Go deeper. Find what you are aligned with and what feels natural to you. With every decision you think you have to “make.” (Actually, for the hands-off manager, decisions have a way of making themselves, of becoming such obvious choices that no real decision is necessary. You just instinctively know what to do next.)
Interview a candidate using your inner listening and you’ll know if he or she is a fit.
Then, as you bring people onto your team, you’ll become skillful at choosing the people with whom you feel a sense of alignment. You’ll know them. You’ll feel a sense of wellbeing when you’re around them.
Now it’s time to do the same thing with your thoughts. Don’t try to ignore or overcome any negative thoughts. You don’t have to make thoughts wrong, because that’s focusing your thinking on them all the more! Just notice the thoughts that produce the bad feelings, notice their lack of validity, challenge their truth, and then turn and go another way.
Picture two paths opening in front of you. One is the path of alignment; one is the path of misalignment. One is the path of what feels good for you; the other is the path of what feels “off” to you. Not “right” and “wrong” for the world; we’re just talking about you, now.
If you spend your time thinking about where you don’t want to go, then that path will call to you. And then you’ll be frustrated because that’s where you end up. And now you can see why.
Some top leaders say a great leader is a visionary. And we know they are referring to market trends, product and service development, and all the things business magazines tell them to talk and think about. Visions of the future.
The hands-off manager is a different kind of visionary. The hands-off manager’s vision is not a vision for what the company will be in 10 years. It’s a vision that sees the potential of his people right here and now.
Your success as a hands-off manager will be directly related to your ever-increasing ability to see more in your people than they’re seeing in themselves.
The next step is inviting them to your vision of their potential.
When you are allowing success (by keeping your hands off of its natural flow) you redefine success as loving the act of making progress. You and your team love making improvements, gently raising the bar, and then enjoying the next step in the journey. Your key skill becomes a relaxed, compassionate observation of what flows and what does not.
This vision goes other places, too. For example, you acquire a new vision of the customer. It’s a gentle obsession with customer observation. Because you realize that if you don’t observe your customers and figure out why they’re buying or not buying, you will lose your ability to help them. Once again, vision becomes observation. It’s not a fantasy trip to an island in the future. It’s now. It’s here. Your customers are just waiting to tell you how to relate to them.
And so it is with the people on your team. If you don’t observe your people and how they’re feeling, you won’t be able to notice their natural skills and abilities. A good hands-off manager is similar to a sports coach who spends time studying the last game’s film footage to observe how his people performed, to see how they moved and what their natural abilities were. The coach may even observe how to use those players differently in the next game.
It’s the same process of observation in the work arena. You make an invitation for your players to enter your vision of their talent, and then you coach them into enjoying the process. Do just that and you will see amazing results.
In the end, successful leadership has very little to do with power and control. And it has nothing to do with catching mistakes and writing new rules. That has the opposite effect of allowing success.
If the workplace is to really flow to success, you must have the fewest rules possible. You want the rules that you do have to be the minimum to comply with regulations, and that’s it. Why? Because you value the unrestricted. You value open-mindedness and creativity. You want to nurture and mentor your people’s love of what they do. And that comes through best in an environment not bogged down with rules. We are creatures who naturally love freedom. We do our best when we are unrestricted. When our mind is free to create, not when we are constantly worried about compliance with the latest set of rules.
When we believe in this life and its limitless nature we become more limitless ourselves. The market and the workplace each become a microcosm of that wonderful sense of life.
When we stop thinking about our limitations we start being open to possibilities. We get out of our own way and let prosperity happen. And that, in itself, becomes our discipline.