The Hands-Off Manager (9 page)

Discipline?

Yes, the hands-off manager believes in discipline and practice. Because we’re deprogramming and unlearning a very big portion of what we’ve been taught all our lives, it’s more an undoing than a doing, and it is a discipline. The whole history of management
has taught you the opposite of the hands-off approach. So it takes practice to undo all of that. And the most difficult part of this practice is to alter your belief about what your experience has taught you. That may sound odd. But consider this: life brings you what you believe, not what you want. Therefore experience, which is something that is generally tied to an external event, is merely the reflection of what you’ve been believing.

The more rapid the rate of change, the more dangerous it is to live mechanically, relying on routines of belief and behavior that may be irrelevant or obsolete.

—Nathaniel Branden

For most people in the old management systems, their experience is a reflection of their belief in limitations and disappointing performances.

But just because you haven’t done something well in the past doesn’t have to be an indication that you can’t do it well in the future. It may just be that you never believed in yourself. You never believed you had the ability. Even though you loved to do it, you never believed you were capable of it.

So step one is to first find your management style in what you love to do. Step two is to allow yourself to believe that a new way of successfully managing people is possible for you. Step three is to attach to only those thoughts that come to you that reinforce that belief. (The other thoughts will challenge you, but if you keep at it they will dissipate.) Take those three steps and you will get there.

Then teach it to your people.

Sound too easy? Still, most people will not want to do this. They will think of all the reasons why they can’t, and so they won’t. And that will simply be more proof and more evidence for
them that life does not work out, thus confirming and reinforcing their belief.

The joy of hands-off decision-making

The discipline of being a visionary leader consists in learning to choose. But not choosing the positive over the negative—that’s the old-school approach, which doesn’t go deep enough to allow for quantum leaps in success. The hands-off manager learns a lot from the negative.

Your decision-making process throughout the day evolves from the process of listening to your wisdom. You may be trying to choose between two options. As you look at one option, how does your body respond to it? Does this option allow you to breathe openly? Does it allow you to have a clear head? Does it allow you to feel a sense of wellbeing and, ultimately, a sense of accomplishment? Or does it create a feeling of repression, inappropriateness, and negativity?

All you need to succeed is what’s already in you. Once you understand that, you can pass it on to the people you manage. It’s a revolutionary concept in the workplace. A truly unusual thought. And perhaps this thought goes against every other business book you’ll ever read. It certainly contradicts the kind of bleak knowledge that many people describe as “common sense.” Actually it is the only sense that is common to all of us.

Transcending the limitations of mind is not possible for dreamers who are addicted to concepts and intellectual abstractions—only to warriors and lovers of truth who are ready to merge with the ecstatic fire of Now.

—Maitreya Ishwara

It’s not that this inward warrior’s journey is all that easy. It isn’t. That’s why you are there to mentor it and keep it on track for your people. Because most of your people have spent their whole lives doing everything they do for outside approval, so they’re always trying to get immediate external feedback for their every action and decision.

Your work is to help them recover from this toxic addiction to approval. It contaminates their work. Approval-seeking is a sickness that must be cured for them to finally do great work (for which the ultimate approval always comes anyway).

So the true hero’s journey is going inside to find your power, because there’s no immediate feedback for it. When you’re alone, searching your interior, there’s no one to say “good job!” as you scan your heart and soul for your true choices. It takes more discipline—not less—than the typical outside-in approach to success.

The hands-off approach carries this key insight: Allowing success is the opposite of forcing success. It is learning what it means to be in alignment with life and with yourself. In due course, you even learn to release yourself from all the “shoulds” that have been placed on you by the world (and your imaginings of the world).

One of the problems people have when they hear something as intriguing as allowing success rather than forcing success, is that they think maybe this is theoretical or spiritual, or something that hasn’t ever been used or tried or worked with.

The opposite is true! This is the system that works in the real-world workplace. This is an applied system. It isn’t someone imagining what business would be like if it were optimal. This is actually something you can use. If you’re a leader sitting across from your people, this is something you can coach them in. It’s something you can coach yourself in.

Soon you’ll be consistently finding the strengths in your people instead of trying to add what’s missing. Soon you’ll be able to teach them to use what’s inside them, instead of trying to fix them and doing the things most managers try in vain to do.

Most businesses operate through wild attempts at control. They focus on their own rules, policies, detailed supervision, inspections, and quality control, as if their people were trained animals!

The hands-off manager is the solution to that dysfunction. Because when you find people who love to do what you’re asking them to do, you don’t have to control them. You don’t have to motivate them. You don’t have to force them to work harder. You don’t have to threaten them to get them to perform. They already love doing it so it comes naturally to them.

So what, then, is the manager’s job?

Your job as a hands-off manager will be a job of learning. You’ll be learning to be aware of what your people love to do. You’ll be learning what powers live naturally inside them. You’ll then be more skilled at placing people in roles suited to their talents. You will see into them, see what they love to do, and listen to what they tell you. Your best work will be to closely observe what they show you.

It can get interesting and challenging when you embark on this journey, because people don’t always tell you the truth! They tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they think will get them a higher salary. That’s the curse of approval-seeking in action. You’ll detoxify that situation every time you show them that winning your approval is not a productive pursuit; that doing good work will take them further than that every time. When you can mentor people this way you will free them up and they will thank you forever. Approval-seeking is our society’s most futile and dysfunctional pursuit. If your people can learn to drop it from their workplace endeavors, they may even learn to drop it at home and improve their personal relationships.

