What I'm Working On

The role plays were written from cases they were already dealing with

A hospital system asked for four hours with their middle managers and other healthcare workplace leaders. The subject was intergenerational communication and the workplace conflict that comes out of it. They wanted clear instruction, and they wanted role plays. This group learns by doing.

We built it as two halves with a lunch break between them. Teaching first: what each generation in their buildings expects from a colleague, from a manager, and from a patient's family, and why those expectations collide. Role plays after — written from situations they were already handling, and titled the way they'd recognize them: “Peer to Peer,” “Leader to Team,” “Maternity Discharge,” and “Medicare Patient w/ Daughter.”

Two of those four are patient-facing, which is the part most generational training leaves out. In a hospital the generational collision isn't only between staff. It's between a young nurse and an older patient's adult daughter, at the worst possible moment for both of them.

The reviews were strong. The leader who brought us in sent a note afterward that I've asked her permission to publish.

A room of couples hearing this as executives and as parents

Sixty minutes at a financial services firm's client event at a resort. The audience is VIP clients and their guests, and it's largely couples — which changes the talk. They're hearing generational change from two chairs at once: as leaders inside their own companies, and as parents working out why their kids approach a career the way they do.

So it runs in two halves. First, generational change in the workplace, built for an audience that's curious rather than obligated. Then retirement — because this group is taking the PHASE Into Retirement™ assessment, and the second half covers what PHASE has shown us about how people actually leave a career, and what the ones who do it well have in common.

An audience that has just answered questions about its own retirement is a different audience. The content has to be worth the conversation they'll have at dinner afterward.

“Sell the value of these benefits to young new hires”

That's their language, not mine, and it's the right framing. A workforce association in California asked for the closing keynote. Their members — workplace leaders and HR managers — already offer good benefits. What they don't have is a way to communicate the value of those benefits to new hires who don't read the benefits guide and haven't yet needed what's in it.

So I'm building around what Gen Z actually ranks first when they compare offers, how to talk about benefits in language that lands with someone in their first job, and what the rest of the workplace can learn from how this generation evaluates an employer. Some of what they're asking for out loud is what everyone else wanted quietly.

Closing keynote means it has to send people home with something they can use Monday morning — not a recap of the two days behind them.

My fifteenth consecutive year in the same room

This healthcare client celebrates physicians and staff reaching ten, twenty, and thirty years of service, and I've been part of it for fifteen years running. The content changes every year, because the workplace those ten-year honorees walked into isn't the one the thirty-year group did.

This year: generation and generational change in the workplace, and then something new for them — PHASE Into Retirement™ trends. A room built around long tenure is a room with a lot of people near the end of a career. Anyone who wants to take the PHASE assessment afterward can.

Fifteen years with the same audience is also the reason I can tell them what has actually changed in their building, rather than what has changed in general. And it's the honest answer to whether a generational talk is a one-time booking.

Advisors who want the conversation that isn't about money

A group of financial planners in Huntsville, Alabama wants to take their client service up to the next level. They'd heard about PHASE Into Retirement™ and invited the PHASE team to present at their monthly luncheon.

PHASE is the part of retirement that isn't money — Purpose, Health, Activities, Social life, and Everyday life. For an advisor, it's the conversation that keeps a client relationship alive after the portfolio question is settled, and most advisors have no framework for it. Their clients have planned the money and not the days.

This session is the introduction: what the assessment measures, what it's showing us about how people actually retire, and how an advisor puts it to work.