The Hands-Off Manager Read Online Free PDF

burned so many times.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “You don’t trust your people.”
    Kerry was silent. She said nothing.
    I took more time in the coaching session than normal because I wanted to introduce Kerry to a new concept called hands-off management. I wanted to teach her what I’d learned from Duane Black—that if she didn’t trust her people it was because she didn’t trust herself. Her entire mind was filled up every day with stressful thoughts about worst-case scenarios. No wonder she was struggling and filled with anger.
    Her first step in the journey from hands-on to hands-off would be to meet with her people for two hours with no agenda on her side of the table.
    “No agenda?” asked Kerry. “You can’t have a meeting with no agenda. We learned that in our leadership training.”
    “Right. And that training was first developed in the 1940s for companies run on the old-school military model of management. It counted on a workplace of people hoping for 30 years of loyal service and a pocket watch at the retirement dinner at the Holiday Inn.”
    “What would I look like, having no agenda?”
    “Someone who cared what their lives were like as telemarketers. Someone who wanted to listen, someone who was neutral about how this final arrangement would look.”
    “Neutral?”
    “Neutral.”
    It took Kerry a full year of coaching to make the trip from micromanaging to mentoring. A full year of internal reprogramming. But she did it. It was a great year for her and her self-esteem as a leader. And listen to her today, in her words from a recent e-mail:
It’s funny how much I look forward to work every day. It’s such an adventure not knowing. I’m so happy to explore and open up in new ways every day. There’s no rigid way I have to be anymore, because I’m no longer obsessed with doing it right. Or not getting in trouble. I think our society does that to little girls. Little girls fear getting in trouble. Making daddy mad. Little boys are given more leeway. Boys will be boys! They get to fail a lot and make tons of mistakes growing up. Girls better get it right the first time! You’ve showed me that as true as that scenario might have felt in my past, it’s just a story now. I can cling to the story or let it go.
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What I like most about the past is that it’s over.
    —Byron Katie
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    Organizational life is a constant process of negotiation and sales. It’s an ongoing opportunity to promote a particular perspective in order to accomplish a purpose you are working toward.
    There’s no way around it: You’re always selling.
    Whether it’s selling ideas to your team, a concept to your own supervisors, or a new service to a customer, your day is spent selling. As the author Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everyone lives by selling something.”
    But not everyone sells the same way.
    Not everyone sells from the same position. In fact, what really sets a hands-off manager apart is the position that Kerry learned to take: neutral. Managerial mastery is simply an unusual mastery of the neutral position.
    Not positive, not negative, but neutral.
    “If you and I were negotiating a land acquisition structure, my strategy, my way of being, would be not to resist anything that you bring to the table,” Duane says, “it would be to accept it, to acknowledge you for having brought up that issue and then to focus our mutual attention on the benefit of the position that I came to sell in the first place. And that way, you have an invitation to shift your position. If I resist your position, then my challenge to you is to defend it, not look at an alternative to it. Because we can’t operate completely outside ego; it wouldn’t be human. We each have a little bit of a tendency to want to defend whatever position we have taken.”
    Reality dances best with someone who is flexible. Success flows toward an open (neutral) position. The best negotiators have an open, neutral mind—not a closed mind.
    Sales and