Bruce Tulgan

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Most managers spend a lot of time communicating with their direct-reports, but their communication is too often lacking in structure and substance. As a result, problems hide below the surface, until they blow up, and then everyone has to jump into firefighting mode. That’s why so many managers are stuck in a vicious cycle of undermanagement.

The solution: Highly-engaged management.

What is managing on autopilot and how can you avoid it?

What are the three most common questions managers ask their direct reports?

What are the questions YOU should be asking?

What is management by interruption and how can you stop the interruptions?

How can you put more structure and substance into your management communication?

In this program, Bruce Tulgan answers these questions and more, drawing on decades of workplace research and sharing true stories from real managers. With a blend of humor, insight, and concrete best practices, Bruce helps managers confront their own bad habits and teaches leaders a step-by-step approach back to the fundamentals of highly-engaged management that anyone can put into action.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Build relationships of trust and confidence with direct reports
• Effectively delegate tasks, responsibilities, and projects
• Keep employees focused on what’s important and moving in the right direction
• Increase productivity and quality for high-, mid-, and low- performing employees
• Increase retention of superstar talent
• Reduce waste, inefficiency, errors, downtime, and conflict

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Conducting regular one-on-ones with direct reports
• Communicating clearly and effectively, with an emphasis on coaching-style dialogue
• Tuning in to the particular strengths and weaknesses of every individual on the team
• Working through or around obstacles in order to hold employees accountable
• Making expectations clear
• Monitoring, measuring, and documenting employee performance
• Helping employees solve problems related to productivity, quality, and behavior
• Dealing with persistent performance problems
• Tying rewards to performance

What are managers saying about new young employees today?

“Their expectations are unrealistic.” “They lack good work habits.”

“They don’t want to pay their dues and climb the ladder.”

“It’s very hard to give them negative feedback without crushing their morale.”

The reality? Millennials and Gen Z employees are not disloyal, lazy slackers. They do not want leaders who humor them or do the work for them. Today’s young talent want managers who take them seriously, set them up for success, and recognize their best efforts. They want leaders who set clear expectations and provide support and guidance when needed.

In this program, Bruce Tulgan draws on decades of longitudinal research tracking young people in the workplace, busting the myths and getting to the reality of what Millennials and Gen Z truly want and need in the workplace. With true stories from both managers and young workers, Bruce blends humor, insight, and concrete best-practices to help audiences build the next generation of high-performers in their organization.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Understand the attitudes and behaviors of young employees, beyond the popular myths
• Attract and select the best young employees when recruiting
• Get new young employees on board and up to speed
• Help young employees learn and grow in their jobs
• Help young employees work smarter, faster, and better
• Teach young employees to understand where they fit in the organization
• Reduce turnover among high-performing young employees and increase voluntary turnover among low-performing young employees
• Prepare the best young employees to assume management responsibilities

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Communicating the right messages during the onboarding process
• Turning every young employee into a knowledge worker
• Utilizing an ‘in loco parentis’ approach to management
• Teaching young employees how to genuinely care about great customer service
• Teaching young employees the basics of self-management
• Teaching young employees the basics of the manager-employee relationship, and how to effectively communicate and work together for everyone’s success

Older Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce in droves, taking with them their collective skill, knowledge, wisdom, institutional memory, and old-fashioned work ethic. Second-wave Millennials and post-Millennial Gen Z are flooding in, bringing a whole new attitude to work.

Meanwhile, older Millennials and Gen X are stuck in the middle, with the lion’s share of day-to-day supervisory responsibility.

Not only is this a great generational shift in the demographics of the workplace. It’s also an epic turning point in the norms and values around work. With a workforce more generationally diverse than at any other time in history, employers and managers are facing new challenges at every point on the age spectrum.

Do you know where each generation in your workplace is coming from and where they are going?

What kind of succession planning is your organization doing? Are you developing talent at every level?

What kind of knowledge/wisdom transfer are you prepared to do?

How are you attracting, selecting, and onboarding the best young talent?

What are you doing to make sure that new hires are not thrust into a sink-or-swim workplace that will drive them away?

