And then they wonder why they’re not successful in the long run.
To make certain you never fall into this zerosum black hole, simply focus on what you’re giving. Not on what you get back, nor on the results of giving or goals for the giving. Trust the system. Know that it will work. Because you are giving into an interconnected system. By doing this, you will get results.
The hands-off manager can enjoy keeping her hands off the process because she can see how big a process it really is. She can see how supported she is by good people everywhere. So she begins to function as a part of a whole, instead of being just a frightened, defensive individual.
Feeling that interconnection with everyone in your organization spreading forth to vendors and to customers, you realize that you get back what you give out, that what goes around, comes around, and that this hands-off mentoring style creates a circular path: The things you give out circulate through the world and come back to you.
The cynical person believes a capitalistic society functions because it promotes doing what’s best for the individual even if it’s at the expense of the whole. So if it’s at the expense of the environment, that’s okay, because you individually benefited. But then in the long run all of society has to pick up the tab for the damage that that particular individual or group did to the environment.
That cynical, individualistic approach is not going to work.
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Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away.
—H.R. White
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The higher your consciousness is, the more you can see the interconnectedness of all things. You see that it’s not possible to damage the environment without damaging yourself. And people who try to accrue things without benefiting others end up as the Enron leaders did: dead or in jail. People who damage the environment, as in the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, damage themselves financially. And there’s no way out of the connected web of life. There’s no way to disconnect from the interconnectedness of all of life and the universe.
Is this too mystical? It’s better described as waking up to reality. It’s just waking up to the physical reality of the interconnectedness of all things. What it’s waking up to is sometimes described as the “butterfly effect.” We live by the butterfly effect in our company, whether we know it or not. (It’s more fun when we know it.) What is the butterfly effect? Chaos theory states that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. If a butterfly in Peking flaps its wings it will affect the weather in Des Moines, Iowa, a week later.
In other words, there’s no way anybody can do anything without affecting everything else.
When anyone in a business career or an organization wakes up to the butterfly effect, they start contributing all day to the higher good of the team. With everything they do. They face each challenge by asking themselves what they can contribute, rather than who they can blame.
Be sure you’re really giving
Many people we have worked with think they are contributing when they are not. What they perceive as giving is actually a form of trading. They’re always trying to calculate their return. Should I help this vendor? Should I help my coworker out of her jam? Should I refund the money to this customer? What would that bring back to me? Would that cut into my profits? Should I meet with this person from the other department to hear her complaint? What would I get back?
It’s all a big trade-off to them. But trading is not giving. Giving has no ulterior motive. It is a way of being.
Think of your company as a mobile hanging from the ceiling. The whole web of the mobile is interconnected, so if you push on one part of it, you move all of it, even if just slightly.