What Are You Doing To Help Your Team Succeed?

My quest to create 99 Millionaires – When most CEOs talk about helping their teams succeed, they’re talking about the company’s success. You almost never hear about business leaders helping employees reach personal goals and achieve true financial stability.

Long ago, I heard a quote by Zig Ziglar that’s guided me through most of my career. “If you help enough people achieve their goals, you will achieve your goals.”

Why don’t more CEOs take this advice to heart? Your company isn’t just dollar signs and profit and loss statements. It’s made of the people on your team, the people who clock in and out and serve your customers every day. And they are more than the faces they show you at work. They have lives and families and goals of their own.

It’s my belief that anything a CEO can do to help team members achieve their personal goals will be rewarded, not just in the feeling of peace that comes with doing the right thing but in tangible results for your company. Your team will be more stable, more engaged, and more focused on serving your customers.

Several years ago, I started a quest to create 99 millionaires — to encourage, coach and support 99 professionals to achieve a level of wealth and security beyond their wildest dreams, and I would invite my fellow CEOs to join me.

Teaching the Basics

If you want to help your team succeed as you have done, start with the basics and share what you know. My Rooter Hero team receives regular training for gaining control over their personal finances, and we invite spouses and anyone else who has input into the family budget. They don’t teach these things in school, so there might even be people on your staff earning six figures and still living paycheck to paycheck.

Problems at home become problems at work, and one of the biggest stressors on a marriage is money. If I can help people gain control over their finances, create budgets and live below their means like I do, they will come to work with a clearer mindset.

Likewise, people aren’t taught in school how to save or how to invest what they save. I encourage my team to create disciplines that help them save now, today. I teach them to do research so they can invest with peace of mind.

Even if the information I’m giving them doesn’t concern the workplace directly, it benefits the whole person, the whole family. That’s help I’m privileged to give.

Tools for Success

Growing wealth and growing in a career starts with awareness — awareness of how you spend your money and your time. As a CEO, you probably know this, but you likely have bright and promising team members who don’t know it yet.

I advise future millionaires to start with awareness. How are you spending your money? Track it for 30 days and find out. There could be something as small as buying an expensive coffee every day that’s keeping you from saving. Track how you use your time. Are you wasting time with addictive video games or television? Could that time be better spent elsewhere?

By all means, do and buy the things you enjoy, but put yourself in control. You should control your possessions and your recreation, not the other way around. Start small and create simple, positive disciplines and habits in your life. As you get better, everything around you will get better. When you save a little money, it becomes easier to save more money. As you invest time in becoming an expert at what you do, more opportunities will open for you.

You would be surprised how many team members will be positively impacted by this type of advice. Make it part of your company culture that everyone is there to grow and improve, not just the company, but in their personal lives as well. Make it clear that you want to help them save, invest and leave a legacy for their families, and share your personal best practices for how to get there. It will give their time at work a greater scope, one that has direct and lasting benefit for them and their loved ones.

Share Your Secrets

This knowledge is yours to share, and I believe it’s the right thing for any leader to do.

I believe that if you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers. I do as much as I can to help direct them because I remember being in their shoes.

Some might say that in creating 99 millionaires, I’m giving away my secrets or creating my own competition, or that they’ll go work somewhere else. I don’t see it that way. Sharing our knowledge and telling people what we do to be successful just encourages us to do more. It’s my way of giving back to the industry, raising the bar for service and creating a stronger marketplace.

And really, I’m not competing against anyone but myself.

Written by John Akhoian.

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