The Hands-Off Manager (7 page)

Jack Nicolaus worked incredibly hard on his golf game, and he actually gave a lot. A professional sports figure, he had millions of people follow him and gain pleasure from watching him play. That’s what he was getting paid for. So his level of play was a gift to sports fans.

He also worked at golf in a different way than we do. We just go out and play at golf, but it wasn’t play for him. It was a discipline, and he was only at his best when he transcended the play. The difference between Jack’s golf and our golf is that Jack’s golf was a gift to someone else, and our golf is only entertainment for ourselves. Giving versus getting—one of the deepest principles of hands-off professional success.

The ultimate functional question is this: “How can I contribute?” or, “What can I give?”

Most people in the workplace are focused on
getting
. They want to get instant results from their efforts. They are obsessed about the external and the negative. They fret about how much time off the guy next to them takes, and how much more pay the other person gets, and how much more time the other person spends on personal conversations. Their self-criticism turns outward all day.

But then there’s a happier, more successful person in the workplace who is living inside a different mindset. A different set of questions, such as, “How can I do a better job? How can I contribute? How can I make a difference here? What can I do to make this a better company?”

That darned person! She just keeps getting further and further ahead of the negative person next to her! The judgmental person next to her continues to become more and more resentful of her success. And for the life of him Mr. Judgmental cannot see what is causing Ms. Happy’s success—which is living with a different set of questions.

Success comes from the questions you ask yourself.

When negative people try to figure out other people’s success, they ask all the wrong questions. They ask, “Were they the first ones to work that morning and the last ones to leave?” Or, “Did they make sure they didn’t make a single personal call that day?” Or, “Did they make sure they didn’t take any breaks or greet people, visit people, and catch up in the break room?” Or, “Did they avoid making mistakes?”

They don’t realize that the success occurred because that person came to contribute. Not to compare. Not to worry about what she was going to get. She came to give. It’s amazing how the ones who don’t worry about what they’re going to get are the ones who always seem to get the good stuff. And those who come to get something wonder why they can’t obtain it! They wonder why life always feels so unfair. Those who come to give something wonder why they always receive a raise without even having to ask for one. They wonder why they’re the ones who are always considered for the promotion, when others have been there longer.

It’s fundamentally a shift from trying to force success to happen, to allowing success to occur through continuous contribution.

The hands-off manager models, inspires, and nurtures this giving approach. He or she mentors contribution. When you take your hands off people’s lives and let them give what they’ve got, you’ll be allowing them to succeed. They will look to see what’s inside them and figure out how they can give that to the world. And that is what allows them to be successful. They don’t have to strive for it anymore. They don’t have to force it. They don’t have to use rigorous willpower. They just have to do what they love to do. Soon they will always be thinking about how they can share their natural ability with those they serve.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying “Amen” to what the world tells you to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Leigh was trying to trust this practice of contributing by doing what she loved to do, but she had a hard time making it fit into her lifelong negative belief system.

“I just have a hard time trusting that life will bring it back to me,” she said over coffee in the break room. “I don’t know, I’m having a hard time trusting life.”

So Leigh doesn’t want to give of herself completely until she can trust that it will be worth it. She doesn’t yet see that she has it backward: the giving comes first. Just do your job in an excellent way. Don’t worry. Be too busy to worry.

Soon, with mentoring from her hands-off manager, she started giving anyway. A year later she was talking differently.

“Life will give back to you whether you trust it or not,” Leigh said. “Life doesn’t require my approval or trust. It just delivers the way it does.”

Leigh learned that life doesn’t always give you what you want—life gives you what you believe. You can only see what you believe is there. The more you trust the process, the more you can stop worrying about what you are going to get back and just give, trusting the process of life where you know one way or the other, you get back what you have been giving out.

If you believe one of your employees is lazy, you can only see a lazy employee, and even if he takes extra time to perfect a report he’s writing, you see the extra time as procrastination,
laziness, and failure to complete his work. This judgment gets in the way of his greatness and your ability to enjoy the potential that’s really there.

Sometimes a new manager will take over an old team and the productivity soars. Why? It’s because she didn’t believe anything negative about the new team. Instead she met with each team member and asked the questions, “What can this person contribute? Where is the particular greatness in this person? What does this person love to do?”

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Meet with yourself. Ask yourself what your gifts are and how you can best contribute to the overall good of the mission.

2. Meet with each person on your team. Take a lot of time with each to talk about his or her gifts. Some won’t think they have any, but you’ll find them by asking what they most love to do. Those are their gifts.

3. See the whole team as a beautifully harmonized network of contribution. Draw a map of your team on paper with a big circle for each employee, with their gifts written inside and lines of contribution connecting them to each other, other departments, and your customers. A giving system. Sit back and look at your paper and let it sink in: You are there to keep their channels of contribution (the lines on your paper) open and flowing freely. As a manager that’s your primary job.

CHAPTER SIX
INSPIRED IDEAS LEAD TO SUCCESS

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

—Dorothea Brande

Surveys of successful businesspeople who are asked the question, “When do you get your best business ideas?” keep yielding the same two answers: number one, in the shower; number two, on vacation. This helps prove the point that the best ideas come when you stop forcing your thinking. The straining involved with forced thinking is actually pushing ideas away. You are repelling that great idea wanting to just float up and announce itself. The solution is to gets your hands off your thinking process and let inspiration flow to you.

