Bruce Tulgan was educated as a lawyer, but discovered his real passion in the study of how people work and manage. Bruce brings that passion to life and reminds us that Management 101 is easy to understand in theory, but easy to forget on Monday mornings.
Bruce Tulgan
Founder of RainmakerThinking, Inc. and Top Expert on Leadership Development and Generational Issues in the Workplace
Featured Topics
Fee Range
$15,000
Bruce Tulgan
Featured Videos
Current: Human Capital Management Strategy
More Videos From Bruce Tulgan
Bruce Tulgan
Featured Keynote Programs
Winning the Talent Wars
Recruiting and Retention for the New Hybrid Workplace
Employers are facing more severe talent shortages than any time since we began our workplace research in 1993. The most acute factors will ebb with time. But there will be lasting echoes.
While many people left their jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic, many others stayed in place waiting for the right time to leave. As hiring soars to record levels in the post-pandemic era, quit rates are also soaring as pent-up departure demand is released.
There are six steps to gaining strategic advantage as an employer in the new hybrid workplace.
- Define a clear value proposition.
- Build and maintain a steady supply chain of applicants.
- Be very, very selective.
- Stay in close dialogue between hiring and day one.
- Structure on-boarding and up-to-speed training.
- Turn every manager into a Chief Retention Officer
Bruce Tulgan breaks down each of these steps, drawing on decades of workplace research and the best practices which have allowed employers to gain control of turnover. With a blend of humor, insight, and concrete strategies, Bruce helps participants understand today’s talent wars and shares techniques for attraction, selection, on-boarding, up to speed training, performance management, development, and retention.
PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:
- The short- and long-term factors affecting today’s talent wars
- The five costs of voluntary turnover
- The top four causes of early voluntary departures
- The top five causes of mid- and late-stage career departures
- Why strong, highly-engaged management is more important than ever
- The six steps to gaining a strategic hiring advantage in the new hybrid workplace
TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:
- Improving on-boarding processes to reduce turnover among new hires
- Defining a clear and compelling employer value proposition
- Building and maintaining a steady supply chain of applicants
- Aligning communication up, down, sideways, and diagonal on the organization chart to improve outcomes—even in a hybrid work environment
- Creating an upward spiral of improvement for every employee in the organization through high-structure, high-substance communication
Fight Overcommitment Syndrome
Learn the Proven Best Practices for Saying “yes” and “no” at Work
Everyone at work is collaborating with lots more people than ever before. New tasks, projects, responsibilities, and opportunities come at us every single day. The truth is, everyone wants to be able to depend on each other and deliver for each other. But nobody can do everything for everybody. Too often, people overpromise, underdeliver—and burnout. That’s when siege mentality sets in: as individuals begin to resist collaboration, teamwork stalls and productivity suffers. One person’s burnout can have HUGE effects!
Navigating collaborative relationships—and the many demands on our time—is not going away. Overcommitting ourselves is not a sustainable solution for us, our teams, or our organizations. What does work? Adopting a true service mindset. That means delivering on what you promise by only saying “yes” to the best asks and the right opportunities.
Now more than ever, it takes extra savvy and skill to manage yourself, your many working relationships, and all the competing demands on your time and talent. But it’s not just about when to say “no”, it’s about how to say “yes”—a service mindset.
In this program, Bruce draws on decades of research, sharing true stories from real people, in real workplaces, in the real world, blending humor, insight, and concrete best-practices to show participants how to fight overcommitment syndrome. Participants will walk away as better collaborators, better prepared to avoid burnout and deliver great results.
PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:
- What overcommitment syndrome and siege mentality look like—the things most people identify as burnout
- Why adopting a true service mindset is not about saying “yes” to everyone and everything at work
- How carefully choosing “yes” and “no” can build you a better reputation in your organization
- The importance of aligning—up, down, and sideways—to ensure you’re not the one who ends up overcommitted
TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:
- Adopting a service mindset that boosts your reputation at work, rather than damage it
- When to say “no” and how to say “yes”
- Executing one thing at a time, not juggling
- Utilizing to-do lists and schedules to break work into doable chunks and find gaps for focused execution time
- Maintaining alignment up, down, sideways and diagonal
- Finding and building up Go-to People, when and where you need them
Back-To-Fundamentals Collaboration
Skills for Establishing Extreme Alignment on Your Team
Everyone at work is collaborating with lots more people than ever before. Not just those working alongside them, but all over the organization chart—up, down, sideways, and diagonal. The truth is, everyone wants to be able to depend on each other and deliver for each other. But when no one has the authority to require others to get things done, how are we supposed to deliver consistent results and maintain high performance?
Rather than escalating conflicts to a manager, resisting those conflicts and remaining frozen, or “proceeding until apprehended”, collaborate the right way: by aligning up, down, sideways, and diagonal.
The ad hoc, unstructured, as-needed communication typical of the collaboration revolution often breeds unnecessary problems that get out of control—leading to delays, errors, and plenty of relationship damage. Extreme alignment is the solution.
In this program, Bruce distills the proven best practices of real people, collaborating in the real world, into guidelines for communication that will revolutionize how you and your team work together. Drawing on decades of research into the habits and systems of successful people in highly-collaborative roles, Bruce equips teams with simple but powerful strategies for staying aligned, no matter where each person falls on the organization chart.
PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:
- What The Authority Conundrum is, why it happens, and how it stalls productivity, damaging working relationships over time
- The importance of alignment in today’s workplace—whether working as part of a team or as an “independent” contributor
- Why establishing alignment helps build true accountability by turning it into a process, not a slogan
- How to “work things out at their own level” and “take charge” without bribing, coercing, bullying, or overstepping their role
TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:
- Aligning vertically, before going sideways or diagonal
- “Going over your own head” at every step, through regular structured dialogue
- Putting more structure and substance into ad hoc, unstructured communication
- Dealing with interrupters and distractors
- Having better meetings and being a great meeting citizen
- Managing relationships in every direction on the organization chart: up, down, sideways, and diagonal
Managing Remotely
When the Workplace is No Longer a Place
Suddenly, everything’s turned upside-down. Where we work, when we work, how we relate to our bosses, to our people—it’s all in flux.
The most successful organizations and managers will design their futures and lead the way. They will be highly intentional and strategic about this sea change occurring in the work of managing work. They will acknowledge and understand the impact of what’s being lost— that intangible but oh-so-critical human factor—in order to address it. They will see that what matters today is, first, how we do what kinds of work and, second, when we do it.
Where we do it comes last.
Something valuable is lost when you and your colleagues work apart. Proximity does matter. Working remotely, you are missing a lot of unintentional soft data exchange; spontaneous interaction; and serendipitous value creation.
In this program, Bruce draws on decades of research and observation, to answer the most common and pressing questions about the new realities of working remotely:
- What will organizations look like?
- How will company culture be communicated and lived?
- How will we handle the basic work of management—staffing, performance management, and development?
PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN:
- How remote work exacerbates the complications of interdependent, high-collaboration work
- How remote work offers an opportunity for managers and organizations to take systems, practices, and competencies to a higher level
- Why place and time matter less and less as the currency of work becomes what value you can add
- Why even the most critical communication can be accomplished asynchronously
TECHNIQUES AND BEST PRACTICES FOR:
- Communicating with intention and cadence
- Coordinating the logistics of work and communication, while keeping the focus on results
- Hybrid-style management, where working and communicating together onsite is the exception, not the rule
- Mastering the three key aspects of managing in the new remote reality of work: staffing strategies; performance management; and employee development
- Translating the fundamentals of strong, highly-engaged management to remote work
- Conducting strong virtual meetings with teams and one-on-one
- How to impart intangibles such as culture and attitude through strong, highly-engaged management