The Hands-Off Manager (13 page)

It’s the ultimate in self-terrorizing stress to believe a passing thought that says something “shouldn’t have happened.” When in fact it happened! Was it God’s first mistake? Was it the universe making a wrong turn? Or was it just as it was supposed to have happened for your benefit and learning?

Soon you alter all your thinking to be about you and your interpretations, instead of the “bad” and “wrong” and “unfair” things that have happened. Soon you realize that your job is not to fix the external world, but rather to beautify the internal world of spirit and mind interacting all day. As the song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”

Huge, practical benefits arise from this managerial approach. Your people will be eminently more comfortable with you when you accept them the way they are. They will be so much more trusting of you. Now their interest will turn to doing great work for you, whereas before they were playing victim to win your sympathy. Your people want to tell you the truth, particularly when they don’t fear being reprimanded for telling you something you don’t want to hear.

Once they find out you aren’t judging them, they’ll share almost anything with you. They are open to creating new agreements.

That’s when you can make real progress in helping them improve their skills. The hands-off manager has the rare ability to enter into a true partnership devoted to the success of
the employee. Employees who aren’t being judged are far more open to coaching and mentoring, and allowing their managers to help them improve.

You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

—Mark Twain

Think of your best friend right now. When you have a close friend, the first thing that gets suspended is judgment. If you’ve done something you’re not proud of or gotten yourself in a real pickle, your friend is very welcoming and says, “Come talk to me about it. What have you done now?” And he has a big smile on his face because he really doesn’t judge you. The friendship is a great friendship because of its lack of judgment.

Non-judgment opens up the door for everyone to be your friend. For everyone to trust you. They can sense in being with you that you don’t react negatively to what they say because you’re not judging it, even though they’re talking to you about something that is completely foreign to anything you would personally do. Maybe they’re talking to you about having had a major drug addiction, and you’ve never even tried drugs. But you’re not nursing and clinging to a judgment about that. You’re listening.

People who accept us completely are the best friends we have. They will take us in no matter what we do and say, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m your friend. I’m here to help you. Tell me what I can do.”

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. The next time someone in a meeting brings up a situation generally accepted to be “bad news” or a negative turn of events, stop the proceedings and slow the meeting down by putting the topic up on the white board.

2. Now invite everyone in the room to participate in an exercise called “What’s Good About This?”

3. Go around the room and let people open their imaginations to possible positive outcomes that you didn’t immediately see. Do this often enough and you will be training your people in letting go of negative judgment and getting right into positive, creative action, no matter what happens.

CHAPTER TWELVE
CREATING RESULTS

There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.

—Ruth Stout

“We’ve got to get this thing churning cash flow today!” said Judith, the name we’ll use for a team leader I was coaching. “We can’t wait until tomorrow!”

“Why can’t you do the kinds of things in your workplace that will build a better company in time?” I asked.

“My job is to do it now,” she snapped. “I have investors. I have people watching me. And now I have angry customers to deal with.”

“Why can’t you partner with those customers and give them what they want?”

“They want refunds!”

“Why not give them?”

“We can’t help customers by giving them a refund on something they really don’t deserve a refund on, because that will affect my profits this week.”

So I pointed out to Judith that companies such as Nordstrom have built an almost unparalleled success curve in the retail industry by being in it for the long run. They want to build a reputation. They sell quality products and stand by them. And if anyone brings them back, they will give them a refund. No questions asked.

Nordstrom succeeded by focusing on their internal process rather than immediate outcomes. They knew that if they got it right internally, success would come. The paradox is that the more one cares for the internal, the better the external result will be. Results are created by looking inside, whether it’s inside a company or inside a human being.

To be successful in business, I want to produce a good product or service. I also want to create a commitment inside my organization to provide a high level of customer service and customer delight. And to achieve these outer results, I now know to look inside the organization. To study the inner system first.

If I also want to have a good sales and marketing program, I’ll need good people in my organization to execute our plan. And I now know that if I do that, the results will show up naturally. Enough tuning on the inside and we can just allow external success to occur.

By now these might seem like obvious approaches, but most companies don’t do things this way (which may be why four out of five companies fail before reaching their fifth year).

Duane Black has seen company after company in the home-building business focus only on their percentage of
profit in every final sale. That’s all they think about all day long because that’s why they think they’re in business. That’s how they think they’ll be successful. External profit. They focus daily on the final, outside result. As Duane says:

And every one of them I observed closely had their profit margins decline over the years, because all they focused on was the bottom line. Over time they would find themselves in an ever more competitive environment delivering an average level of product, an average level of customer service, and an average level of community. But customers don’t want to pay a premium for “average.” Customers don’t get excited about “average.” And so these companies ended up not making big margins. Soon they had to do bigger volume to try to offset their mediocre product. And their volume negatively affected their quality, so the spiral went downward and it wasn’t long before they were in real trouble. That’s the tragedy of a purely outside focus.

Duane’s many years in the highly successful SunCor Development Company have been characterized by the company’s inside focus. He’s helped lead their commitment to working on the inside rather than the outside.

