Gary Winters

Coach  Workshop Facilitator Author

If you put your mission on a t-shirt, would people wear it?

Your organization has a mission statement, right? How about your team? 

Laurie Beth Jones, author of The Path: Creating Your Mission Statement for Work and Life, suggests three criteria for a good mission statement: 

  1. It should be a single sentence.
  2. It should be understandable by a 12-year-old.
  3. You should be able to recite it at gunpoint if needed. 

I’d add a fourth: it should be compelling. 

The Parks and Recreation Department for a mid-sized city reviewed their own mission statement and found it both wordy and boring. It went something like this: “Our mission to plan, develop, and maintain public parks and provide recreational opportunities for all citizens.” True enough, but with a bit of brainstorming and engaged thought, they came up with this: 

City of Brentwood Parks and Recreation: We deliver joy.  

Yowsa! Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? 

Too many organization or team mission statements go something like this: “Our mission is to continue to provide real-time access to diverse products and services to stay relevant in tomorrow’s world. (That’s not actually real, it was created by a random mission statement generator on the web. But it soundsreal, right?)

Compare that business-speak with Pepsi’s mission statement: 

Beat Coke. 

Which one you gonna remember? Which one is compelling?

Here’s a thought. Play with your team’s mission statement (or create one from scratch, if you haven’t got one). Ask your team: What do we do? Why is that important? Why is that important? And why is that important? Aim to create your team’s equivalency to “We delivery joy.” 

When you’ve got something that grabs you – something you could put on a t-shirt people would love to wear – you’ve got a compelling Mission Statement. 

“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.