Once they find out you aren’t judging them, they’ll share almost anything with you. They are open to creating new agreements.
That’s when you can make real progress in helping them improve their skills. The hands-off manager has the rare ability to enter into a true partnership devoted to the success of the employee. Employees who aren’t being judged are far more open to coaching and mentoring, and allowing their managers to help them improve.
* * *
You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
—Mark Twain
* * *
Think of your best friend right now. When you have a close friend, the first thing that gets suspended is judgment. If you’ve done something you’re not proud of or gotten yourself in a real pickle, your friend is very welcoming and says, “Come talk to me about it. What have you done now?” And he has a big smile on his face because he really doesn’t judge you. The friendship is a great friendship because of its lack of judgment.
Non-judgment opens up the door for everyone to be your friend. For everyone to trust you. They can sense in being with you that you don’t react negatively to what they say because you’re not judging it, even though they’re talking to you about something that is completely foreign to anything you would personally do. Maybe they’re talking to you about having had a major drug addiction, and you’ve never even tried drugs. But you’re not nursing and clinging to a judgment about that. You’re listening.
People who accept us completely are the best friends we have. They will take us in no matter what we do and say, “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m your friend. I’m here to help you. Tell me what I can do.”
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. The next time someone in a meeting brings up a situation generally accepted to be “bad news” or a negative turn of events, stop the proceedings and slow the meeting down by putting the topic up on the white board.
2. Now invite everyone in the room to participate in an exercise called “What’s Good About This?”
3. Go around the room and let people open their imaginations to possible positive outcomes that you didn’t immediately see. Do this often enough and you will be training your people in letting go of negative judgment and getting right into positive, creative action, no matter what happens.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CREATING RESULTS
There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.
—Ruth Stout
“We’ve got to get this thing churning cash flow today!” said Judith, the name we’ll use for a team leader I was coaching. “We can’t wait until tomorrow!”
“Why can’t you do the kinds of things in your workplace that will build a better company in time?” I asked.
“My job is to do it now,” she snapped. “I have investors. I have people watching me. And now I have angry customers to deal with.”
“Why can’t you partner with those customers and give them what they want?”
“They want refunds!”
“Why not give them?”
“We can’t help customers by giving them a refund on something they really don’t deserve a refund on, because that will affect my profits this week.”
So I pointed out to Judith that companies such as Nordstrom have built an almost unparalleled success curve in the retail industry by being in it for the long run. They want to build a reputation. They sell quality products and stand by them. And if anyone brings them back, they will give them a refund. No questions asked.
Nordstrom succeeded by focusing on their internal process rather than immediate outcomes. They knew that if they got it right internally, success would come. The paradox is that the more one cares for the internal, the better the external result will be. Results are created by looking inside, whether it’s inside a company or inside a human being.
To be successful in business, I want to produce a good product or service. I also want to create a commitment inside my organization to provide a high level of customer service and customer delight. And to achieve these outer results, I now know to look inside the organization. To study the inner system first.
If I also want to have a good sales and marketing program, I’ll need good people in my organization to execute our plan. And I now know that if I do that, the results will show up naturally. Enough tuning on the inside and we can just allow external success to occur.
By now these might seem like obvious approaches, but most companies don’t do things this way (which may be why four out of five companies fail before reaching their fifth year).