The Hands-Off Manager (3 page)

Why not just leave it there and move on? Release its power over you. See it in a different light so that you can focus on your natural talents, your God-given gifts, and bring the best of who you are to the surface.

The hands-off manager uses this principle to not carry grudges; he meets every person in the workplace with equal trust and understanding. The past is merely something you have learned from. The mistakes were a blessing, because you now know how to do it better going forward.

Most micromanagers in old-school organizations today immediately think that when things go awry, they have to overcome them. They imagine a Rambo figure who can overcome any odds and can fight off 50 or 100 people at a time if he has to, because he is so strong in his ability to overcome. Our national macho mythology nurtures an image of a guy who is really muscular and adept at fighting. So we build into our culture and collective psyches the idea that “If I only became stronger, if I only worked out harder, if I only ran more miles, or went to more seminars, or pushed myself harder, then I’d finally become strong enough to deal with the issues my team is facing.”

But the opposite is true. If you want a strong mind, you must learn to quiet your mind. If you want real power, you must learn to let go. Greatness exists within everyone, and your biggest job is to get out of its way and let it come through.

Doing this will eventually make you incredibly powerful. Not so strong that you can lift hundreds of pounds at one time, but strong in a different, deeper way. So strong that you can discipline your mind and discipline your thoughts to let go of anything that isn’t serving you. So strong that your people draw their strength and calm from you—just from being with you! You don’t have to say anything for them to feel how peacefully powerful you are. They warm up to your vision, and teamwork begins to emerge of its own accord. It’s being inspired to happen instead of forced to happen.

No more team-building seminars

Companies often ask me for a seminar in team-building. I don’t give them anymore. I know that if people are not performing and communicating with team spirit, it’s not a team-building issue, it’s a leadership issue.

I am very direct with the manager asking for the training. I want her to see that great leadership will create a culture in which teamwork will simply grow. They don’t need teamwork training. The manager herself needs hands-off leadership training so she can learn to mentor success instead of trying to impose productivity.

If you are a newly enlightened manager you have begun with a shift in awareness. You’ve pulled your power back from the external world of form to the internal world of energy. You now know how to shift your awareness up and over the bothersome event so that you can see another more productive path to take.

You cannot be attacked from this lofty position. Even if people say negative things about you, you don’t end up giving your power to them. You keep it in yourself. “Negative” occurrences don’t bother you so much anymore because you simply use them for practice. You actually gain strength from them.

Is it a tough discipline? Yes! It may be even harder than working out with weights. Because it’s so counterintuitive at first. It goes against our whole upbringing and training.

Learning the inner game

When you study people in history who knew the secret of inner allowing versus outer overcoming, you find that they usually had long, happy lives. Bernard Baruch, who died in 1965 at the age of 95, was an American financier, stock market and commodities speculator, statesman, and presidential adviser.

After his success in business, he devoted his time to advising a range of American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, on economic matters for more than 40 years. Baruch was highly regarded as an elder statesman. He was a man
of immense charm who enjoyed a larger-than-life reputation that matched his considerable fortune. Baruch is remembered as one of the most powerful men of the early 20th century.

When asked about his long life and success, Bernard Baruch said he discovered the key when he was younger. He said, “In the last analysis, our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.”

What? Ourselves? Not overcoming outside obstacles?

Here is another way to look at the hands-off manager’s shift in inner awareness. Imagine going to the airport with a huge suitcase. You don’t even consider trying to take it onto the plane with you because you know it won’t fit or be allowed. So you check your bag and let the airline take care of it.

But what if you tried to board a plane the same way you try to live your life?

You’d be carrying all your heavy, inappropriate, disallowed baggage onto the plane! All your hurts and resentments and tiny betrayals get carried around with you. Imagine going through the airport and picking up other bags, not even your own, and trying to carry all of them onto the plane with you! Your spouse’s baggage, your kids’ baggage, and all your direct reports’ baggage.

Is there even enough room on this plane?

This may sound like a slapstick comedy, but it’s how many of us who play micromanagement roles in society live today. Just keep this in mind: If you did this with your baggage in an airport, you would not be allowed to fly.

And the same is true with your career. By trying to carry all this baggage (by trying to remember who has done you wrong, whom you don’t trust, who disappointed you, what department you don’t get along with), you are too burdened to fly.

Take your hands off your life to allow success and allow yourself to fly.

Allowing your career to take flight

When my son Bobby was a little boy he was always asking me about various sports figures and superheroes.

“Dad, who would win in a fight between Arnold and Bruce Lee?”

“Bruce Lee.”

“Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman?”

“Superman.”

“What if Arnold and Superman fought Rocky, Chuck Norris, and Spider-Man?”

“Okay, time for bed!”

We are actually fascinated by questions such as these, which is why such fictional heroes as Rambo and Superman endure. And the internal power that can lift you up through your organization is more akin to the power Superman has than the external power Rambo tries impose on events. Rambo is a human being who can be brought down by a bullet. And if he were shot in the heart, he’d die; there’d be no more Rambo. But one of Superman’s abilities enables things to bounce off of him. He has a power beyond that of Rambo. If someone fires a bullet, he just pushes it away with his hand and moves on; it doesn’t affect who Superman is. That’s why his archetype calls to us. That’s why he endures and speaks to the inner hero in children and adults.

He has the power to deflect rather than overcome.

