Joseph Grenny

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.

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.

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.

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.

Often, we want to make big changes but lack the resolve to see them through. We can’t seem to summon the necessary willpower to take on huge challenges like improving performance, earning a promotion or increasing productivity.

Joseph Grenny studied more than 5,000 people attempting to overcome entrenched personal challenges and uncovered a breakthrough in personal influence: our inability to change is not due to a lack of will, but rather, a lack of skill. With a clearer understanding of six powerful sources of influence that shape our behavior, we can become ten times more successful at changing anything.

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.

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.