By doing this, he is reducing his own stress level at work. He is completely aware that every time he judges someone he alters his own well-being.
So he refuses to assign the responsibility for negative feelings to the person he is tempted to judge. He assigns the responsibility for these feelings to his beliefs regarding that person.
Only thoughts cause stress; people do not. People cannot.
But for the old-school micromanager the stress never quits, and the harmony in the organization never holds.
If you are micromanaging in the old style of shame and blame, you will recognize this example: You’re pulling into the company parking garage and suddenly have to slow down because there’s an old person in front of you going slower than molasses. If you then decide you don’t like older people who drive slowly, you start to suffer. And you will suffer every time this “happens” to you. Even though it’s not really happening to you, it is being caused by you—the stress comes directly from your thought. The older person has no power to stress you out. You think you are suffering because this oldster is driving poorly, but the truth is you are only suffering because of your judgmental thought about him or her.
We all want to be powerful and in control of our own well-being, but we continually give away the very power we seek by our inability to forgive and let go. The only way out of this trap of constant suffering is to cultivate the open-minded, hands-off skills of letting the actions of others roll off our backs and letting other people’s negativity go in one ear and out the other.
Anything we cannot let go of has control over us. But once we can let go, we’re in control. We can laugh and enjoy how we are unaffected by what other people might be doing.
That’s when you change as a manager.
That’s when people see you as an island in the storm. A person to go to for peaceful resolutions of crises. In other words, a true hands-off manager who gets results from a relaxed, enthused, and highly productive team.
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One does not “manage” people. The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.
—Peter Drucker
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How to open your energy field
The hands-off approach allows you to learn to take your power back and live in a world of quiet action and non-judgment. If you do this, you’ll soon be living with an open mind, forgiving effortlessly and taking back control of your energy and enthusiasm for doing great work.
Discovering your natural gifts and learning your true nature is not about learning how to force yourself upon your team. It’s about allowing success to emerge from within you, and then from inside others. It’s an inside job. And once you see that all real power comes from the inside, you can start to become powerful.
There is a story about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that illustrates what we mean. A young would-be composer wrote to Mozart, asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding musical form, and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested: “But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now!”
Mozart replied, “Yes, but I never asked how.”
Mozart’s point was that he simply let the symphonies emerge from within him. He didn’t have to figure out how to force something outside him to work.
Duane has a saying he uses at work, although it doesn’t apply only to work; it applies to life in general. His saying is, “Find them, don’t fix them.” It’s a policy that encourages finding strengths in your employees that already exist, and allowing those strengths to come forward. It also applies to finding the right people for the job, people whose natural skills and interests align with the work you are asking them to do.
When they do what they love the success will follow. Once you know what they love to do and help them do it, they’ll do it for you all day long. Keep finding ways to match their talents with the tasks ahead. Find them, don’t fix them.
And there will always be employees for whom you don’t find a good job match. Nothing seems to make them happy. Soon, you know in your heart they aren’t a fit for the team you have.
Old-school managers have a hard time dealing with this realization. They keep trying to fix things. They keep trying to fix people. They go through endless inept exercises to try to find ways to motivate mismatched employees to get them to do what they really don’t want to, and are not interested in or excited about doing. They try to find ways to make them change themselves into someone they are not. This is a waste of everyone’s energy!