Ron McMillan

For more than twenty-eight years, Ron McMillan has helped union and first-level managers, CEOs, and corporate executives become measurably more vital by advising them on topics including team development, personal vitality, quality, communication, and results-oriented leadership. Cofounder of VitalSmarts, Ron has researched methods for driving rapid, sustainable, and measurable change in behaviors.

Ron is the coauthor of seven books, three of which are The New York Times bestsellers Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High and Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior.

Recognized as a subject-matter expert in interpersonal relationships, corporate culture change, and workplace issues, Ron has been featured widely in the national media including NPR, Inc. magazine, and The New York Times.

A gifted speaker, Ron has appeared at hundreds of conferences, conventions, and management retreats such as the American Society of Training and Development, Human Resource Development, and Direct Selling Association. Additionally, Ron has spoken to executives at Lockheed Martin, AT&T, Nike, Saturn, Hewlett-Packard, Ford, Sprint, Disney, Harley-Davidson, Providence Healthcare, and Intel. Ron’s unrivaled ability to delight a crowd and inspire his audience to improve their personal and professional lives has clients asking for his return again and again.

A pioneer in the training industry, Ron cofounded the Covey Leadership Center where he helped to develop numerous training programs including Principle Centered Leadership and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Ron is cofounder of VitalSmarts and currently serves on its board of directors. With award-winning training products based on thirty years of ongoing research, VitalSmarts has helped more than three hundred of the Fortune 500 realize significant results using a proven method for driving rapid, sustainable and measurable change in behaviors. VitalSmarts has been ranked twice by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America and has taught two million people worldwide.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

Whenever you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, it’s likely that a crucial conversation is keeping you stuck.

After more than thirty years of research in two dozen industries involving more than 25,000 individuals, VitalSmarts has observed leaders struggle with poor performance, stalled change initiatives, low productivity, strained relationships, and general lack of results. VitalSmarts’ observations confirm that leaders who avoid talking honestly with the right people about the right issues can expert poor results.

On the other hand, top-rated leaders routinely employ skills that turn diverse thought into synergy and synergy into results by mastering Crucial Conversations. In short, when the stakes are high, opinions differ, and emotions run strong, the best individuals, teams, and organizations:

* Have the skills to step up to controversial and heated issues

* Professionally discuss issues in a way that makes it safe for everyone to speak

* Create an environment where people share their best ideas, make wise decisions, and then act on those decisions with conviction

Based on the New York Times bestselling book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, this captivating topic guides audiences through the steps to mastering crucial conversations and harnessing the power of turning every employee interaction into an experience that achieves synergy, alignment, and agreement.

Audience participants will walk away from this speech with a new set of high-leverage tools to effectively achieve breakthrough results. Armed with the new skill set to make the most of every interaction, participants will create more positive results, personally, professionally, and throughout their entire organization.
Participants experience significant improvement and real results in areas such as:

* Productivity — At Sprint, applied Crucial Conversations skills resulted in a 93 percent improvement in productivity.

* Quality — After a Crucial Conversations intervention, quality, time, and cost metrics improved 10-15 percent at Sprint.

* Teamwork — At MaineGeneral Health, employees trained in Crucial Conversations were 167 percent more likely to speak up and directly resolve problems when they saw a teammate demonstrating poor teamwork or being disrespectful.

* Relationships — Survey results gathered at Franklin Pierce College six months after a Crucial Conversations intervention showed that passive-aggressive behavior and anger due to deficient communication was down by 14 percent, while trust levels had increased by 15 percent.

* Safety — Managers who went through the training at MaineGeneral Health showed a 53 percent improvement in speaking up over managers who had not been trained about shortcuts that could be dangerous for patients.

* Employee Satisfaction — At AT&T, employee satisfaction rose by 20 percent. At The University of Colorado Hospital, turnover decreased from 38 percent to 12.5 percent.

* Efficiency — At AT&T, billing costs were reduced by 90 percent after Crucial Conversations training. At Sprint, customer care expense was reduced by $20 million annually by automating and speeding up processes.

Are you craving similar results? Let VitalSmarts’ Crucial Conversations presentation be the catalyst your organization need to drive rapid and sustainable change, get stalled change initiatives back on track, and turn good individuals and teams into key contributors.

Length: 1 to 3 hours
Audience: General to Executive Level

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

What do a high-powered Fortune 500 executive, a tribal leader in sub-Saharan Africa, and the founder of a San Francisco-based conglomerate run exclusively by ex-cons have in common? They’ve all helped themselves and others change behavior. In other words, they’re all influencers.

