The Hands-Off Manager (15 page)

In other words, there’s no way anybody can do anything without affecting everything else.

When anyone in a business career or an organization wakes up to the butterfly effect, they start contributing all day to the higher good of the team. With everything they do. They face each challenge by asking themselves what they can contribute, rather than who they can blame.

Be sure you’re really giving

Many people we have worked with think they are contributing when they are not. What they perceive as giving is actually a form of trading. They’re always trying to calculate their return. Should I help this vendor? Should I help my coworker out of her jam? Should I refund the money to this
customer? What would that bring back to me? Would that cut into my profits? Should I meet with this person from the other department to hear her complaint? What would I get back?

It’s all a big trade-off to them. But trading is not giving. Giving has no ulterior motive. It is a way of being.

Think of your company as a mobile hanging from the ceiling. The whole web of the mobile is interconnected, so if you push on one part of it, you move all of it, even if just slightly.

When you are an ongoing contribution to your people and your customers, you never know what’s coming back to you, and you don’t have time to try to figure it out. Figuring it out is a waste of energy. With all the mental energy you’re using trying to figure out your return, you could be doing more giving. And the one “unimportant” customer you treat badly could very well have potential to refer more people to you than you ever thought possible, and there’s no way to figure out who that is ahead of time.

A business coach we were working with said, “Well, I gave my friend Joe a half-day of business coaching; he said he’d pay me when he could and he never paid me back, so that didn’t work. Giving doesn’t always work.” And he never thought about the fact that six months later, another friend passed along a major client to him. He thought they were unrelated. We think too small. We don’t realize that the person we’re helping is very likely not the person we’re going to get help back from. More often than not, we get it back from someone who has extra capacity to give to us. So the circle isn’t just between you and one person; it’s between you and everyone. You and the whole. Imagine the rungs on a ladder. You receive from the rung above you and you give to the one below you. Another way to say it is that you receive from
those who have more and give to those who have less. In this context you don’t expect to get back from the person you gave to, but you trust that the universe will give back to you in other ways from other sources.

We knew a salesperson named Stan. Stan was an incredible top salesperson who had just joined a new company we were training. The first thing he did when he got there was sit down with everybody inside that company one at a time to get to know them. He treated them like gold, no matter what their position. He found out what their jobs were and he asked them how he could help them in his sales role. How could he interact with them in a way that would be most beneficial to them? He got to know them. And other jealous salespeople saw him as a real charmer. But they didn’t know why he was “wasting his time” with all those people in lower positions.

It’s true that Stan was a manipulator. But a great pianist is a manipulator, too, when his fingers manipulate the piano keys to perform a beautiful sonata. Stan didn’t have to try to work up some “trust” that everybody he was meeting with could someday help him. He didn’t care. He knows the universe so well that he has a certainty about the interconnectedness of everything. He has a
certainty
that kindness to one person is never wasted, even if that specific person doesn’t end up helping him in any way. He knows that his time is never wasted because it is a kindness invested into the system.

In the biographical movie
Gandhi
, when everyone around Gandhi was yelling about something the Jews were doing wrong, he stopped his followers and said, “I’m a Jew.” They were stunned and didn’t know what he meant. But his message finally sank in. What he meant was, don’t pretend Jews are not connected to us. Don’t make them separate. They are part of us.

Gandhi was trying to wake his followers up to a higher level of realization of the interconnectivity of everyone and everything.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

—Voltaire

Earlier in my career I joined with Michael Bassoff to create a very successful fundraising system called “RelationShift” fundraising. (Our book about it is
RelationShift: Revolutionary Fundraising
.) That system is based on shifting (actually, reversing) the relationship between the donor and the organization, so that the donor is appreciated in very large ways.

We have trained many nonprofit organizations in this system of giving more back to the donor than the donor gave them. Your gift to your donor is part of the interconnectedness of all spirit, no matter what. You can’t not get it back. You can’t break the system. We’ve proven this in our unorthodox fundraising system over and over, wherever it’s been applied! You can’t out-give the giver. You can’t give somewhere and not get more back. You can’t beat the system! It’s a system that exists beyond trust and belief. For it to really flow and function you don’t have to try to have faith in it. Let’s take electricity. Most do not truly understand how it works; they just know that it does. You already know it works. And when you’re a hands-off manager you don’t have to try to work up “trust” or “faith” in the principle of ongoing contribution. You already know it works. You can keep contributing to the higher good of the organization and just let your career unfold.

It keeps life simple. Joy and bliss are not complicated; they come from simple acceptance.

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Don’t hesitate to be of assistance to anyone and everyone in your organization. Too much time is wasted at work trying to decide whom to talk to.

2. Drop the distinction of “unimportant people” from your mindset. Every customer and every coworker has the power to advance your career beautifully, often in unseen and unknowable ways.

3. The next time another department or person is being criticized in a team meeting, stop the meeting and tell your team you are going to invite that person in to the next meeting so you can all talk together. Let other departments join your meetings often. Bring people together. Let everyone in the organization experience how interconnected they are.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DEEPENING YOUR DESIRES

Purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system.

