The definition of team is both a noun and a verb. And both have applicability in the world of business. The noun, “Team”, describes what you have and what you’re building. And the verb describes the action of teaming up and teamwork. In this talk, Grant connects these elements through the Affinity Principle.

Based on his book, “The Affinity Principle,” Grant shares palpable examples where he has witnessed and experienced the difference between being called and treated as an employee and being called and treated as a team member.

This is not an exploration of semantics. This is a talk that outlines a simple recipe to create a spirit of teamwork within your entire organization.

There are inevitable pinch points when we continue to do things the way we’ve always done them. These glass ceilings are hard to crack and often require a shift in perspective and mindset.

In this presentation, Grant explores ways to work on process improvement and explore opportunities for growth. He explores tactics ranging from delegation to outsourcing, process improvement to systems overhauls, and balancing automation with creativity.

Grant  also looks at transitional strategies that allow team members to expand their roles and allow everyone to move up through the organization. This can substantially improve retention and performance in your team, but ensuring the team members you’re promoting are up to the task does involve checks and balances that range from job crafting to safety nets.

Providing and communicating a clear purpose and a consistent set of expectations for team members is not as ubiquitous in business today as you might think.

In early-stage startups, chaos usually reigns. As structure forms and the team grows, plans change and strategy shifts. The rubber’s hitting the road, stress is usually high, and clarity (and “Affinity”) is rare.

Even as companies’ mature clarity of purpose and expectations often becomes more clouded. As clear as the strategy may be in the visionary’s head, oftentimes team members feel ill-informed and unsure of exactly what they should be doing.

Grant has consulted with a wide range of companies from the beverage industry to healthcare and has seen first-hand that lack of clarity and poor communications are consistent, and persistent issues.

If you feel your organization lacks clarity of purpose or expectations, come on this journey with Grant as he shares ways to create “Affinity” for your team.

He will share ways to add context and drive motivation. He’ll show how the ‘why’ provides a much deeper connection than the ‘what’. 

Team members need a meaningful common goal that morphs them from a group of individuals each doing a job (potentially in isolation) into a team with a purpose with clear expectations of them and the ideal outcome of their efforts. Grant will show you practical ways to achieve this optimal state in your team.

Encouragement helps create alignment and shape behavior in far more substantial and sustainable ways than disciplinary styles could ever hope to achieve.  

However, encouragement is not praise. Encouragement focuses on improvement and recognition of effort and can be doled out liberally in pursuit of the specific outcome sought.

With encouragement comes a sense of confidence and hope when it is underwritten by the support needed to achieve the designated goal.

Encouragement helps people persevere and in today’s discombobulated world of business, perseverance is more critical than ever.

Grant will share examples of companies built around the simple premise of raising people up and allowing those team members to be the best that they can be. 

Watch your profits soar when you focus on raising your people up!

There are fundamentals in the creation and nurturing of a culture of community and “Affinity” within an organization.

In this session, Grant shares simple ways to gain cohesion and a more organizational orientation, versus a departmental orientation.

Interdepartmental turf wars are routine in growing companies, and they usually start as a function of conflict in the leadership team. This silo effect dramatically impacts a company’s ability to function optimally.

Grant shares firsthand examples of the impact of ‘silos’ and the many ways in which you can enhance a sense of community, camaraderie and unity among your team even in the most challenging settings.

COVID has triggered a spike in anxiety disorders across the globe. This is impacting individuals, households, businesses, and entire communities.

In this session, Grant unpacks what causes anxiety and addresses those things that individuals, family members, companies and communities can influence.

Genetics and trauma are common ingredients of anxiety, but environmental factors such as diet, common lifestyle stressors, and uncertainty, can play significant and ongoing roles as triggers and fuel for anxiety disorders.

Grant shares simple, achievable lifestyle tips that are underwritten by peer reviewed research.

He also elucidates the degree of uncertainty surrounding COVID and how it is at direct odds with our innate need to seek certainty and make contingency plans. 

He also brings into focus research which clearly demonstrates that resilience increases when we focus on the things we can change and when we reduce our fixation on those things that are out of our control.

This session is full of simple and practical tools to reduce and better manage this epidemic of anxiety on an individual basis. Grant provides insights and tools to address the environmental factors we can influence and to better bring our attention to the present, where we can reduce the uncertainty that clouds all our minds in these turbulent times.

Encouragement helps create alignment and shape behavior in far more substantial and sustainable ways than disciplinary styles could ever hope to achieve.  

However, encouragement is not praise. Encouragement focuses on improvement and recognition of effort and can be doled out liberally in pursuit of the specific outcome sought.

With encouragement comes a sense of confidence and hope when it is underwritten by the support needed to achieve the designated goal.

Encouragement helps people persevere and in today’s discombobulated world of business, perseverance is more critical than ever.

