The Hands-Off Manager (17 page)

If you look at the people who have truly influenced the world, they were always inner-idea people. They include such notables as Gandhi; Thomas Edison; Joan of Arc; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Christ; Buddha; and the list goes on. They influenced our thinking, our philosophies, and our beliefs. They shifted the world. They changed the course of history, and they used an understanding of the three worlds to do it.

To realize your full potential, all you have to do is focus on the ingredients. Look inside to change the inner process, and just let the results happen. Let your process produce the results that it will naturally. Soon you will learn to make a difference. You’ll become a person of real influence. You’ll become a person who significantly alters what happens in the physical world as a result of your having been here.

The Declaration of Independence was a document about a new way of being, a new governance. Our Constitution was an idea. Both of these ideas came from inspired people who connected to their potential and utilized all three worlds to bring forth their ideas.

As a result of Enron and other newsworthy corporate transgressions, our government is trying hard to control business and public corporations from the outside. To force them through all sorts of exercises, procedures, documentation, and additional audit processes to keep them from taking advantage of people. But change happens from within. Companies that don’t exploit people have already had the idea not to. They have just adopted the idea that they do not want to take advantage of people. They have become people whose true desire is to do what is best.

We are always trying to fix what’s wrong instead of finding what’s possible. Fixing never really works. If anything, it makes the problem worse. The Resolution Trust Corporation—the U.S. government–owned asset management company mandated to liquidate the assets of insolvent savings and loan companies—often spent more money on legal pursuits and resolving the so-called problems of the institutions than they received from selling all of their assets. This whole governmental “fixing” was a complete disaster. It wasn’t a failure of the institutions as much as it was a failure of government policy. It’s a graphic example of how trying to change a result that’s already occurred isn’t going to change anything.

Only coming up with a whole new system will ever truly affect the outcome. One simply must focus on what could be, rather than what has been.

When you observe children on a playground, almost nothing makes them more spirited and inspired than when one of the kids stands up and says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea!” And everybody comes alive.

“Oh, what?”

And the kid says, “Let’s build a tree fort!”

“Yes!”

They’re actually using all three worlds: the first world is the spirit, the inspiration (“I’ve got an idea!”); the second world is the mind (“Let’s build a tree fort!”); and the third world is the physical manifestation, the actual tree fort. There’s nothing more inspiring than a fresh idea. That’s how tree forts get built. Because everybody gets inspired by the idea, and the tree fort is what you see at the end.

What happens in most workplaces is that everybody walks around grumbling because there isn’t a tree fort, and there isn’t a good compensation plan, and the IT system’s software isn’t right—all the focus is on the physical world, which is always perceived to be inadequate. They focus on what they have already manifested, instead of the fresh idea that would change everything.

Most micromanagers we work with are so busy trying to repair the already-sinking Titanic that they can’t sit still for this teaching. “Spirit?” they say. “I’m dealing with real world problems here! Go back to California!” But this is exactly the insight they need. Knowing about and utilizing all three worlds would change everything for them.

When the world of quantum physics expanded people’s minds, it lifted the world out of the old-school Newtonian cause-and-effect belief system. It disproved the crudely mechanical explanations of infinite, creative time and space. It opened the mind.

It’s time the workplace had the same open-minded revolution.

Take a look at Duane’s chart on the next page as a reminder of how the three worlds inside us relate to each other. Note that intuition is the mind’s link to the world of spirit, and the five senses are the mind’s link to the physical world. Everything that is happening in our lives is experienced through our judgments, attitudes, and beliefs, and the mind is the controlling factor. It is the bridge between concept and manifestation.

The creative process—understanding all three worlds. Most of what is happening is unseen.

Intuition and the five senses are the links between the three worlds.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. List three things in the outer world of the workplace you don’t like. Three systems or situations you wish were different.

2. Under each item write the words “spirit,” “mind,” and “body.”

3. Trace each manifestation back to its original impulse (spirit)—what was it initially thought to accomplish?—and then trace it to Mind (the thoughts and plans that went into it) and see if you can come up with new systems.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE HANDS-OFF MANAGER AS COACH

Our chief want in life is to find someone who will make us do what we can.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Morale in the workplace is the creation of the leader. He or she coaches it into existence. Or doesn’t. But morale is not just an accidental climate that comes in on the wind.

A manager we’ll call Tony was a gifted project manager who oversaw construction sites for Duane many years ago. His skills and intellect were exceptional, but Tony was not happy in his work.

Two upper managers who came to review Tony’s progress in monthly update meetings were relentlessly critical and questioning of Tony’s decisions, and Tony was too sensitive a person to let it go.

The quality of his work began to deteriorate to levels that were unacceptable. He justified his shortcomings by saying that these two managers were interfering with his well-being. He couldn’t stand the criticism.

Finally, Duane had had enough. He knew that compassionate listening had run its course, and it was time to upgrade the coaching to the tough-love level.

“Tony, I want to ask you a question,” Duane said.

Tony said nothing.

“Has there ever been a time when these two managers’ comments were deliberately designed to hurt you and undermine your work?”

“No,” Tony said, after some hesitation.

