2. Drop the distinction of “unimportant people” from your mindset. Every customer and every coworker has the power to advance your career beautifully, often in unseen and unknowable ways.
3. The next time another department or person is being criticized in a team meeting, stop the meeting and tell your team you are going to invite that person in to the next meeting so you can all talk together. Let other departments join your meetings often. Bring people together. Let everyone in the organization experience how interconnected they are.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DEEPENING YOUR DESIRES
Purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system.
—Norman Cousins
The hands-off manager always wants to go deeper. He wants to find what lies beneath a coworker’s desire. He doesn’t just want to know what you want; he wants to know why you want it. That will tell him more about how he can help. Asking these questions will allow him to help someone not only realize their true desires, but see the underlying sources of those desires.
An employee may say, “I want to drive a Mercedes.” And you, as a mentor, will go deeper and ask, “Why do you want a Mercedes?”
“I want to have very reliable, high-quality transportation.”
“How else might you achieve that for yourself now, so it isn’t left stranded out there in the future?”
Or maybe you’re meeting with a new employee and talking about her career goals. She says, “I want to be rich.”
That’s a good start. But why?
She says, “I want to be secure so I don’t have to worry about where my next dollar is coming from. I want to have enough money that I can be generous with others, and maybe give some money to charity.” That is the deeper desire, and the one you can help her realize now.
One of the most effective methods a hands-off manager uses to bring out the best in employees is learning their deepest desires. Once you know what they are, you can put your mentoring and coaching into that context. You are helping them get what they want, not what you want.
And when you take their “wish list” deeper than the first blush, you can show them how to live the life they dreamed of right now, with your full support. Otherwise your people are seeking the end without the means. They’ll be left stranded in their own futures with no one to pick them up and give them a ride home.
You will help them go right to the means. So instead of having goals about how many millions they’re going to have, they now have intentions about how effective a person they’re going to be. They now have intentions about what’s inside them that would create the wealth.
Under your mentoring they can reformat their approach to what they want.
Wanting something is always coming from the position of weakness. To want something is to say “I’ll probably never have it, but I wish I could.” Wanting emphasizes its lack. So there’s no self-esteem in it. There’s no self-confidence built by wanting. It’s like drowning your desires in fear-based hope.
Most people in the workplace are in this cloud of fearful hope. Your skill as a mentor will be to remove the cloud. You’ll help them internalize and realize their purpose in each act of contribution, so that it doesn’t live out there in an estranged future.
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Nothing contributes so much to relax the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
—Mary Shelley
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Your team members then shift their purpose from things they want to ways they want to be. And paradoxically, they get things more quickly that way: Wealth flows into ways of being more quickly than it does into fits of wanting. Soon your career-direction meetings with your people shift their focus: Instead of traditional goals measured as successful by the CPAs or the tax code, you have created within your team a simple desire to make a difference.
You can apply this everywhere. You’ll be asked to speak to a group of people, and rather than desiring to be a great speaker, you now just desire to make a connection with the group to whom you are talking. Connection is all you care about now. You can’t be a speaker without a listener, so you’ve learned how to speak into the listening process.
I once taught a graduate program at the University of Santa Monica in presentation skills and public speaking. The first thing I said when I got up on the stage to teach my students was, “If I had only two words to teach you this semester, the two words I would use are these.” I wrote on the white board “only connect.” And I said, “That’s all you’re about, that’s all you have to worry about, that’s all you have to care about.”