Discipline?
Yes, the hands-off manager believes in discipline and practice. Because we’re deprogramming and unlearning a very big portion of what we’ve been taught all our lives, it’s more an undoing than a doing, and it is a discipline. The whole history of management has taught you the opposite of the hands-off approach. So it takes practice to undo all of that. And the most difficult part of this practice is to alter your belief about what your experience has taught you. That may sound odd. But consider this: life brings you what you believe, not what you want. Therefore experience, which is something that is generally tied to an external event, is merely the reflection of what you’ve been believing.
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The more rapid the rate of change, the more dangerous it is to live mechanically, relying on routines of belief and behavior that may be irrelevant or obsolete.
—Nathaniel Branden
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For most people in the old management systems, their experience is a reflection of their belief in limitations and disappointing performances.
But just because you haven’t done something well in the past doesn’t have to be an indication that you can’t do it well in the future. It may just be that you never believed in yourself. You never believed you had the ability. Even though you loved to do it, you never believed you were capable of it.
So step one is to first find your management style in what you love to do. Step two is to allow yourself to believe that a new way of successfully managing people is possible for you. Step three is to attach to only those thoughts that come to you that reinforce that belief. (The other thoughts will challenge you, but if you keep at it they will dissipate.) Take those three steps and you will get there.
Then teach it to your people.
Sound too easy? Still, most people will not want to do this. They will think of all the reasons why they can’t, and so they won’t. And that will simply be more proof and more evidence for them that life does not work out, thus confirming and reinforcing their belief.
The joy of hands-off decision-making
The discipline of being a visionary leader consists in learning to choose. But not choosing the positive over the negative—that’s the old-school approach, which doesn’t go deep enough to allow for quantum leaps in success. The hands-off manager learns a lot from the negative.
Your decision-making process throughout the day evolves from the process of listening to your wisdom. You may be trying to choose between two options. As you look at one option, how does your body respond to it? Does this option allow you to breathe openly? Does it allow you to have a clear head? Does it allow you to feel a sense of wellbeing and, ultimately, a sense of accomplishment? Or does it create a feeling of repression, inappropriateness, and negativity?
All you need to succeed is what’s already in you. Once you understand that, you can pass it on to the people you manage. It’s a revolutionary concept in the workplace. A truly unusual thought. And perhaps this thought goes against every other business book you’ll ever read. It certainly contradicts the kind of bleak knowledge that many people describe as “common sense.” Actually it is the only sense that is common to all of us.
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Transcending the limitations of mind is not possible for dreamers who are addicted to concepts and intellectual abstractions—only to warriors and lovers of truth who are ready to merge with the ecstatic fire of Now.
—Maitreya Ishwara
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It’s not that this inward warrior’s journey is all that easy. It isn’t. That’s why you are there to mentor it and keep it on track for your people. Because most of your people have spent their whole lives doing everything they do for outside approval, so they’re always trying to get immediate external feedback for their every action and decision.
Your work is to help them recover from this toxic addiction to approval. It contaminates their work. Approval-seeking is a sickness that must be cured for them to finally do great work (for which the ultimate approval always comes anyway).
So the true hero’s journey is going inside to find your power, because there’s no immediate feedback for it. When you’re alone, searching your interior, there’s no one to say “good job!” as you scan your heart and soul for your true choices. It takes more discipline—not less—than the typical outside-in approach to success.