You can shift your whole way of leadership thinking. You can shift your awareness to be totally in tune with what’s happening with others, and what’s happening with you. And whenever you see something come up that doesn’t align with you, you don’t fix it; you accept it, deal with it, deflect it, and move in a newer, healthier direction.

Deepak Chopra once wrote that when you get “bad news,” it becomes good news if you suspend judgment. It was always good news anyway. It was just in disguise. “If you don’t get what you expected, look at what you got,” says Chopra. “Where is the gift in what you received? Is there a way you can transform it into an opportunity to learn? In this approach, change is accepted, not denied. A sense of spaciousness enters in.”

The spaciousness he describes is exactly the shift in awareness we are talking about. It’s a shift from narrow, judgmental, constricted awareness to a bigger, more spacious, hands-off allowing.

Chopra concludes, “On a profound level, every event in life has two possible causes. Either what happens is positive, or it is bringing up something you need to learn in order to create something positive. It’s the same with the body. What happens inside a cell is either healthy activity or a sign that a correction is needed. Although life can seem random, in fact everything is pointing to a greater good. Evolution is not a win-lose crapshoot, but a win-win journey to transformation.”

You’ll learn your true nature this way, by being free from the effects of everyone else’s nature. It’s a way of giving yourself space, of giving yourself the freedom to live out your true professional potential, to discover what’s possible for you!

Because once you have gotten rid of all of this limitation, weakness, anger, and sadness, you’re back into possibility. You’re enthusiastic once again about ideas and innovation and the very things that move this organization forward. You are truly focused on solutions. Problems are just the process that allowed you to perfect your path.

Soon you’ll have a different definition of personal power. You’ll realize that if you are truly powerful, you can let go. You can forgive. You can release. You can deflect. That’s the real power.

Greatness is within you. There is nowhere you need to look to find it. It is already inside, waiting for permission to express itself. If you knew you already had something, why would you go looking for it? The trick is to remember. Remember to let go of all the negative ways of thinking that are obstacles toxic to your success. Remember to allow your success to take its natural course and happen for you. The success you find will be greater than you ever imagined possible.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. The next time you feel a conflict with someone, write down two things you appreciate and admire about that person and sit down to resolve the conflict by telling them these things first.

2. Take mental and physical notes about everyone who works with you so that you become more and more aware of each person’s loves and strengths. Start a notebook about this, and don’t forget to include yourself in it.

3. Begin noticing your own thinking throughout the day as you lead and communicate: Which thoughts bring you down? Which thoughts lift you up? By practicing this step you will begin to understand that it is always your thinking that creates your feelings, never other people.

CHAPTER TWO
REDEFINING SUCCESS FOR YOURSELF

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children…to leave the world a better place…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your first job as a hands-off manager is to manage your inner life. It is impossible to mentor others toward success if you haven’t done it within yourself. Hands-off management begins at home in the mind of the mentor.

So how do we make sure we become successful? Most people never succeed, because their definition of success always includes some change in the outer world, and the outer world is so hard to change. So you might begin by redefining success for yourself. And you might find that the definition itself is already inside you—not in some book or audio recording.

Sometimes you’ll read or hear something that seems profound. It feels as though it could make a difference and shift your awareness about how life could work for you. But you also have a funny feeling about it. You may be thinking,
This is something I already knew
. If you are reading a book and a certain paragraph rings true, you may underline it to read it again. Then you get that familiar feeling again:
This is something I already knew
.

This is a sign that your life’s purpose is already inside you! You don’t have to seek it out. If you had no awareness of what your life’s purpose was, how would you have known that those words could apply to you? If you didn’t have an innate and natural understanding of your potential, how would you have been touched by those words?

When a group of people are reading the same thing, they’ll each respond to different passages differently. Reading groups always experience that. People think it’s because they just have different tastes and preferences, and they don’t think beyond that. They don’t realize that what calls to them from the book is resonating with something already inside them. It’s the energy, spirit, and force that’s within communicating: What you’ve just read aligns with who you are.

Once you wake up to this inner resonance, you will know when things have meaning for you and how you can use them in a way that will benefit your life.

This inner tuning and intuition is at the heart of hands-off management. You don’t need to get your hands on the world to shape and manipulate what’s already perfect inside you.

You can even go one step beyond that if you’re open to it: You can realize, “If I can recognize it by reading it in a book, then I’m not learning it from the book, I am being reminded of it by the book. And if I’m being reminded of it, it must already exist someplace inside me.”

So if it already exists, would it not be possible without the reading and without the external exercise, to just let it come through?

That’s the key to a hands-off life: Find a way to let the best of what’s in you naturally come through.

Rather than racing around learning all kinds of new managerial systems, procedures, and trendy formulae, you just get better at knowing yourself and the person you are managing. You’ll then learn how to let go of your old ideas. You’ll learn how to find what’s already there, rather than going looking for what you think you’re missing. Napoleon Hill said, “Think and grow rich.” But we are saying, “Remember and grow rich.”

When you manage yourself and someone else it is only the negative thoughts you have that get in your way. If you believe negative, limiting thoughts about yourself and the other person, then those thoughts will manifest in the outcomes you experience.

Radical? Contrary? Let’s start here: Think about how you use your mind. Why do most of your ideas, inspiration, concepts, and solutions come to you when you’re singing in the shower? Or when you’re just relaxed and being quiet? Or when you’re driving down the road not really thinking about anything?