Bruce Tulgan addresses these questions and more, drawing on decades of workplace research, sharing true stories from real managers. With a blend of humor, insight, and concrete best-practices, Bruce helps audiences understand the generations in the workplace today – each at different life stages, with conflicting perspectives, expectations, and needs—so that you can turn age diversity into a strategic advantage.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:

• How the generational numbers are expected to shift in the coming years
• How the norms and values of the workforce will continue to change
• What these changes mean for employers, managers, and employees
• How to build cooperative and mutually supportive work relationships with those of other generations
• How to assess and address the human capital management issues presented by generational diversity

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Appreciating the attitudes and behaviors of other generations
• Making adjustments in your own attitude and behavior in order to communicate and work more effectively with other generations
• Focusing on the common ground—the work you have in common
• Evaluating the generational mix of your team and planning for the human capital management issues you may face:
• What can you do to improve recruiting, selection, training, performance management, retention, and development for those of all generations?
• Is there a mid-level leadership gap?
• Is there a gap in bench strength for senior management?
• How can you establish a formal knowledge & wisdom transfer process in your organization?
• Could a flexible retention model solve your biggest staffing issues?
• Is there a talent drain among your aging workforce?

The working relationship employees have with their immediate managers is the number one factor determining their success.

So many managers are so busy – or otherwise unwilling or unable to provide strong leadership – that most employees simply do not get what they need from their managers. But employees can do a lot to help themselves.

Be the employee who says to every boss, “Great news, I’m going to take responsibility for my part of this management relationship! I know you are busy. I’m going to work with you to make sure I understand exactly what you expect of me. I’m going to learn standard operating procedures and use checklists. I’m going to keep track of everything I’m doing and exactly how I’m doing it. I’m going to help you monitor, measure, and document my performance, every step of the way. I’m going to solve problems as soon as they happen, and if I come to you for your help you’ll know I really need you. I’m going to learn and grow and be able to take on more responsibility. Then you’ll be one of the most valuable employees that boss has.

Blending humor, insight, and concrete best-practices based on decades of research, Bruce Tulgan guides employees through the critical skills of managing their relationship with their bosses by highlighting what factors they can and can’t influence and how to work successfully within that framework.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN TO:

• Build relationships of trust and confidence with their managers
• Seek appropriate guidance, direction and support from their managers
• Take on new tasks, responsibilities and projects
• Stay focused at work and moving in the right direction
• Increase their individual work productivity and quality
• Keep track of their own performance and report regularly to their managers
• Reduce waste, inefficiency, errors, down-time, and conflict with other employees
• Learn, grow, and go the extra mile in their jobs

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Effective self-management
• Establishing regular, structured, one-on-one communication with your manager
• Customizing your approach to every person who manages you
• Getting the information you need to understand exactly what is expected of you, every step of the way
• Assessing and planning for the resources you need
• Earning more rewards by working smarter, faster, and better

Every day, people move into positions of supervisory responsibility and leadership because they are very good at their jobs, they’ve shown a commitment to the organization, or they’ve shown maturity and the ability to take on more responsibility. These new roles often involve responsibility for other people. New leaders usually get some quick lessons in doing some new paperwork. But too often, nobody ever teaches them how to do the people work.

Every new leader must go through the challenging process of assuming authority, establishing communication with direct reports, and managing workflow. This is especially daunting for those who are younger and less experienced.

How do you introduce yourself as a strong new leader without being “the new sheriff in town?”

How do you project the right amount of humility without soft-pedaling your authority?

How do you ask the team what should change and what should stay the same without raising expectations unrealistically or inviting an endless group debate?

How do you quickly assess the individual members of the team?

In this program, Bruce Tulgan draws on decades of research, sharing real stories of helping new leaders stand up in their roles and thrive. Blending humor, insight, and concrete best practices, Bruce introduces new leaders to the “take charge by learning” approach to standing up as a leader and gaining the tools to be a successful manager.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:

• How to take on and carry out supervisory, management, and leadership responsibilities
• The fundamentals of highly-engaged management
• How to build relationships of trust so they are not just managing their direct reports but truly leading them
• How to continually cultivate and improve their management skills

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Conducting regular, ongoing, one-on-one meetings with direct reports and senior leadership
• Talking like a performance coach, communicating expectations clearly, and establishing authority as a new leader
• Adjusting management practices to fit the strengths, weaknesses, and personality of each direct report
• Effectively monitoring, measuring, and documenting performance
• Creating “real accountability” based on performance
• Addressing and solving employee problems such as issues with productivity, performance, and personal behavior

In hundreds of advanced management seminars, Bruce Tulgan has taken experienced leaders through one problem-solving session after another, focusing on one real life case study after another: “Who are the employees you are really struggling with? What are the really tough cases?”

