Cambridge Business Association
The Hands-Off Manager
Book

The Hands-Off Manager

How to Mentor People and Allow Them to Be Successful

Steve Chandler and Duane Black
Career Press, 2007
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Steve Chandler and Duane Black present an approach to management that promises to lower your stress level, increase your happiness and allow everyone in your organization to be more creative and productive. The idea is that old-style, hands-on micromanagement does not engage today’s workers. The book tries to persuade readers through emotional appeals, which can be illuminating but sometimes appear strained. The book includes interesting quotes from all kinds of people, including Peter Drucker, Deepak Chopra, Napoleon Hill (whom the authors criticize), Voltaire and others. getAbstract says the authors’ core ideas are persuasive, but the style might lean a little too much on intangible insights for some readers. However, this is a great book if you are a stressed-out manager who wants to find a new approach. Read this, calm down and stop micromanaging.

Summary

What Lifts You Up?

Your staff members cannot reach their highest potential if you micromanage them. Once you realize this, you will stop and become a “hands-off” manager, so you unleash their creativity and energy. If you try to control everything and everyone, you will create rigidity and your people will retreat from your leadership.

When you define your happiness by what happens at work, you give away your power to decide your own purpose and course in life. Instead, pay attention to what lifts you up and what deflates you, so you can realize that your feelings come from your own thinking, rather than from external events. Take back your power by seizing responsibility for your thoughts and feelings. Do something constructive, instead of wasting time and energy assigning blame. Learn to let go by recognizing that the past is dead and gone.

Realizing that you are free to choose what you are going to do in the future, without recrimination, is the key to inspirational leadership.

To achieve happiness and success, allow your core self to resonate with your conscious thoughts and actions. Contentment demands internal alignment. Have you ever read something...

About the Authors

Trainer and consultant Steve Chandler, the author of 14 books, is a guest faculty lecturer at the University of Santa Monica. Duane Black is COO and executive vice-president of a housing development company with more than 150 employees.

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