Gary Winters

Coach  Workshop Facilitator Author

Ever considered spending time with a leadership coach?

Do you know what world-class athletes like golfer Tiger Woods, tennis star Serena Williams, and swimmer Michael Phelps have in common?

They have a personal coach. 

So can you!

Have you ever…

  • Gotten stuck trying to figure out the “vision thing” and it’s practical role in the day-to-day operation?
  • Wondered how to inspire disillusioned, skeptical people to do their best?
  • Found yourself avoiding a difficult conversation because you weren’t sure how to handle it?
  • Been faced with a tough decision, and wondered whether or even how to include your team in choosing the best option?
  • Just taken charge of a new group, and wanted to have a smooth, successful transition?
  • Felt overwhelmed by resistance to change?

You can take yourself only so far without the help of others. Enter the leadership coach.

Nowhere else will you receive 100 percent dedicated attention to you. A coach is someone who helps you move from where you are to where you want to be, and does so by focusing on your goals, your skills, and your habits.

As a leadership coach, my clients include senior executives, middle managers, front-line supervisors and team leaders. I’ve don’t have a cookie-cutter approach – each engagement is unique. That said, these projects have several things in common:

  • The work is confidential.

  • If the coaching is sponsored by the coachee’s supervisor or a senior executive, we begin with a three-way meeting to establish ground rules and clarify objectives.

  • The work is goal-oriented, and those goals are established at the beginning.

  • Often the work is enhanced by some information gathering, either in the form of a 360-degree feedback instrument or with confidential interviews with key stakeholders.

  • The work is short-term – often beginning and concluding with a two-hour meeting, with several one hour sessions in the middle.

  • There may be homework between meetings – an action item, an article to read, etc.

  • The meetings are conducted by phone, Zoom, FaceTime, etc.

My academic training is counseling psychology. While coaching is not therapy, having an understanding of the dynamics of the helping relationship has proven enormously useful.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

“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.