Like clockwork, the same basic cases come up over and over again—the same 27— maybe it’s the superstar the manager is afraid of losing, the slacker the manager cannot figure out how to motivate, the one with an attitude problem, or the two who cannot get along. From decades of research, Bruce has identified the most frequent and toughest challenges managers face and the best step-by-step solutions.

Of course, different challenges require different approaches. What’s astounding, however, is how many of these challenges— even the most difficult—fall away when managers really commit to high-structure, high-substance communication.

In this program, Bruce draws on decades of research, sharing true stories from real managers, blending humor, insight, and concrete best-practices to show participants how to apply the management fundamentals to the challenges managers most often face.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:

• How to identify and avoid the vicious cycle of undermanagement
• The most common ways that managers spend their management time and techniques for gaining control of that time
• The back-to-fundamentals approach to high-structure, high- substance communication
• How to apply the fundamentals to their own daily management challenges

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Overcoming the challenges unique to new, first-time leaders
• Teaching self-management
• Managing performance, such as productivity and quality
• Managing employee attitudes and interpersonal conflicts
• Motivating and retaining superstars
• Developing new leaders
• Working around resource constraints, logistical hurdles, and rapid change
• Renewing commitment to strong, highly-engaged management

There is an ever-widening soft skills gap in the workforce, especially among the newest young members of the workforce. Soft skills like self-awareness, people skills, problem-solving, and teamwork may be less tangible and harder to define and measure than many of the hard skills, but they are absolutely critical.

The cliché is that people get hired because of their hard skills but people get fired because of their soft skills.

When employees have significant gaps in their soft skills: Potentially good hires are overlooked. Good hires go bad. Bad hires go worse. Misunderstandings abound.

People get distracted. Productivity goes down. Mistakes are made. Customer service suffers. Workplace conflicts occur more frequently. Good people leave when they might have otherwise stayed longer.

The good news is that soft skills can be taught, coached, and developed – just like technical skills. All it requires is the right understanding and commitment from managers and leaders in your organization.

In this program, Bruce Tulgan shares true stories from real managers to illustrate how you can tackle the soft skills gap in your organization. With a blend of humor, insight, and concrete best-practices, Bruce teaches managers how to successfully improve the soft skills of their direct reports using his research-based soft skills competency model paired with the fundamentals of highly-engaged management.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:

• What the soft skills gap is, where it comes from, and its costs for organizations
• RainmakerThinking’s soft skills competency model, and how to apply it to your organization
• How soft skills are no less important than technical skills
• Which soft skills are most often lacking in today’s young employees, and how to address them
• How to not only improve soft skills, but effectively engage young employees in the process

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Integrating soft skills into every aspect of the human capital management process, from hiring to talent development and retention
• Identifying and communicating which soft skills are most important to your organization
• How to approach soft skills gaps in three categories:
• Followership
• Critical Thinking
• Professionalism
• Applying a teaching-style leadership approach to coaching and developing the soft skills of your team

Employers are facing more severe talent shortages than any time since we began our workplace research in 1993. The most acute factors will ebb with time. But there will be lasting echoes.

While many people left their jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic, many others stayed in place waiting for the right time to leave. As hiring soars to record levels in the post-pandemic era, quit rates are also soaring as pent-up departure demand is released.

There are six steps to gaining strategic advantage as an employer in the new hybrid workplace.

• Define a clear value proposition.
• Build and maintain a steady supply chain of applicants.
• Be very, very selective.
• Stay in close dialogue between hiring and day one.
• Structure on-boarding and up-to-speed training.
• Turn every manager into a Chief Retention Officer

Bruce Tulgan breaks down each of these steps, drawing on decades of workplace research and the best practices which have allowed employers to gain control of turnover. With a blend of humor, insight, and concrete strategies, Bruce helps participants understand today’s talent wars and shares techniques for attraction, selection, on-boarding, up to speed training, performance management, development, and retention.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:

• The short- and long-term factors affecting today’s talent wars
• The five costs of voluntary turnover
• The top four causes of early voluntary departures
• The top five causes of mid- and late-stage career departures
• Why strong, highly-engaged management is more important than ever
• The six steps to gaining a strategic hiring advantage in the new hybrid workplace

TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:

• Improving on-boarding processes to reduce turnover among new hires
• Defining a clear and compelling employer value proposition
• Building and maintaining a steady supply chain of applicants
• Aligning communication up, down, sideways, and diagonal on the organization chart to improve outcomes—even in a hybrid work environment
• Creating an upward spiral of improvement for every employee in the organization through high-structure, high-substance communication