Few people have had the influence on the field of management and motivation as Dr. Bob Nelson. He is president of Nelson Motivation, Inc., a management training and consulting company, that specializes in helping organizations improve their management practices, programs and systems. He is a co-founder of the National Association for Employee Recognition and previously worked closely with Dr. Ken Blanchard (The OneMinute Manager) as his principal writer, co-author, chief of staff and vice president of The Ken Blanchard Companies for ten years.

   Only a few professional speakers can claim to have sold as many books as Dr. Nelson: some 3 million books on management and motivation, translated into over 25 languages, including 1001 Ways to Reward Employees (now in its 2^nd edition and 52nd printing), The 1001 Rewards & Recognition Fieldbook, 1001 Ways to Energize Employees, 1001Ways to Take Initiative at Work and The Management Bible.

    Dr. Nelson appears frequently in the national media including (within the last six months) twice in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Money magazine, NPR and a dedicated box feature in BusinessWeek. He has also appeared numerous times on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS and has been featured in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Fortune and INC. magazines and numerous other publications to discuss how to best motivate today's employees.

    Bob has been speaking for more than 20 years and has spoken thousands of times to over 800 companies (many on a yearly basis). He has also performed hundreds of public seminars with American City Business Journals, Lumacore, Get Motivated Seminars and Wyncom's "Lessons in Leadership" to live audiences in excess of 80,000 people. He has worked with or consulted for almost two-thirds of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. He holds an MBA in organizational behavior from UC Berkeley and received his PhD in management from The Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management School at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles, where he worked closely with the late Dr. Peter Drucker on his doctoral studies.

1) Creating A Culture of Recognition – Performance Based

   Most employees today feel overworked and underappreciated.  During times of change when we are asking them to do more with less, they report feeling less valued and more stressed for their efforts than ever before.  Bob Nelson, Ph.D. will expand your thinking of what recognition means and how you can better and more frequently recognize those you work with -- even with little time, resources or budget.  This session will focus on core elements found in strong cultures of recognition that inspire employees to new levels of performance and help to create an exciting, positive work environment and competitive people advantage for the organization.  It features specific techniques and strategies that can be immediately applied back on the job within a larger, systematic framework for improvement over time.

   Far from being “fuzzy notion,” Dr. Nelson will show how recognition represents the single most validated principle for driving desired behavior and performance in today's work environments.   He will draw from research and his own doctoral work and experience in working with 2/3s of the Fortune 500 on the topic of rewards & recognition to show how the best companies and managers integrate recognition into their work practices, identifying and acting on opportunities and addressing the leading obstacles along the way.  His session is filled with specific real-life examples and techniques that can be immediately applied by attendees to systematically leverage, build and sustain a culture of recognition at work.

Attendees will learn:

·       Research about what employees most want when they do good work

·       Basics of effective recognition and the role every manager plays in it

·       Top reasons why managers do not use recognition and how to overcome each

·       A system framework for building an ongoing culture of recognition & reward

·       Best practices of leading organizations today regarding people management

·       Research-based six dimensions of world-class cultures of recognition

 2) Inspiring Exceptional Performance

   In this workshop, Bob Nelson will discuss strategies for getting employees to take initiative in the workplace today to suggest and act on their ideas to improve or innovate, including how employees can "manage up" and sell their ideas above them in the organization, and predict and overcome obstacles that are likely to encounter.  He will focus on the small things that can be done to start to make a BIG difference in your workplace as well as strategies for "keeping your commitment to your commitment" once you are back at work.  

 Attendees will learn:

   He shares research about current levels of stress in the workplace, how people can respond to stress in their jobs and makes the fundamental point that stress and excitement are essentially the same emotion and can be managed successfully.