Fight the Undermanagement Epidemic:
How to Build a Culture of Strong Leadership
How do the managers in your organization tackle the challenges of today’s increasingly high-pressure workplace?
If your managers are like most managers, they are probably stuck in a vicious cycle. They feel they don’t have enough time to manage, so they try to “empower” employees by leaving them alone. They “check in” and “touch base” and their doors are “always open”… until something goes wrong. Then the manager goes into firefighting mode… until the fire is out… then the manager has even less time… So, the manager goes back to being hands off… until the next fire.
This vicious cycle is one that Bruce Tulgan has seen time and again. And there’s a name for this phenomenon: undermanagement.
What can you do to help the managers in your organization? Bruce Tulgan shares insights from an ongoing Undermanagement Epidemic study to provide senior leadership with the information they need to identify and cure undermanagement.
Participants will learn:
- The eight costs of undermanagement that lead right to the bottom line
- The seven myths that prevent most managers from being highly-engaged with direct reports
- Exactly what employees need from managers in order to succeed
- Exactly what managers need from senior executives in order to deliver what their employees need
- Strategies, options and next steps
Techniques and Best Practices for:
- Understanding and identifying the signs, symptoms, and effects of undermanagement in your organization
- Identifying the specific challenges managers are facing in the real world today
- Regular high-structure, high-substance, coaching-style management
- The most effective ways to help managers learn, embrace, and adopt the best practices of highly-engaged management Making a systematic commitment to proven best practices at every level
It’s Okay to Be the Boss:
Learn the Proven Best Practices of Highly-Engaged Leadership
In today’s rapid-pace workplace managers can’t afford to be hands-off. There is no time for waste or inefficiency. Everyone has to do more with less. Employees have become more high-maintenance as the nature of work has changed.
Too many managers today tell us they…
- don’t have enough time to manage their people.
- too often avoid interacting with “difficult” employees
- struggle to hold employees accountable.
- often wait to have important conversations until they are frustrated or angry.
- struggle to retain the really great employees.
What’s the solution? Highly-engaged management.
Based on decades of research, Bruce Tulgan has identified the proven best practices of today’s most effective leaders. Bruce helps managers confront their own bad habits, challenging the myths that prevent leaders and managers from being strong, and sharing the 8 fundamentals of highly-engaged management that anyone can practice.
Participants will learn:
- 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 or tying rewards to performance
Not Everyone Gets a Trophy:
How to Bring Out the Best in Today’s Young Talent
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.”
“They think everybody is going to get a trophy in the real world, just like they did growing up.”
The reality? Millennials and Gen Z employees are not disloyal, lazy slackers. They do not want leaders who humor them or give credit where it isn’t due. Quite the opposite! Today’s young talent (at least those worth hiring) 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.
The truth is that these young employees are the future of work – and your organization! They will be your next leaders and eventually calling the shots themselves. Why wouldn’t you want to provide them with the guidance, direction, and support that they need from more experienced colleagues?
Bruce Tulgan busts the myths and gets to the reality of what Millennials and Generation Z truly want and need in the workplace. Equip the leaders in your organization with the powerful insight of our ongoing Generational Shift research and watch your young talent succeed.
Participants will learn:
- Understand the attitudes and behaviors of young employees, beyond the popular myths
- Attract and select the best young employees when recruiting or 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
The Great Generational Shift:
The Workforce Is Changing – Are You Ready?
Baby Boomers are leaving, Second-wave Millennials and Gen Zers are flooding in, and First- wave Millennials and Gen Xers are stuck in the middle. It is not only a generational shift in the numbers in the workforce. This is also an epic turning point in the norms and values of the workforce and a corresponding transformation in the very fundamentals of the employer-employee relationship.
The Great Generational Shift presents a whole new set of challenges for employers in every industry, employees of all ages, and for managers at every level.
Of course, there are as many different individual stories as there are people in the workplace. But Tulgan’s ongoing Generational Shift research has illustrated strong generational trends in career paths, management practices, attitudes, expectations, and overall behavior at work. With a workforce more generationally diverse than at any other time in history, employers and managers are struggling to balance their business needs with an increasingly high-maintenance workforce.
What does the Great Generational Shift mean for the future of your organization? Bruce Tulgan helps everyone understand the generations in the workplace today – each at different life stages, with conflicting perspectives, expectations, and needs. 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 those of other generations
- Making adjustments in your own attitude and behavior in order to communicate and work more effectively with those of 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:
- Is there a talent drain among your aging workforce?
- Could a flexible retention model solve your biggest staffing issues?
- How can you establish a formal knowledge & wisdom transfer process in your organization?
- Is there a gap in bench strength for senior management?
- Is there a mid-level leadership gap?
- What can you do to improve recruiting, selection, training, performance management, retention, and development for those of all generations?
