The Hands-Off Manager Read Online Free PDF Page B

negotiations will occur internally, too—inside one mind at war with itself.
    We were communicating with a friend this morning who’s a professional golfer, and he was having such a hard time getting into tournaments and doing well, even though he’s a great golfer,because negative thoughts keep coming into his mind as he’s about to hit the ball. Throughout his career he’s been trying to force them out and force positive thoughts into their place.
    What I recommended was that he step back from both positive and negative thoughts to what he might call a neutral position. Simply observe the thoughts, let them pass by, and then hit the ball with nothing in mind whatsoever. Not by forcing a positive: I can do this, it’ll be great, it’ll go in . And not by being worried: Oh no, I’m going to blow this . But to just step back and allow thoughts to pass like clouds. And when there’s an opening, hit the ball. From neutral.
    Everything improved. “Neutral” is powerful.
    Learning negotiation from physics
    As I sat in Duane’s study early on a warm Arizona Sunday morning discussing the amazing power of neutral, he told me that he deepened his understanding of its power by observing the structure of the atom.
    In atomic structure there are always three forces: there’s an electron, which produces a negative force; there’s a proton, which produces a positive force; and there’s a neutron, which remains neutral. The neutron and the proton create the nucleus of the atom, and the electron travels around that nucleus at very high speeds. Electricity is a function of the negative electrons transferring through a conductor from one atom to the next. So the negative is very elastic; it’s very moveable throughout all of physics. A negative force moves easily from one place to another.
    On the other hand, the neutral force and the positive force are much less moveable. When you separate the nucleus—the neutron and the proton—you unleash violent atomic energy; that was the basis of the atomic bomb.
    “So that connection,” says Duane, “that bond, in my opinion, which is based on physics, simple physics and chemistry, has been proven to be where the real strength is in business. The connection between the positive and the neutral. Although the negative has tobe there to sustain balance, it’s very easily swayed and moved and transferred to another atom. In the case of human beings that means to another person, with little effort. We’re almost too open to it. But you can’t, without a severe response, separate the neutral and the positive.”
    That brings us back to the hands-off manager’s respect for neutral observation as the ultimate vision. As a true and artful observer, one must be without judgment and without a position. A true observer gains power from seeing all valid positions from a neutral spot.
    Those of us who are managers deal every day with opposites. We deal with up and down, success and failure, hard and easy, fast and slow, happy and sad. What we don’t always understand is that those opposites go together and need each other. We can only experience easy because hard exists. We can only experience up because down exists.
    Yet we’re always anxious to remove the opposite of the experience we seek! In reality, it’s impossible. The experience we seek could not exist in a relative universe (and workplace) where everything is understandable only because its opposite also exists.
    So a worried, fussy micromanager’s resistance to opposition, and to the opposite of that which he seeks, blocks him from getting to where he was trying to go. He gets good critical feedback, and instead of being open to it he’s immediately defensive.
    He ends up more worried about the negative he wants to get away from than the positive he wants to move toward. And ultimately he can’t get to success from there. The “there” he is stuck in has too much worry to gain traction and move.
    The hands-off negotiator has