Gary Winters

Coach  Workshop Facilitator Author

How would you be graded as a leader?

Jim thought of himself as a pretty good leader with the bad luck of inheriting a poorly performing team ten months ago. He couldn’t understand why there was a gap between how he saw himself and the performance of the team. I suggested to Jim that he turn his focus for a few moments from his team’s disappointing performance to his own leadership practice to shed some light on the matter. The simple technique I proposed is unscientific and completely subjective, but it is sobering. If you’d like to know how effective you are as a leader, you might try it too.

Step One

Take a sheet of paper and list of all the members of your team in a column. Then choose three areas of team performance to evaluate that you feel are important, such as productivity, attitude, commitment, judgment, grace under pressure, and on. For each dimension make another column on the paper. Jim chose to look at morale, team spirit, and attention to detail.

Step Two

The next step is to rate each of your team on each of the areas of focus, using a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being excellent). Don’t worry about reasons or proof – you aren’t going to share your results with anyone.

Step Three

Add up all three columns, and then add the three sums to produce a single number. Divide by the number of people you rated.

That final number represents YOUR effectiveness as a leader.

When Jim added up the columns, and the sum of those columns, and divided by seven (the number of his employees). The result was 6.32. That’s Jim’s “grade” as a leader on these three dimensions.

Why?

You can’t be an 8 or 9 with a team of 4s and 5s if they’ve been part of your team for six months or more. The team is a direct reflection of its leader. While you may inherit a group of sub-par performers (or superstars), over a short period of time their performance is a direct measure of your performance. If there are shortfalls, look first to your own leadership behavior to gain insight into how to improve the score.

I told you it was sobering!

“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.