Winning the Talent Wars:
Build a Winning Culture of Attraction, High-performance, and Retention
The number one issue troubling business leaders today is the increasing difficulty of recruiting, motivating, and retaining the best talent. There is a talent shortage at every level, in every industry. The talent wars are back on and more heated than ever. Organizations and individuals are forced to adjust to the ‘new normal’ of constant change and uncertainty.
Make no mistake, the talent wars are affecting organizations of every shape and size:
- Average durations of employment are decreasing
- Voluntary unplanned turnover rates are increasing
- Departure demand is increasing
- Open-position rates and time-to-hire rates are increasing o Early voluntary departure of new hires is increasing
What can you do about it? There are two options: enter a bidding war for talent or build a winning culture. Our research shows that bidding wars don’t work. At the highest level, the goal must be to build a winning culture. But a winning culture is much more than ping pong tables and happy hours. Building a winning culture takes time and effort and is everyone’s responsibility.
Bruce Tulgan will arm senior executives, HR leaders, and hiring managers with the leading strategies and tactics to build a winning culture in your organization.
Participants will learn:
- The challenges, causes, and costs of today’s talent wars
- What a winning culture really means to employees today
- The eight dream job factors that employers can leverage to attract and retain top talent
- The five steps to successful hiring
- How to boost the prestige factor of your organization as a top employer
- Why you should “do more” for your superstar employees
Techniques and Best Practices for:
- Developing a hiring process that attracts more of the talent that your organization needs
- Improving onboarding processes in order to reduce turnover among new hires
- Reinventing the concept of “knowledge work” in your organization, turning every employee into a knowledge worker o Making retention a priority for everyone in the organization, not just management or HR.
- Increasing retention of high performers and turnover among low performers
- Creating an upward spiral of improvement for every employee in the organization
It’s Okay to Manage Your Boss:
Learn the Proven Best Practices of the Most Successful High Performing Employees
You rely on your manager more than anyone else to meet your needs at work – to provide guidance, direction, support, resources, and coaching.
Our research shows that sufficient management support is critical for employees who want to consistently produce high-quality work, feel good about what they do, and earn credit for their results.
The working relationship employees have with their immediate managers is the number one factor determining success or failure.
The problem is that too many managers are undermanaging their direct reports: 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.
Bruce Tulgan helps employees learn the critical skill of managing their bosses – or, “managing up” as it is often called – by highlighting what is within their power to influence so they can succeed at work despite the growing problem of undermanagement.
Participants will Learn:
- 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
Building New Young Leaders:
Critical Skills for First Time Managers
One of the challenges facing organizations today is the impending leadership gap: as the most experienced leaders and managers retire and are replaced by today’s middle managers, there is an increasing demand for new young leaders to step up and fill the ranks.
Every new leader at any level must go through a process of assuming authority, establishing communication with direct-reports, and managing workflow. This is a challenging process for new leaders of any age. It is especially challenging for new leaders who are younger and less experienced.
Our research shows that most new young leaders do not get enough structured guidance, direction, and support in taking on their new management responsibilities. Bruce Tulgan will introduce new leaders to the “take charge by learning” approach to standing up as a new leader, providing them with our back-to-fundamentals approach to highly-engaged management.
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
The 27 Challenges Managers Face:
Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems
What are the most difficult challenges you face when it comes to managing people?
Despite the diversity of people and situations, in our research the same basic challenges come up over and over again:
- How do you manage employees who are not so good at managing themselves?
- How do you help an employee get more work done?
- How do you help an employee improve quality?
- How do you manage an employee who has an attitude problem?
- How do you retain the superstars?
- How do you lose the low performers?
No matter what the specific challenge, when things are going wrong in a management relationship, almost always, the common denominator is unstructured, low substance, hit-or-miss communication. The most effective solution is applying the fundamentals of highly-engaged management.
Bruce Tulgan helps illustrate how the fundamentals can be applied to the most common management challenges in your organization, one challenge at a time.
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 your 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 o 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 your commitment to strong, highly-engaged management
Bridging the Soft Skills Gap:
How to Teach the Missing Basics to Today’s Young Talent
“They have no self-awareness.”
“They don’t take personal responsibility or hold themselves accountable.”
“They don’t know how to think, learn, and communicate without checking a device.”
“They don’t know how to problem solve, make decisions, or plan.”
Do you find yourself saying similar things about the young employees in your organization?
Professionalism. Good work habits. People skills. Critical thinking. These are just some of the soft skills that employers today say are lacking among their new young employees. They are coming into the workplace as the most highly educated generation to date, and yet they struggle with some of what we call the “old-fashioned basics.”
What are employers to do?
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. Bruce Tulgan teaches managers how to successfully improve the soft skills of their direct reports, using his 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
- Tulgan’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 the which soft skills are most important to your organization
- How to approach soft skills gaps in three categories: – Professionalism – Critical Thinking – Followership
- Applying a teaching-style leadership approach to coaching and developing the soft skills of your team