—Norman Cousins

The hands-off manager always wants to go deeper. He wants to find what lies beneath a coworker’s desire. He doesn’t just want to know what you want; he wants to know why you want it. That will tell him more about how he can help. Asking these questions will allow him to help someone not only realize their true desires, but see the underlying
sources
of those desires.

An employee may say, “I want to drive a Mercedes.” And you, as a mentor, will go deeper and ask, “Why do you want a Mercedes?”

“I want to have very reliable, high-quality transportation.”

“How else might you achieve that for yourself now, so it isn’t left stranded out there in the future?”

Or maybe you’re meeting with a new employee and talking about her career goals. She says, “I want to be rich.”

That’s a good start. But why?

She says, “I want to be secure so I don’t have to worry about where my next dollar is coming from. I want to have enough money that I can be generous with others, and maybe give some money to charity.” That is the deeper desire, and the one you can help her realize now.

One of the most effective methods a hands-off manager uses to bring out the best in employees is learning their deepest desires. Once you know what they are, you can put your mentoring and coaching into that context. You are helping them get what
they
want, not what
you
want.

And when you take their “wish list” deeper than the first blush, you can show them how to live the life they dreamed of right now, with your full support. Otherwise your people are seeking the end without the means. They’ll be left stranded in their own futures with no one to pick them up and give them a ride home.

You will help them go right to the means. So instead of having goals about how many millions they’re going to have, they now have intentions about how effective a person they’re going to be. They now have intentions about what’s inside them that would create the wealth.

Under your mentoring they can
reformat
their approach to what they want.

Wanting something is always coming from the position of weakness. To want something is to say “I’ll probably never have it, but I wish I could.” Wanting emphasizes its
lack. So there’s no self-esteem in it. There’s no self-confidence built by wanting. It’s like drowning your desires in fear-based hope.

Most people in the workplace are in this cloud of fearful hope. Your skill as a mentor will be to remove the cloud. You’ll help them internalize and realize their purpose in each act of contribution, so that it doesn’t live out there in an estranged future.

Nothing contributes so much to relax the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

—Mary Shelley

Your team members then shift their purpose from things they want to ways they want to
be
. And paradoxically, they get things more quickly that way: Wealth flows into ways of being more quickly than it does into fits of wanting. Soon your career-direction meetings with your people shift their focus: Instead of traditional goals measured as successful by the CPAs or the tax code, you have created within your team a simple desire to make a difference.

You can apply this everywhere. You’ll be asked to speak to a group of people, and rather than desiring to be a great speaker, you now just desire to make a connection with the group to whom you are talking. Connection is all you care about now. You can’t be a speaker without a listener, so you’ve learned how to speak into the listening process.

I once taught a graduate program at the University of Santa Monica in presentation skills and public speaking. The first thing I said when I got up on the stage to teach my students was, “If I had only two words to teach you
this semester, the two words I would use are these.” I wrote on the white board “only connect.” And I said, “That’s all you’re about, that’s all you have to worry about, that’s all you have to care about.”

Some of the students asked if they could see a video of them speaking so that they would know what to improve. I said, “Wrong focus. If I were to make a video, I would have the video be of your audience, not you. Then we will sit and watch the audience. But we will not watch you. It’s not about how you’re coming across; it’s about whether
they
feel a true connection to you.”

When your direct reports want something, ask questions that take them deeper. What drives that desire? If somebody says, “I want to be famous,” you might ask, “Why do you want to be famous?” And they might say in an unguarded moment, “Well, because famous people make a difference and people pay attention to them.” And you ask, “Well, why don’t you just make people pay attention to you by making a difference? Because right now you can make a difference. You don’t have to wait to become famous. You have a desire that’s been put in the future. But you could have it now.”

You can lead people away from their weakest position—
Gee, I wish I could have what I want…but I’ll probably never get there
—and lead them into giving away what they want! If they want appreciation, they can give more away. Soon, whenever they even think of something they want, they can say to themselves,
I’m just going to give it away!
After they practice doing that for a while, they begin to realize,
If I have it to give away, I must already have it!

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

—Peter Drucker

Steps to hands-off success in your life

Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:

1. Write down the four material things you want most in life right now. Boat, house, entertainment system, car, whatever. Leave plenty of space below what you wrote down.

2. Now write down why you want it: for example, “It would give me….” or, “It would mean that….” Discover the ways of being those “things” would create for you.

3. Finally, imagine how you can be that way right now. Today. At work and at home. Once you practice this act of deepening your desires and seeing what lies beneath each one, you can meet with each employee on your team and talk about their big picture career desires. You’ll help them get to their own way of being that they’re not yet giving themselves permission to understand. As a gifted hands-off mentor you will be able to show them that their best nature was being held hostage by an uncertain future. That they were saving their best for some yet-to-be realized experience. By showing them this, you will free them to be who they always wanted to be, now.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LIVING IN THREE WORLDS

The greatest natural resource in the world is not in the Earth’s waters or minerals, nor in the forests or grasslands. It is the spirit that resides in every unstoppable person.

—Cynthia Kersey