The Fortune 500 executive brought a new product to market in a third the time of her predecessors—saving a struggling company. The tribal leader eliminated a deadly disease. The founder of the San Francisco conglomerate transforms hookers, thieves, and drug dealers into productive citizens. Each of these influencers has solved some of the world’s most profound problems.

We all want to be influencers. Hardly a day passes that we don’t try to influence ourselves or others to do something new and different. Whether you are looking to improve your relationships with your direct reports or motivate your employees to demonstrate more concern for profitability, you are continually working on ways to exert influence.

And yet, in spite of the fact that we are routinely trying to help ourselves and others alter their behavior, few of us can articulate a model of what it takes to do so. Its time this changed.

In this fast-paced and inspiring presentation based on the New York Times bestseller, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, you will learn to create rapid and sustainable change. You will journey from San Francisco to Thailand and meet influence masters who have made change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You’ll find out why some managers have increased productivity repeatedly and significantly—while others have failed miserably. In short, you’ll discover how to:

* Motivate yourself and others to do things you don’t feel like doing

* Rapidly master new skills to achieve greater results

* Harness the power of peer pressure to accelerate change

* Quickly amass the social influence to change the behavior of hundreds or thousands of people

* Use the invisible and constant power of the environment to make change the path of least resistance

The most important capacity you can hold is the capacity to influence behavior. Once you tap into the power of influence, you can begin to solve the problems you care about most—from the simplest to the most persistent, resistant, and profound challenges you can imagine.

Length: 1.5 to 3 hours
Audience: General to Executive level

Leadership for Maximum Engagement: Crucial Skills for Team and Organizational Performance

For decades, experts and researchers have studied and dissected what differentiates the best leaders and leadership teams from the worst. This research has led the VitalSmarts team of experts to focus on vision, audacious goals, execution, and accountability. Leadership expert and New York Times bestselling authors argue that rather than separating the bad from the good, leadership teams will learn more by asking what differentiates the good from the best. The best teams achieve something the rest never attain: 100 percent engagement and absolute intellectual honesty.

The Holy Grail of team performance is completely leveraging the hearts and minds of every team member. Typically, the roadblock that derails teams from leveraging their full potential is found in breakdowns of Crucial Conversations. Failures to fully disclose intellectual differences and fully confront collapses in performance are the root cause of mistrust, politics, and disengagement in top teams.

This highly practical, entertaining, and engaging presentation will draw from 20 years of study with over 100 executive-level and senior management teams that highlights skills needed to attain 100 percent engagement. Grenny and his co-authors have spent more than 10,000 hours watching how virtuoso teams manage crises, make decisions, and spur each other to peak performance through masterful practice of crucial conversations. Participants will learn skills that will immediately help them improve their crucial conversations and influence their team to maximum engagement.

Length: 1 to 3 hours
Audience: Middle Managers to Executive Leaders

Silence Kills: The Seven Crucial Conversations in Healthcare

All too often, well-intentioned professionals in healthcare organizations choose not to speak up when they’re concerned with the behavior, decisions, or actions of a colleague.

Your participation in this presentation ensures your involvement in a movement that is sweeping the nation. Released in 2005 at a national press briefing, this study is making a big impact on the healthcare industry. “Silence Kills” reviews seven categories of conversations that are especially difficult and, at the same time, appear to be especially essential for people in healthcare to master, including:

* Broken rules
* Mistakes
* Lack of support
* Incompetence
* Poor teamwork
* Disrespect
* Micromanagement

Exploring the current trends in healthcare, VitalSmarts guides the audience through solutions to avoidable medical errors. With 195,000 people dying each year in U.S. hospitals because of medical mistakes, this study suggests that creating a culture where healthcare workers speak up before problems occur is a vital part of the solution.

Length: 1 to 3 hours
Audience: Healthcare Professionals

"Ron McMillan gives every minute its sixty second's worth! His time with you will be engaging, interactive, and bottom line, influential. Ron offers uncommon common sense when it comes to life's crucial conversations." — MBNA America

"Ron showed a real passion for the power of crucial conversations in our lives and how we can affect them, rather than just be affected by them. He shared some very illustrative personal stories in order to emphasize the teaching points and was very thorough in the topics he covered." — AIG

"Ron McMillan is a wonderfully gifted and highly entertaining speaker who uses humor and energy to deliver a superb communications model for dealing with difficult conversations." — Trustmark Insurance Company

"The great thing about VitalSmarts is their all-star line up of facilitators and trainers. It was my pleasure to be introduced to Crucial Conversations through Ron McMillan. Ron has a way of making each session a true 'batch of one' experience. His down to earth, approachable style was a perfect match for the subject matter. I truly felt he created an atmosphere where dialogue was encouraged and supported." — CNA Insurance