Glenda, not to keep trying to “fix” Barry with leadership training and negative performance reports. We asked that Glenda “find” Barry—the real Barry, the true, natural salesperson wanting (but not being allowed) to emerge.

Finally Glenda saw the light and repositioned Barry as a senior major account salesperson and turned him loose in the field where Barry loved to be. After four months, Barry’s commissions were enormous, and he was able to settle all his financial crises at home while loving the job he was doing.

Glenda had just taken her hands off Barry’s natural inclination to succeed. And this powerfully effective “find them, don’t fix
them” approach also applies to us as individuals. We benefit when we continue finding out who we are and letting that discovery manifest in the outside world, rather than trying to fix ourselves.

Learning to turn in a new direction

1. We often enjoy going in person to hear the teachings of a dear friend, a philosopher/guru named George Addair who holds wonderful workshops on personal evolution. (This book is dedicated to him.) One of his sayings is “You never overcome anything.” In this Addair means that anything that has been a part of your history will always be a part of your history. You can’t make it go away. However, over time, if you choose to, you can simply defuse and dismiss it and go another way. You can follow another path so that the memory loses all its power over you.

2. When leaders are bold and decisive throughout the day, they often make mistakes and bad calls. It’s part of being in action. It’s a big part of courage. George Patton used to say that an average plan executed right now is far more effective than a great plan that takes a long time to decide to put into action.

3. A hands-off leader can just release a mistake and let go of it. And while it doesn’t disappear, it simply becomes old news. It’s this letting go of the need to “overcome” things that happened in the past that leads to becoming truly powerful.

4. The Greek word
metanoeo
is translated as “repent’ in the English New Testaments, and W.E. Vine’s Dictionary states that it means “to perceive afterwards.” Therefore, it means to take another look and to change one’s mind or purpose, and it always involves a change for the better. So
repent
then means nothing more than “turn and go another way.” Some traditions have been trying to teach us that if you’ve done something wrong, you should punish yourself, feel remorse, and burden yourself with your shameful behavior. What the literal translation really wants you to do is just turn away from it and take a newer, better direction in your thinking.

5. When I reflect on my recovery from addiction years ago I realize I didn’t really “overcome” my addiction. I simply took another path. I repented, in the truer, deeper meaning of the word. I realize, too, that if I were to get back on the path of alcohol and drugs I’d have the same problems all over again. The code is there in my brain for addictive drinking. So if I started drinking again, it would be addictive. And it doesn’t matter whether the code came from repetitive use or genetics; it’s there, so I just don’t go there. The process is to not go there. To replace the false spirit of drugs with true spirit.

6. I know from my personal experience that “overcoming” truly doesn’t work. It doesn’t have any track record of working in the workplace, either. And when you hear people who are newly happy with their jobs now, they say, “I’ve moved on. I’ve just moved on.” They don’t say, “Well, I was able to come to grips with it, wrestle with it, overcome it, conquer it, defeat it.” No one who is truly free of a problem such as addiction says, “I was able to overcome, defeat my alcoholism, and it lies in a heap and I am victorious over it.” They just say, “I’ve moved on. I’ve accepted my powerlessness and taken another path. It’s not a part of my life. I’ve chosen a different way, a different form of spirit than alcohol.”

7. Carl Jung said, “People do not solve their psychological problems, in my experience. They outgrow them. They grow in a different direction and just leave them in their history.” This is what the process of allowing success is all about. It’s the heart and soul of hands-off management. It’s considered a revolutionary form of management because it breaks the old codes of manipulation and mistrust.

8. Some therapists say that in order to move on, you must reenact a conversation you had with your antagonist all over again and resolve that memory that’s inside you. But that’s just giving more strength to the story. And we are looking to free you from your stories. Micromanagers in the workplace do the same dysfunctional thing those therapists do. They relive
breakdowns and mistakes and go over and over them, making people wrong all day long.