One of the ways you know your hands-off management is succeeding is when you hear your people say, “Our company is...” or “We always….” It’s an inclusive “our” and “we” versus an exclusive, antagonistic “they” or “them.”
It’s no wonder companies descend into this paranoid, self-protecting culture. Our whole society feels absolutely trapped in this syndrome. Try to sell a newspaper about good news! Try to start a television news station based on the positive things happening in the world. As the old saying in the newspaper business goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” People have conditioned themselves not to look for what’s possible, but for what’s dangerous. When we vote for our presidents, one of the biggest selling points seems to be which one is going to protect us the most; not who can lead us into the kind of future we want to have, but who can protect us from evil?
To have happiness and success on our work team we must reverse this process ourselves. We can’t wait for society and the rest of the world to wake up. And we start by looking at our people as great people. And then looking for what’s possible instead of what’s wrong.
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The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.
—Tom Peters
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Begin to watch every thought—it might be an opportunity for a turnaround in your belief system. Get good at that kind of reversal. Is that thought life-enhancing? Is it a thought that communicates to you and your team an example of who you are and who you wish to become? Or is it this thought: I wonder if that person wants to hurt me? Or, I wonder if this person just wants my job, or if they’re just telling me that to get on my good side?
Our biggest opportunity as managers is to reverse all we’ve been taught and start to think in terms of what could be, instead of what should be but isn’t.
It’s not natural to want to hide and live in fear and desperation. It’s normal and common, but it’s not natural. And the reason we know it’s not natural is that we’ve never met anyone who felt a sense of peace who lived in that way.
Physically we’re more advanced in this awareness than we are mentally or spiritually. Physically, when we experience pain, we immediately realize that something is out of alignment. So we work to bring it back into alignment through whatever means we can: nutrition, physical therapy, even surgery. We want to get ourselves back into the flow of things. Spiritually and mentally, though, when there’s pain, we blame others! We think, superstitiously, there’s something outside of us that needs fixing. So try to fix the world outside.
But the world outside is only a reflection of the pain inside. So we’re chasing ourselves. Want to be miserable? Try chasing yourself.
The hands-off manager calls off the chase.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Write down three things you wish hadn’t happened at work last week.
2. Under each incident put the words, “Course Correction,” and list the ways you can make things better because of this so-called negative event. What can you use the event for? How can it be a parable or teaching tool in the future? What was it sent here to show you?
3. Before you announce a change to your team or to an individual, do a little brainstorming with yourself. All change is growth toward the better. The universe is kind. What is stopping you from seeing and communicating this? What homework can you do on this change so you can sell it enthusiastically to your team instead of sharing in their grief about it?
CHAPTER NINE
TUNING YOUR INSTRUMENT
Harmony is not just a feeling. It’s a physical process.
—Dr. Rollin McCraty
There is help for us in discovering what we align with.
There are books written about muscle testing and how you actually have a physical response to thoughts. Your body gets weaker or stronger based on how a certain thought is affecting you. (We recommend Power Versus Force by David Hawkins.)
Duane uses a breathing process in which he tries to figure out whether something is constraining his ability to breathe freely and easily, or whether he feels open around it. Some people call it gut instinct, but whatever process you use, you want to become aware of yourself physically.