Gary Winters

Coach  Workshop Facilitator Author

Managing People
Doesn't Have to
Be So Hard

There are simple, effective,
and proven tools and techniques
which make it easier

Which you can learn

Everything is hard before it is easy.

What if the people you manage…

  • Were consistently motivated to do their best?

  • Were truly team players, supporting one another?

  • Consistently sought – and achieved – stretch goals?

  • Saw you as someone who brought out their best?

  • Even arrived at meetings on time, eager to be there, ready to contribute?

Your job would be easier, right?

Managing becomes easier once you take a coincidental collection of people who happen to report to the same boss and shape them into a high performing team.

I've been exploring how to do just that for three decades.

Not as an academic. It’s been hands-on, rolling up my sleeves with managers at all levels, from team leaders to front-line supervisors, mid-level managers to CEOs, in over 300 organizations – public and private, large and small. 

I’ve studied everything from how leaders create a compelling vision to how they sweat the small stuff, from how they make tough decisions to how they handle a difficult conversation, from how they inspire to what makes them perspire.

My mission is to learn all I can and share it with as many as I could.

There are four ways I do that – seminars and workshops, one-on-one coaching, by publishing seven books (with more to come), and by curating a blog, The Leadership Almanac

Ready to make your job easier? Choose an option below:

“What ELSE Your Boss Never Told You” is the sequel to the very popular “What Your Boss Never Told You.” Packed inside are more tips, techniques, and insights about the challenging, but rewarding leadership position.

“What ELSE Your Boss Never Told You” is written in a conversational tone, as though you and the author were enjoying a cup of coffee and talking about the issues that emerge for new leaders. It stands alone, and/or could be read before or after the first volume, “What Your Boss Never Told You.” You can start with any chapter and read in any order you like.

if you search for a book on management, you’ll find a staggering 600,000+ books currently available. How can you narrow that down? “What Your Boss Never Told You” is the best place to start.

No textbook here – this book is short and sweet. It’s designed to help you “unpack” your new job and be effective from the first day with your new team. It contains twenty-one chapters filled with the wisdom Winters has gathered from real managers – effective, successful leaders in organizations much like yours.

Leaders make decisions every day – big and small. Most know that if they include others in the decision-making process, the quality of those decisions – and the commitment to them – will likely improve. That said, they also know it’s impractical, if not impossible, to include others in every decision they confront.

“To Do or Not To Do” tackles the question of when to make decisions on your own, and when to involve your team. It gives you a deceptively simple but proven method to determine, when you are facing a difficult decision, how to decide how to decide.

Far too many meetings are dreadful, mind-numbing, energy-draining, productivity-sapping, colossal wastes of time. As someone once said, “To kill time, a meeting is the perfect weapon.”

Here’s the deal: if you’re willing to learn and apply the techniques in “So, How Was Your Meeting?”, you’ll call fewer meetings, while vastly improving the ones you do lead. They’ll take less time, have more balanced participation, produce better decisions, and result in concrete action items for follow-up afterwards.

While there are thousands of books written for people about to retire, this may be the only book for people who manage soon-to-retire employees. Written in a casual, conversational style, “Managing the Soon To Retire Employee” will give you everything you need to know to move forward with confidence and grace.

You can be successful with Sooners. It won’t happen by chance, and it’s not a matter of pulling some management “trick” out of your hat. But you can learn how to do it, and you can apply what you’ve learned right away.

Managing friends or former peers can be awkward. When you become the boss, everything about these relationships can suddenly be uncomfortable. There’s a new set of ground rules to establish – as manager, you are going be accountable for the work performance of friends or former co-workers on the team, and they are going to have to adjust to the fact that they now report to you. Everyone involved can feel awkward and hesitant about the future. 

Have you been approached by management with an offer to promote you to supervision? Or, are you mulling over the possibility for the future? Find yourself not sure whether to accept the promotion?

If so, you’ve come to the right place. Help! They Want to Make ME a Supervisor will help you sort out a very big question: Should you accept the offer to become a supervisor? Once you’ve read this book, you’ll be confident that you’ve made the best decision for you and for your organization.