Motivation (The Brian Tracy Success Library) by Brian Tracy

Author:Brian Tracy [Tracy, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780814433126
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2013-04-23T14:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Be a Teacher

In my seminars, I often start off by asking a cryptic question: “What is your most valuable financial asset?”

After a pause while people ponder the question, I tell them, “Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability. It is your ability to get results that people will pay you for.”

Of all the assets in a company, only people can be made to appreciate in value. All other assets and resources deteriorate and depreciate over time. When you take the time to grow your people, you can actually cause them to increase in value—in earning and contribution ability—and to increase the value of their work to the organization.

One of your most important roles as a manager is to teach and train the people working under you how to do the job, and how to do the job better. In your role as teacher, you are helping them to feel more valuable and more capable of making an increasingly important contribution to the company, which is also a powerful means of motivating them.

Teaching Is Your Job

When I started off as a manager, I hired people for various positions. They would often come to me and ask for instructions on how to perform a task that I considered to be quite simple or that I thought they should already know how to do. These constant interruptions by my staff were a constant irritation.

Then, one day, I had a revelation: Teaching is not a side issue or a distraction from my work. Instead, it is a key part of my work. The reason I was a manager was because I had already mastered these tasks, so I could then focus and concentrate on tasks of greater complexity and importance. The reason that the members of my staff were working under me was because they did not know how to do these things yet. But they could learn.

Even MBAs Need Instruction

I hired a new MBA graduate some years ago. He was positive and sincere, and he ran marathons. He was obviously not afraid of hard work and was well organized and disciplined.

On his second day, I called him in and asked him to put together a pro forma on a real estate project that we were looking into. He nodded and agreed and went back to his office to begin work. After a couple of days, I asked him how it was going. He looked up at me with a pained expression and said, “Quite honestly, I don’t know what a pro forma is.”

For me, a pro forma is a simple evaluation of the feasibility of a project or investment. It begins with determining the revenues that can be generated from the project, deducting all costs and expenses of generating those revenues, and arriving at a profit figure. This profit figure is then divided into the cost of the total project in the first place to determine an expected rate of return. Based on this expected rate of return, calculated conservatively, you can determine whether it is a good investment in comparison with other investment opportunities.

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