Free The Hands-Off Manager by Steve Chandler Page B

more in your people than they’re seeing in themselves.
    The next step is inviting them to your vision of their potential.
    When you are allowing success (by keeping your hands off of its natural flow) you redefine success as loving the act of making progress. You and your team love making improvements, gently raising the bar, and then enjoying the next step in the journey. Your key skill becomes a relaxed, compassionate observation of what flows and what does not.
    This vision goes other places, too. For example, you acquire a new vision of the customer. It’s a gentle obsession with customer observation. Because you realize that if you don’t observe your customers and figure out why they’re buying or not buying, you will lose your ability to help them. Once again, vision becomes observation. It’s not a fantasy trip to an island in the future. It’s now. It’s here. Your customers are just waiting to tell you how to relate to them.
    And so it is with the people on your team. If you don’t observe your people and how they’re feeling, you won’t be able to notice their natural skills and abilities. A good hands-off manager is similar to a sports coach who spends time studying the last game’s film footage to observe how his people performed, to see how they moved and what their natural abilities were. The coach may even observe how to use those players differently in the next game.
    It’s the same process of observation in the work arena. You make an invitation for your players to enter your vision of their talent, and then you coach them into enjoying the process. Do just that and you will see amazing results.
    In the end, successful leadership has very little to do with power and control. And it has nothing to do with catching mistakes and writing new rules. That has the opposite effect of allowing success.
    If the workplace is to really flow to success, you must have the fewest rules possible. You want the rules that you do have to be the minimum to comply with regulations, and that’s it. Why? Because you value the unrestricted. You value open-mindedness and creativity. You want to nurture and mentor your people’s love of what they do. And that comes through best in an environment not bogged down with rules. We are creatures who naturally love freedom. We do our best when we are unrestricted. When our mind is free to create, not when we are constantly worried about compliance with the latest set of rules.
    When we believe in this life and its limitless nature we become more limitless ourselves. The market and the workplace each become a microcosm of that wonderful sense of life.
    When we stop thinking about our limitations we start being open to possibilities. We get out of our own way and let prosperity happen. And that, in itself, becomes our discipline.
    Discipline?
    Yes, the hands-off manager believes in discipline and practice. Because we’re deprogramming and unlearning a very big portion of what we’ve been taught all our lives, it’s more an undoing than a doing, and it is a discipline. The whole history of managementhas taught you the opposite of the hands-off approach. So it takes practice to undo all of that. And the most difficult part of this practice is to alter your belief about what your experience has taught you. That may sound odd. But consider this: life brings you what you believe, not what you want. Therefore experience, which is something that is generally tied to an external event, is merely the reflection of what you’ve been believing.
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The more rapid the rate of change, the more dangerous it is to live mechanically, relying on routines of belief and behavior that may be irrelevant or obsolete.
    —Nathaniel Branden
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    For most people in the old management systems, their experience is a reflection of their belief in limitations and disappointing performances.
    But just because you haven’t done something well in the past doesn’t have to be an indication that you