Once you learn to do this with yourself you can do it with your people. You can plant seeds and ask questions which they can then take away and contemplate. Don’t demand immediate answers. Don’t micromanage problems. Once you truly see the unlimited potential of your people and the limitless possibilities that life has made available for them, you won’t have to worry about how to think of good ideas. You’ll just let them roll in.

“So maybe we should take showers and go on vacation all the time!” a small-business owner said after looking at one of these surveys.

He was not far from the real answer; our best practice will be to get into that relaxed, hands-off state of mind that occurs in the shower and on vacation. The real answer is to learn to listen and recognize, to learn to be available for the ideas that are in us instead of trying to find them in a manual or guideline.

That’s the secret discipline involved with success. It’s in allowing yourself to step back and let it happen. It’s a tough discipline to learn at the outset, but it’s a rewarding one. It rewards you in large ways by helping a great career unfold. But it also rewards you in smaller, more immediate ways, too: For example, you can actually finish your workday with a low level of stress. You can learn what it means to do less and achieve more.

But I thought you had to think to grow rich

People keep trying to succeed through forced thinking because they’ve drawn a false conclusion about it. They spend all day thinking about something, and when that doesn’t get them the answer, they finally just stop thinking. But then, boom! Once they stop thinking, they get their brilliant idea!
And then they credit the thinking. They don’t see that it was the stopping and relaxing that delivered the idea.

Here’s another example of how this works. Someone will ask you someone’s name and you know you have it on the tip of your tongue. But in the moment they ask you, you can’t remember it. Try as you might, you can’t think of it! You keep forcing your mind to produce, and it just won’t. But a few minutes later, when you’re talking about something else completely off the subject, the name will come to you.

That’s the way of the mind. And that’s the way the hands-off manager uses it. Successful ideas will come to you once you learn to trust that process.

To put it another way, the fundamental key to success now becomes self-trust and belief in yourself. Belief that you’ve already got everything you need inside you.

That’s not an egotistical point of view, because it’s not coming from an “I’m better than you” orientation. Instead, it comes from “I have this life in me just as you do, and I’m trusting this life. Therefore success is coming through me. You can do the same thing!”

When you become successful, others notice. They notice that you use a hands-off approach with yourself. You don’t worry yourself to death. You don’t stress out over deadlines. You don’t try to seek the approval of others. You don’t try to anticipate what others think of you. You don’t use fear as your personal motivator.

Soon your example of fearless success becomes an invitation to others, not a basis of comparison to show them where their weaknesses are.

Talking the other day to a manager about his inner talent prompted him to say, “Well, you know, you’ve coached me in this over the years, and I’d like to believe you, but you’re masterful at it. I don’t really think I could do what you do. You’ve got a unique personality.”

What a laugh! But when you are a mentor who has become successful you will encounter this quite often. People will want to put you on a pedestal because they assume your position is due to the strength of your personality—a personality they think they just don’t have. This is your perfect opportunity to set them straight and get them on board. You might say to that doubting person, “Remember that analysis you did for me on that difficult property two years ago? Man, that was a good job. And remember that outline you prepared for me on the land plan for that project? That was incredible. You have such a gift. If only you could believe that the same gift that you exhibited on that exercise is also possible from you in what you’re trying to do now. Imagine what you could accomplish.”

The hands-off manager sets the stage for success by always taking employees back to their own personal experiences of success. When encouraging them to believe in their own greatness, you can’t make it theoretical. You have to take them back to something they have done that they’re proud of and that they were acknowledged for. Remind them of how they made a difference, and point out to them the skill set they have already exhibited. This factual evidence is what nurtures the self-belief in them that you want.

It’s amazing how many people can shift to higher levels of success once they are mentored this way.

One company leader was skeptical and asked, “Isn’t your approach to management a little soft? I mean, if all my managers become hands-off, how can I drive performance and hold people accountable?”

But this is not a soft or passive approach. Our experience shows increases in energy and productivity when a hands-off approach is used. It holds people
more
accountable for high performance, not less. It is not patient with people whining and playing victim. It has no room for self-pitying complaints.

And sometimes a hands-off manager can be “hard” on team players to wake them up to their power. You do want to get their attention. So you might say, “Look, this is ridiculous. You’re one of the most talented guys I’ve ever worked with. I’ve watched you perform at a level that was truly exceptional. And now you’re stumbling over this? This is not acceptable. It shouldn’t be acceptable to you, either. Clearly, judging by what you’ve done in the past, you can do this. And now you’re thinking of excuses as to why you can’t? That’s not going to work. Step up and do what you’ve already proven you have the ability to do. Tell me what I can do to assist you right now.”

When do you take the harder, tough-love line? When you are inspired to do so. It will just occur to you, and you’ll follow your inner prompting.

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

—Abraham Maslow

Here’s the inspired idea from which all other ideas flow: A successful life exists in everyone. It’s not something you have to go search for in the outside world. We are born to be functional and fulfilled. Everything we need has been given to us (including the ability to add whatever else we want to add): We don’t have to go search for how to breathe. We don’t search for how to see or how to hear. We just accept that they’re a part of what we have inside of us. Success is in there, too. It’s programmed from birth because it’s the way of the universe. Evolution is inevitable and just the way things work. Why would it not include personal and financial evolution?