The hands-off approach carries this key insight: Allowing success is the opposite of forcing success. It is learning what it means to be in alignment with life and with yourself. In due course, you even learn to release yourself from all the “shoulds” that have been placed on you by the world (and your imaginings of the world).
One of the problems people have when they hear something as intriguing as allowing success rather than forcing success, is that they think maybe this is theoretical or spiritual, or something that hasn’t ever been used or tried or worked with.
The opposite is true! This is the system that works in the real-world workplace. This is an applied system. It isn’t someone imagining what business would be like if it were optimal. This is actually something you can use. If you’re a leader sitting across from your people, this is something you can coach them in. It’s something you can coach yourself in.
Soon you’ll be consistently finding the strengths in your people instead of trying to add what’s missing. Soon you’ll be able to teach them to use what’s inside them, instead of trying to fix them and doing the things most managers try in vain to do.
Most businesses operate through wild attempts at control. They focus on their own rules, policies, detailed supervision, inspections, and quality control, as if their people were trained animals!
The hands-off manager is the solution to that dysfunction. Because when you find people who love to do what you’re asking them to do, you don’t have to control them. You don’t have to motivate them. You don’t have to force them to work harder. You don’t have to threaten them to get them to perform. They already love doing it so it comes naturally to them.
So what, then, is the manager’s job?
Your job as a hands-off manager will be a job of learning. You’ll be learning to be aware of what your people love to do. You’ll be learning what powers live naturally inside them. You’ll then be more skilled at placing people in roles suited to their talents. You will see into them, see what they love to do, and listen to what they tell you. Your best work will be to closely observe what they show you.
It can get interesting and challenging when you embark on this journey, because people don’t always tell you the truth! They tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they think will get them a higher salary. That’s the curse of approval-seeking in action. You’ll detoxify that situation every time you show them that winning your approval is not a productive pursuit; that doing good work will take them further than that every time. When you can mentor people this way you will free them up and they will thank you forever. Approval-seeking is our society’s most futile and dysfunctional pursuit. If your people can learn to drop it from their workplace endeavors, they may even learn to drop it at home and improve their personal relationships.
The work, and the love of it, becomes the focus. When you place people in roles for which they are unsuited, you can’t supervise them enough or discipline them enough to get good work. Because there’s no love there. You can try to impose more policies and procedures, but you still won’t get what you’re looking for.
But when you place people in roles that are ideally suited for who they are, watch what happens. Now they have a chance to exhibit their gifts and do what they love. So you can walk away and come back later to a job well done with little or no supervision. That’s hands-off managing at its best. You weren’t even there!
Is this too soft a system? You might worry that it’s not toughminded enough to produce results, but our experience tells us that quite the opposite is true. In fact, this system is exactly what the toughest-minded football coaches do. It’s Vince Lombardi walking along a practice field trying to figure out whether his linebacker should really be a safety. Or whether his tight end would be a better fullback. And then finally deciding, “I want to try you out at fullback; the way you move it looks like it’s a better fit for you.” A focused coach in football will often move players out of the position they think they should be in to something that fits better. The coach sees that as his ongoing role, to match up his athletes, put them in different positions, and keep moving until they’re all in positions that come more naturally to them.
In the end, the best coaches and the best leaders are people who will get the best out of their players, as opposed to trying to force something out of them that may not be there. The greatest gift you can give people is to give them themselves. Duane tells his managers, “See more in your people than they’re seeing. Then, invite them to your vision.”
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What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
—George Eliot
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Why do you have to do this? Why do we need mentors to help people do what they love to do? Why can’t people already see this potential in themselves?