SunCor decided long ago not to obsess about volume of sales. It trusts that volume will occur naturally; it allows volume to show up when volume is appropriate. It’s more focused each day on perfecting the inner system that will create great communities and phenomenal land planning. For example, it insists on always having good architecture, it builds only in great locations, and it boasts a staff of people who love what they do and are aligned with it, and therefore are naturally, effortlessly committed to doing a great job.

The company has also thrived on a noncompetitive, non-intimidating sales environment. Allowing success to occur naturally rather than trying to force it. As Duane says:

We don’t say to our salespeople “You
will
sell 10 houses every month.” If we have a month of really bad weather and no one comes to our sales center and they don’t sell any houses that month, we don’t have a problem with that. We have said to them, “Look at the opportunity you have, here. You get to represent a quality community. You get to represent a quality home. You get to represent people who you know are going to follow through and deliver the product you’re promising. What an opportunity you have to be successful. You don’t even have to work hard at this. You just get to share with people the incredible opportunity that being in this community would be for them.”

Salespeople know they’re telling the truth when they sell this way. And customers know the company will take care of them after they buy. They know from SunCor’s history that their house will grow in value over time. So it’s not a hard sale. If you’re a SunCor salesperson you don’t have to decide whether your chair should be higher than the customer’s during negotiation, or when you should push back from the desk, or when you should be silent because this is a “closing moment.” All of those artificial and manipulative strategies don’t have to play a role in the process.

All you have to do to be successful as a salesperson is to share what you’re excited about and proud of. Share what’s inside you. Customers respond to that and it becomes an easy sale. Salespeople succeed when they know what they’re really selling. When they know that final, intangible experience of joy that a homeowner feels from moving into just the right home.

Business guru Tom Peters gives seminars on the importance of inner design versus outer striving. On one of his slides he quotes a Harley-Davidson executive who said, “What we sell is the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns, and have people be afraid of him.” The hands-off manager helps a salesperson go inside to find out what they are really selling.

Going inside is used by Duane when he negotiates with landowners to do joint ventures with SunCor. That’s why he’s been able to make buys that make people around him say, “I can’t believe you did that. Why would anybody do a deal like that? How could you buy 20,000 acres for $100,000 down and no payments except out of sales?”

Because the landowner became a partner. The landowner was excited to be a part of what SunCor was doing. He wanted to share in the same passion for producing something to be proud of. It wasn’t because his accountant told him it was the best short-term deal he could get. It wasn’t because it was the highest amount of up-front value or the most immediately profitable. It was because he felt in his heart that it was how he would be most successful over the long run. He knew that partnering in a sincere quest for quality would likely bring him the most value over time.

This dramatizes the contrast between quick-hit, immediate results–oriented goals (the hands-
on
approach), and long-term purpose and inner intentions (the hands-
off
approach). Duane says:

I don’t like goals that are results-oriented at all. We don’t use them in our organization. Sure, we have forecasts to help our financial planning, but we don’t have goals. Therefore we don’t think,
Man, am I disappointed in myself because I didn’t sell 10 this month.
Our inner dialogue is,
I only sold nine this month, and that’s
okay, because look at the way I pleased these people. And look at the way I took care of my customers. And look at the quality of what we delivered. And you know what, they’ll tell other people. And next month, I’ll probably sell 11! So I’m not worried about it. I show up happy and optimistic every day because I am proud of what we do and who we are.

Duane doesn’t want his people to have such an attachment to results that not getting them will make them feel discouraged:

We don’t want to feel unhappy with ourselves or unsuccessful because we didn’t accomplish numerically what we said we were going to do, because we did accomplish what we said we were going to do. We delivered a good product. We represented it openly and honestly. We took care of these people after the sale. We provided great service and warranty. We did all those things. Those were our goals. Those were the standards we set for ourselves. They were based in who we were going to be, and the doing just naturally took care of itself.

Trust the universe to reward the inside game. It’s a process of being who you want to be right now, this very moment, instead of straining to reach a future goal.

Duane recalls a development project in southern Utah, a home-building environment where new community developers don’t have a great track record and so are not generally trusted in the beginning. Therefore, when SunCor started a community there, they were working hard to get any sale they could get.

In the first year they sold fewer than 50 homes. The second year it went up to 80. The third year it was up to 100. And the fourth year was just under 120.

“And then, all of a sudden, people realized that we were what we said we were,” Duane says. “The community we were building was not just talking about something that was going to turn out great—it
was
turning out great. And the people who lived there were telling their friends, ‘This isn’t something where they just say they take care of you after the sale; we’ve been taken care of after the sale.’”

Now they’ve jumped from 120 houses to more than 200 a year.

“We can’t keep up with it!” says Duane. “We’re having to limit our sales because we cannot deliver as much product as people want to buy from us. We can’t develop the lots fast enough, we can’t find enough help to build all the houses we can sell.”

The key here was an absence of stressful external goals. They never focused on how many houses they were going to sell to accomplish this level of success—they had the ingredients of success built in. It was an inner process they committed to, followed through on, and delivered.

“So the inner workings were our true goals,” says Duane. “They were process goals rather than outcome goals. Our enduring desire was to build a quality product. To provide good customer service. And the other goals—the goals of result, the goals of success—we didn’t have them; we didn’t need them. We let things flow naturally from the inner commitment to who we were going to be. The desire to be great and the belief that the inner process will create that.”