I am excited to announce my latest book will be released within the next few months from Tremendous Life Books. The book is geared towards managers, with tips on how to develop, coach, and motivate employees. The book takes a unique approach, sounding more like advice you would receive from Caesar Milan than you would from Steven Covey.  Over the next few weeks I am going to use this blog to provide you the backstory on how the book took shape.

The concept started from an analogy I use in management workshops. I often work with managers looking for better ways to develop, coach, and motivate their employees for success. Managers are busy people, and there is a lot of demand on their time throughout the day. Sometimes the reason for an employee’s poor performance steams from the fact that expectations have not been clearly communicated to him/her. My analogy is about training a new puppy to sit and stay. The pooch doesn’t know what sit and stay means, and even if he did, he doesn’t understand why it’s important to comply.  You need to show him, reward him, and reinforce. It’s the same basic concept with employees.

Last year, I was asked to submit an article for the Credit union Executives Society (CUES) website. This would be my second article written for CUES. I relied on my dog metaphor, and wrote the article How Your Dog May Hold the Key to Training and Coaching Employees, which they published in April. Overall, the article received great feedback. At first glance, some people questioned if I was inadvertently comparing employees to dogs. That’s not the case at all. The focus wasn’t on the employee or even on the dog, it was on the manager who was more adept to communication and comprehending their pets at home than they were their employees at work. Once managers read through the entire article, they found the advice to be fun and practical. The positive comments encouraged me to expand my original metaphor and tell more stories. Within a few weeks, I had enough material for the basis of an entire book.

I self-published my first book, Promotions Are Not Served At The Deli Counter. With this book, I really wanted to get it distributed through a traditional publisher. I contacted Tremendous Life Books based on a recommendation from a training/speaking colleague of mine, Al Walker. Al told me about how wonderful the people were at TLB, and what a great relationship he forged with them as they published his latest book The Sheep Thief. Tremendous Life Books was founded in 1965 as Executive Books by noted speaker and author Charlie “Tremendous” Jones. Charlie Jones was an advocate of reading, as he often said “you will be the same person five years from now except for two things: the people you meet and the books you read.” After Charlie Jones passed away in 2008, his daughter Tracey became president and rebranded the company Tremendous Life Books to honor her father.

The individuals at TLB were as professional and personal as I could ever expect. My draft manuscript was initially received by Jason Liller. Jason is responsible for many things at TLB including author submissions. Jason read my manuscript and passed it along to Tracey Jones. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Tracey is a huge dog-lover. TLB was in the process of releasing its own dog-centric book, True Blue Leadership. Written by Tracey, True Blue Leadership provides leadership lessons from the perspective of her dog Mr. Blue. Tracey emailed me after a few weeks to let me know how much she liked what I had written. TLB is headquartered in Mechanicsburg, PA which is about a two hour drive away. We arraigned a day in August for me to drive up to meet everyone and talk about the book.