When leading a company, wether it is a merchant services business, a marketing services business, or a widget business the temptation for many business owners is to look at their people as a means to profits. Although this may technically be true the line of thinking is exactly wrong. A company’s people are not a path to profits rather a company’s mission is to make meaning and make the world a better place. A company makes the world a better place by focusing on serving its clients and helping its team members have better lives and be more successful. If a company does this as its primary motivation profits naturally ensure. It’s good karma. Or as Jesus would have said, “Treat others the way that you want to be treated.”
It is important to note that I am not arguing that we should fail to hold our team members to the highest of standards of performance. We should expect nothing but greatness for everyone within our organization. Yet, our motivation must be to help people. When our motivations are pure people will sense that, they will work harder for us, they will work smarter for us, they will be loyal to us. The natural fruit of this is innovation, productivity and increasing profits.
On the contrary, to the business owner that just wants to get rich and that is their main or only motivation the result is easy to predict – disengaged employees, stagnation, higher employee turn over.
I have been blessed over the course of my career in that I have owned or worked for good companies with good people that care about making meaning, care about others, and care about its team members. The natural outflow of that is profits.
So my challenge to any business owner is to ask yourself what your true motivation is. If your motivations are good, then surround yourself with great advisors, build a great product or service and help people and get rich at the same time. If your motivation is to get wealthy at all costs – you will probably eventually end up poor and at the very least unhappy.
How great can you be? I challenge you to greatness! You have all of the power to be great in every sense of the word.
