“You’re great,” said Tony, “and this is not bad news.”
“Not bad news? We had a $700,000 contract disappear and it’s not bad news?”
“It’s just what happened.”
“Well, I’m tired of this Zen stuff or whatever it is. I was counting on that commission.”
Tony said, “Let’s work with what is. Let’s look at all news as good news. At least potentially.”
Doug said, “But how can I close a deal with them if they are in negotiation to sell the company? The company won’t even be theirs. They can’t sign the check!”
“How is this good news?” asked Tony.
“It’s not,” said Doug after thinking for a while.
“What if the training you are offering them could help them get a better price for their company? What if the fact that they’d contracted for transformative training and begun to implement it increased the perceived value of the company?”
Doug said nothing, but his demeanor suggested that he was getting interested.
His manager, Tony, continued, “They’ve done our pilot training trial courses for two months now and the employees got a real boost, so they want to roll out the big program, right?”
“Until the sale of the company, yes.”
“Right! So now they can go into negotiations having invested in a powerful training boost to productivity. It allows the buyer to perceive this company as thirsty for ongoing improvement. It also allows the seller to suggest that the bottom-line numbers are about to get much better because of what this training can produce. They can increase their price in the sale of the company. Everybody wins.”
Doug was lit up. He thanked Tony and left the room ready to make the pitch of his life. The end of this story was a happy one for Doug, because the client bought the training as a bargaining chip in the sale negotiation, and ended up not selling after all. The employee base was so rejuvenated by the training that the original owners decided to keep the company and grow it.
Had Doug’s hands-off manager Tony not shown Doug how to drop the negative judgment and just work with what happened, gloom and doom would have been in Doug’s life for weeks after the “bad news” arrived.
Tony was unusual. Hands-off managers are one in a million. Most employees are led by ineffective micromanagers who suffer from their own habit of continuous judgment.
The common theme of most managers is that they are always at least mildly upset about what’s happening. You see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, read it in their e-mails.
But what’s happening is not upsetting them. Their judgment about it is.
Anything that bothers us only bothers us because we have a judgment about it. We cling to passing thoughts that say, This is wrong! This shouldn’t be happening to me! But we don’t stop to realize that the upset we’re experiencing is caused by our judgment.
If we could be open to all things and see them as the flow of the marketplace and get away from what should not be, we would release ourselves from a monumental amount of dissatisfaction, upset, stress, and blame.
This ability to dismiss judgment when it pops up is a critical skill for the hands-off manager to cultivate. It takes daily practice, but the practice is rewarding beyond measure.
* * *
In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy.
—Albert Einstein
* * *
If you drop this negative judgment long enough, it will produce peace at your center and a gentle surge of relaxed intelligence that can deal well with any issue.
We aren’t saying you should be in denial. We aren’t recommending that you not evaluate. You can evaluate without passing personal judgment. You can be an expert evaluator of performance, without being disappointed in or upset about a person’s actions.
Knowing the difference is vital.
A coworker in a top managerial position was recently going through a lot of stress about a circumstance her son was in. She thought her state was caused by her son and his circumstances, but it wasn’t. There was only one thing that was really a problem for her: her judgment. But she couldn’t see it. She was looking at his illness, his financial struggles, and his marital struggles as things that should not be happening. It was reality, but to her, reality was wrong.
And that belief was the cause of her stress. Not her son. Her son had nothing to do with it. Her thoughts were the only “bad thing” that was “happening to” her, but she was old-school judgmental and could not see it.
Her stress was fundamentally triggered by her belief that what she was going through shouldn’t be happening. She had placed herself firmly in non-acceptance, resistance, and judgment. And that self-placement was creating her suffering.