I Learned This the Hard Way, But You Don’t Have To.
Many years ago, before I was a pastor, I was a regional vice president for a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had a team of five full-time managers that worked for me. Every week, it was expected that we would make calls and set up appointments to fill in our schedules for the week.
But every week, those five managers would fail to fill their schedules with appointments.
I thought, Okay, they’re new at this. They just need a taste of how good business is and how easy it is to make money, and they’ll jump in and get it done.
So, I helped them. I made their calls for them, and I filled their weeks with appointments. For months, I sat in the office from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every Saturday making calls, filling up my schedule and theirs for the week.
And those five managers loved that. They were making more money than they had ever made in their lives. Every week, their schedules were booked up with appointments they hadn’t had to make, and they didn’t have to come in the office every Saturday to make calls. I was doing it all for them.
One day, the wife of one of the managers called me and told me her husband was at the bar getting drunk. She asked me to go to the bar and get him. I was shocked as this manager had told me and his wife that he was heading out to an appointment that I had set for him.
That’s it, Gary, I thought. You care more about this guy’s family than he does. He will not even show up for an appointment that has already been set for him!
That’s when I stopped taking responsibility for those five managers. I realized I was robbing them of the pressure that would push them to make the calls on their own.
I had my own pressure and my own bills to pay. So, I would make the calls—the cold calls. (That’s an industry term that means you call complete strangers and try to sell them something, or set up an appointment to sell them something.)
I’d make 90 cold calls a day, every day. I’d open the phone book and call strangers because I had bills to pay and a family to feed. Falsely, I assumed everyone would respond to pressure the way I had. My hope was that if my managers could just see how easy it was to make the sale once at a client’s house, they would eagerly want to make the phone calls. I discovered that was not the case.
And what happened when I stopped? They all quit.
That was a big eye-opener for me.
Learning not to take responsibility for the lives of other people has been one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn.
Now, understand what I’m saying. We’re to help people in tough times. We’re to help people as they’re going through tough times.
We’re to teach people. We’re to mentor people. We’re to demonstrate how things can and should be done. But we’re not supposed to keep doing for them what they can and should be able to do for themselves at some point.
Not taking responsibility for the lives of others was a lesson I had to learn the hard way, and several times over, unfortunately.
Read more in my brand-new book, 6 Things I Learned the Hard Way .
It’s my hope that this little book can help YOU be “the wise,” learning these six things by reading my stories rather than having to experience them or go through them yourself—that the things I learned the hard way, you won’t have to.
Click on this blog’s offer to request your copy of 6 Things I Learned the Hard Way now.
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