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Joseph  Grenny

Joseph Grenny

Business Communication Expert & NYT Best-Selling Author

Joseph Grenny

Business Communication Expert & NYT Best-Selling Author

Biography

Joseph Grenny believes the most interesting questions in the world have to do with human beings. He has devoted his career to understanding why we do what we do and how our behavior affects our organizations, our results, and our lives. In his engaging keynotes, Joseph shares his passion for social science and the belief that if you can change an organization, you change thousands of lives. Joseph Grenny is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, dynamic keynote speaker and leading social scientist for business performance. Over the past thirty years, he has delivered engaging keynotes at major conferences including the HSM World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall. Grenny’s work has been translated into 28 languages, is available in 36 countries and has generated results for 300 of the Fortune 500.

Grenny has shared the stage with General Colin Powell, Jack Welch, Jim Collins, Daniel Pink, Patrick Lencioni and Brené Brown at some of the world’s premier leadership conferences and organizations including HSM World Business Forum, Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, American Society of Training and Development and American Bankers Association. His greatest pleasure is connecting with audiences to inspire those changes with research-driven stories, real-life application, and skills demonstrated by the world’s most influential leaders — ideas and knowledge that if applied, can literally change people for good.

Grenny is the coauthor of four immediate New York Times bestsellers with more than three million copies in print: Crucial Conversations, Influencer, Crucial Accountability and Change Anything. He has contributed regularly to BusinessWeek and Forbes; appeared on The Today Show, CNN, Bloomberg and Fox Business News; and been cited in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

For the past thirty years, Grenny has conducted social science research with the goal to help leaders and organizations achieve new levels of performance. Specifically, he has focused on human behavior — the underlying written and unwritten rules that shape what employees do every day.

A protégé of Albert Bandura, the world’s most influential and greatest living psychologist, Grenny’s internationally published research led to the development of his four books as well as four award-winning training solutions of the same titles, which have helped more than one million people and 300 of the Fortune 500 companies in 36 countries change human behavior.

Joseph Grenny believes the most interesting questions in the world have to do with human beings. He has devoted his career to understanding why we do what we do and how our behavior affects our organizations, our results, and our lives. In his engaging keynotes, Joseph shares his passion for social science and the belief that if you can change an organization, you change thousands of lives.

His greatest pleasure is connecting with audiences to inspire those changes with research-driven stories, real-life application, and skills demonstrated by the world’s most influential leaders—ideas and knowledge that if applied, can literally change people for good.

Speaker Videos

TEDTalk: Change Behavior - Change the World

Speech Topics

Not All Conversations Are Equal. Some Are Crucial.

A passionate social scientist, Joseph Grenny has spent thirty years studying crucial moments that have the potential to change the trajectory of our career, lives, and relationships—moments when what we say and how we say it can mean the difference between success and failure. 

When the stakes are high, emotions run strong, and opinions differ, masters of crucial conversations create alignment and agreement. They speak up and share their concerns candidly and respectfully regardless of the other person’s level or position.

What’s more, in organizations that foster cultures of open dialogue, mistakes are caught more quickly, decisions are implemented more effectively, and innovation flows more routinely.

Bridging the Gap between Expectations & Results

Joseph Grenny has spent thirty years studying cultures of dialogue and accountability. When others let us down, break rules, fail to deliver on their promises, or behave badly, what do we do?

Unfortunately, most people choose to say nothing because when accountability is void, they assume they don’t have the power or authority to raise a concern. In fact, Joseph’s research shows people waste $1,500 and an 8-hour workday every time they avoid an accountability conversation.

However, in organizations that build cultures of accountability, people raise concerns with those beside, above, and below them on the organizational chart. As a result, problems are solved routinely and quickly and a pervasive sense of empowerment and responsibility for results prevails.

Leadership Is Intentional Influence

Every leader wants to be an influencer—to create wide-spread and lasting change. And yet, few leaders possess more than a handful of techniques for getting others to change. What truly influential leaders understand is that influence has little to do with pep talks, bribes or system updates but rather is the capacity to systematically, rapidly, and sustainably change a handful of key behaviors.

By drawing from the skills of hundreds of successful leaders, thousands of successful change efforts, and more than six decades of the best social science research, Joseph teaches a proven model for leading change—a model that was named the Change Management Approach of the Year by MIT’s Sloan Management Review.

10X Your Influence: New Research in Leading Change

Joseph Grenny has spent the past thirty years studying effective change agents—leaders who have rapidly and systematically produced widespread change in human behavior.

His research, published in the MIT Sloan Management Review and named by MIT as the Change Management Approach of the Year teaches that these effective influencers drive change by relying on six different sources of influence at the same time. Those who succeed predictably and repeatedly don’t differ from others by degrees. They differ exponentially. Joseph’s research reveals that leaders who understand how to combine all Six Sources of Influence™ are ten times more successful at producing substantial and sustainable change.

Four Crucial Skills of a High-Performance Culture

After studying a worldwide sample of more than 11,000 managers and employees, Joseph Grenny and his colleagues uncovered a formula for maximizing the hidden potential of an organization’s human system—the employees. Leaders who develop four competencies characteristic of a high-performance culture are 104% better at executing and 98% better at innovating than organizations that don’t succeed in these competencies.

Those competencies are: self-directed change, open dialogue, universal accountability, and influential leadership. Leaders who strategically invest in building these four competencies into their human system leverage what research shows is the most potent predictor of sustained value for customers, employees, and shareholders—a high-performance culture.

The Science of Leadership

For the past thirty years, Joseph Grenny has conducted social science research to help leaders and organizations achieve new levels of performance. Specifically, he has focused on human behavior—the underlying written and unwritten rules that shape what employees do every day.

A protégé of Albert Bandura, the world’s greatest living psychologist, Joseph’s internationally published research has been distilled into applicable skills leaders can implement to increase their personal influence, improve strategic relationships, and change behavior in their organization. He’ll share his latest insights on the intersection between social science and leadership.

Silence Kills: The Seven Crucial Conversations for Healthcare

Research and regulatory bodies have long confirmed that poor communication in healthcare is harmful at best and deadly at worst. The sad reality is that fewer than 10 percent of doctors and nurses speak up when they see colleagues make mistakes.

In this eye-opening and highly informative session, your audience will learn the seven categories of conversations that are essential for healthcare professionals to master: broken rules, mistakes, lack of support, incompetence, poor teamwork, disrespect, and micromanagement.

Books & Media

Books

Influencer