Duane continued, “Has there ever been anything they have communicated to you that wasn’t intended to make you more successful at getting the job done?”

“I suppose not, no,” said Tony.

“So it’s a matter of style, then,” said Duane. “You are reacting emotionally, not to what they are communicating, but the way in which they say the words.”

“If you put it that way, I guess I am.”

“Then I’m going to ask you for something. I’m going to ask you to grow up. I’m going to ask you to learn a more mature way to reformat what they are saying so that you can hear it as support and not as a threat to you.”

“I don’t know….” said Tony.

“Because it is support, Tony, and they just don’t know how to communicate with you in a way that considers your sensitivity to criticism.”

Tony was quiet.

“Tony,” Duane said, “today is Thursday. I want you to take the rest of the week off and do whatever it is you do to help you make a big decision. Then Monday we will meet and discuss your future with this company. You are capable of far better work than you are producing. If you find you are unwilling to grow up and take
their communication gracefully, I’m going to let you go. I have no desire to have someone as capable as you are be this unhappy.”

Tony came in Monday with a huge smile on his face.

Duane asked him what decision he had made.

“I’m excited,” Tony said. “I never saw my own part in this. I never realized that I could reformat this. I really think you have changed my life.”

As the months and years rolled along, Tony came to Duane many more times to thank him for that fateful meeting and for changing his life. He told Duane that he was one of the most influential people in his life. This ended up being an incredibly positive experience for Tony. Learning to deal with the two critical managers had, in fact, provided him with a great service. It helped him grow up.

The thing we surrender to becomes our power.

—Ernest Holmes

Do people really change?

I get that question all the time in my leadership seminars. But asking the question itself betrays a lack of understanding of human nature.

People do nothing
but
change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But it’s in the nature of a human being to be ever-changing. Every living thing is always changing, so why would we humans be any different?

Yet we think we are! We think people have permanent, fixed personalities that they are all stuck with. Especially in the workplace. People get labeled early on and are dealt with based on the label. This is a mistake.

Can you coach another person so that the person really changes?

We saw how Duane coached Tony. That’s one example that confirms it can be done, but let’s look at another example. Let’s look at the example of me. Let’s examine the notion that people never change through the sample of this one life of mine.

If you saw a man who used to be drunk most of the time—a young man whose life was nothing much more than lying, cheating, stealing, drug-taking, drinking, and running up a massive debt—you would have a hard time trusting, or even liking, that man. But what if you saw that same man today and he had not had a drink or drug in 26 years, was happy and healthy with a wonderful family and fulfilling successful career dedicated to helping other people? Would you call that a change?

Every person on the planet today who has transformed from the low, suicidal life of addiction to a new life of spirit, service, and health—and there are millions of them!—has more than “changed.” They have become someone else. They have become their potential.

And, in most cases, they have been coached.

Sometimes coaching takes on the form of parenting. Sometimes it shows up as 12-step sponsorship, and sometimes it is just sharing an idea with a friend. But one thing is certain: people can change—and coaching can accelerate that change.

My first sponsor in my 12-step program coached me from the living suicide of drinking and addiction to higher levels of life than I ever dreamed possible. We worked with a book (most coaches are very intimate with transformative books) and we charted a new path for my life.

Once I’d reached a (blessed) level of clarity and sobriety, my mind was open to even more coaching from books and then from more mentors. (Spiritual growth has no upper limit. Just when you
think you’re as happy as a person can be, it gets better.) The coaching I received took me from abject financial disaster to a successful professional career.

Yet when we think about coaching, especially “life coaching,” we sometimes think of ineffective, New Age-y, faux guru types who sit with their clients and channel spirit beings. And that doesn’t sound like something that would be a good fit for a high-powered organization that really wants to move numbers forward and achieve proactive success.

But good coaching does just that. In fact, the word coaching comes from the world of sports. A world of performance and numbers. Therefore, sports provides a perfect metaphor for what good coaching is in an organization. The first thing a masterful coach does is decrease the fearful emotional charge inside the person being coached. As the great football coach Vince Lombardi said, “It’s hard to be aggressive when you’re confused.” So, if you’re coaching me, you first bring your positive attention to my situation. Soon my negative feelings start to lift. I was working with a large group of managers one day when Duane Black himself volunteered to step to the front of the room to illustrate a point I was making. He walked up to the two flip-charts I was using to contrast the thinking of ownership versus the thinking of victimization.

“Let’s try looking at it this way,” Duane said going to the ownership flip-chart. He drew a very large plus sign on the page and said, “When you are positive (pointing to the sign), you add something to any situation, conversation, or meeting you are in. That’s what being positive does, it contributes. It adds something.”

He then walked over to the victim’s flip chart, drew a large minus sign, and said, “When you are negative, you subtract something from the conversation, the meeting, or the relationship. If you are negative often enough, you subtract so much from the relationship that there is no more relationship.”

Duane was giving us the simple math of the human interactive experience! It was a law of the universe up there on the flip-chart of life: positive adds, negative subtracts. A positive person contributes, a negative person takes away. I immediately recalled that in grade school, the minus sign was called the “take-away” sign.