The work, and the love of it, becomes the focus. When you place people in roles for which they are unsuited, you can’t supervise them enough or discipline them enough to get good work. Because there’s no love there. You can try to impose more policies and procedures, but you still won’t get what you’re looking for.

But when you place people in roles that are ideally suited for who they are, watch what happens. Now they have a chance to exhibit their gifts and do what they love. So you can walk away and come back later to a job well done with little or no supervision. That’s hands-off managing at its best. You weren’t even there!

Is this too soft a system? You might worry that it’s not toughminded enough to produce results, but our experience tells us that quite the opposite is true. In fact, this system is exactly what the toughest-minded football coaches do. It’s Vince Lombardi walking along a practice field trying to figure out whether his linebacker should really be a safety. Or whether his tight end would be a better fullback. And then finally deciding, “I want to try you out at fullback; the way you move it looks like it’s a better fit for you.” A focused coach in football will often move players out of the position they think they should be in to something that fits better. The coach sees that as his ongoing role, to match up his athletes, put them in different positions, and keep moving until they’re all in positions that come more naturally to them.

In the end, the best coaches and the best leaders are people who will get the best out of their players, as opposed to trying to force something out of them that may not be there. The greatest gift you can give people is to give them themselves. Duane tells his managers, “See more in your people than they’re seeing. Then, invite them to your vision.”

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

—George Eliot

Why do you have to do this? Why do we need mentors to help people do what they love to do? Why can’t people already see this potential in themselves?

Because they’re trained not to!

In our society’s system, most people are beaten down and critical of themselves as they emerge from young adulthood and enter the workplace. Their teenage years have been a blizzard of anxious criticism from worried parents and teachers fearful that their kids would not “turn out,” and therefore embarrass them. Then the young people enter the workplace only to get mismanaged by people without any real leadership skills, and their resentment builds. Finally, they are so unable to forgive and forget and move on that they can’t see their own abilities anymore. They’re already obsessed with how they are being judged and treated by others. So their potential stays hidden under all of the criticism and the “shoulds” they’ve been living up to all their lives. Is it any wonder that they turn to approval-seeking as their only focus? Rather than focusing on their work, how to fall in love with it and be excellent at it, they are always trying to win approval, score points, make impressions, and criticize others so that they get approval by comparison.

But where is the good work in all of that? We have taught our young people to be aggressive, cynical politicians instead of true craftsmen and masters of their work.

So the real job of our leadership is to give these people back to themselves.

When they are mere approval-seekers they live in fear of criticism. They swing between severe anticipation and imaginary fear. They try to score inner-office impressions instead of pleasing the customer. They think the competition is the person down the hall, not the company making a similar product. And then they wonder why the other company took their customer.

Soon their stress causes them to convert fear of anticipated criticism into self-criticism. Not consciously, but subconsciously the programming may go like this: “I’ll criticize myself so that you can’t criticize me.” Or, “I’ll get to me before you can!” Self-criticism and low self-esteem become a defense mechanism. (You will see this in the people you sit down with when you take over a new team. If you’re the first hands-off manager they have ever
had, it will be like entering a war-torn province.) The worker’s subconscious mind says, “If I’m already skeptical of the work I do and who I am in the workplace, then at least I’ve beaten you to it.”

It isn’t just managers and parents who miss this opportunity to give people to themselves. Sometimes even professional success coaches and consultants miss it—the very people you would think were there to reverse the process. Rather than coaching you into becoming the best of who you are, they look for the best of who they think you should be. That makes the coaching relationship less than supportive, and keeps alive the client’s sense of “I can’t do this.”

Without hands-off management and mentoring that is compassionate and visionary, leadership generally defaults to this philosophy: “The world would be a better place if only everyone would operate as I do.” That’s an alarmingly narcissistic perspective, and because of that, it’s not functional. We are interconnected beings, not isolated egos.

When you blame others, you give up your power to change.

—Douglas Noel Adams

A computer programmer we worked with named Jared was letting his stressful beliefs get in his own way. He was little more than a collection of thoughts about his own weakness. So he lived in fear and set out to make sure his every move won someone’s approval. His focus was on his own frightened ego.

There is a mistaken perception in our society that confuses ego with high self-worth. Ego is really the opposite of that. Ego fearfully asserts itself. So, paradoxically, Jared could lose his ego and increase his inner confidence and sense of worth at the same time. Fortunately he had a hands-off manager who saw that.

Jared redirected his focus to the work, realigned with the work he loved most, and soon got so into his work that
approval-seeking was no longer necessary. He realized the ultimate: Love what you do and you won’t need anyone’s approval.

The hands-off football coach

When the University of Texas football team won the national championship in the 2006 Rose Bowl, it was largely due to their star quarterback, Vince Young. Young had become a well-rounded, complete player in his junior year, and many were calling him the best college quarterback of all time. When his coach Mack Brown was asked how all those improvements in Vince Young’s game occurred from one year to the next, Coach Brown said, “We just stopped coaching him. We just got out of his way. We saw what was emerging in him, and we decided to let it come forward without a lot of old coaches messing with it.”

That was a huge act of both hands-off power and humility on the part of Coach Brown, and he had a national championship to show for it. Most coaches would still be trying to change Vince Young and “correct” him.