Grant will share examples of companies built around the simple premise of raising people up and allowing those team members to be the best that they can be. 

Watch your profits soar when you focus on raising your people up!

Sometimes described as “fully absorbing experiences,” flow states describe the optimal state where we encounter a challenge that is testing our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is possible to meet this challenge.

If the challenge exceeds our skills, anxiety will rise. Or if our skills exceed the challenge, boredom sets in. In both these cases where the challenge either exceeds or underutilizes our capabilities, we’re not in a flow state.

This quest of Flow applies to you as a leader, to your team members in their daily pursuit of joy in their work, and to your company. When there is a state of Flow, productivity and performance follow.

In this session, Grant shares tools and tips to find and create a state of flow for you, your team, and your company.

Sometimes described as “fully absorbing experiences,” flow states describe the optimal state where we encounter a challenge that is testing our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is possible to meet this challenge.

If the challenge exceeds our skills, anxiety will rise. Or if our skills exceed the challenge, boredom sets in. In both these cases where the challenge either exceeds or underutilizes our capabilities, we’re not in a flow state.

This quest of Flow applies to you as a leader, to your team members in their daily pursuit of joy in their work, and to your company. When there is a state of Flow, productivity and performance follow.

In this session, Grant shares tools and tips to find and create a state of flow for you, your team, and your company.

A culture of trust, communication and great teamwork starts with mindful leadership.

In this presentation, Grant explores the connection between leadership and teamwork and how to produce a culture of trust and communication. He shares ways to inspire and ignite synergy between leadership and team in order to stimulate cooperation interdepartmentally and between divisions of your company.

Grant delivers this talk in simple, implementable ways that will help your team grow together. This talk can be incorporated with some fun activities exploring the differences and similarities between team members.

Empathy leads to great teamwork. When we get to know each other well, it becomes much easier to work together. 

This experiential layer can help reduce friction and develop appreciation and respect across your team.

Hire hard, manage easy.

The need to attract and retain talent has never been as necessary as it is in today’s global market.

Depth and breadth of your talent pool is critical, but how you lead and inspire teamwork will ultimately define your success.

In this presentation, Grant shares powerful methodologies for refining talent acquisition in your company. He also shares some unique perspectives on how to define and attract the right team members to your company.

Furthermore, Grant highlights critical elements of building cohesive and high-performance teams. He also focuses on engagement and retention tools and systems to ensure the talent you have worked so hard to recruit is more likely to stay on your team for the long term.

Change is inevitable. Whether in business or our personal lives, nothing stays the same forever. Helping your team navigate change can be challenging, and yet rewarding.

In this presentation, Grant explores the dynamics of change and how it is seen by a cross section of team members. He shows you how to help those team members who are resistant to navigating this inevitable phenomenon within your company.

Helping your team embrace and leverage change will help you grow your brand and create a more profitable business.

Get your team excited about embracing change today!

Consistently delivering your brand’s cultural promise to your team members, and in turn to your customers, is hard to do. It gets harder and harder as your company grows.

In this presentation, Grant shares scalable ways to grow and expand your cultural underpinnings and maintain brand integrity.

Grant has grown small, single0-site companies into regional and national icons and carried the cultural integrity through this growth. The power of a healthy corporate culture is undeniable and delivering your brand’s cultural promise through your team is achievable on any scale with the right training and systems in place.

The underpinnings of a great brand are complex, but incredibly important for your team to embrace. Building, or even maintaining a great brand is tied to many elements of your day-to-day operations.

In large measure, strong brands get built through strong culture and great customer experiences.

The process of defining your brand begins in the planning stages, but implementing that vision comes down to your team.

Your marketing team will be critical in this process, but your leadership and team members’ buy in is fundamental.

In this presentation, Grant explores some great brands and how they have achieved brand power and sustainability through their people.

When consulting with companies, one phrase is often repeated to describe systems and methodologies:

“But that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Business and industry are moving at an ever escalating pace and simply doing things the way they’ve always been done rarely aligns with present challenges and demands.

Even though embracing innovation can challenge a company’s need to maintain control, it is actually about doing things we’ve always done more efficiently and effectively.

Being innovative is about solving problems and bottlenecks with creativity, technology, and new ways of thinking about old problems. Innovation is crucial for growth, facing future challenges, and gaining an advantage over competitors.

With innovation comes disruption.

The disruptive nature of innovation can allow companies to transcend their competition.

In this presentation, Grant focuses on disruptive technologies and solutions that illustrate the inherent value of challenging status quo.  The challenge for leadership is navigating this rocky path while retaining talent and managing the future workforce and technology needs of the company.

Communication with your team and stake holders is critical in this process of change, and Grant illustrates the way major disruptors have embraced innovation while changing entire industries.

Technology intertwines every element of society, politics and business. Even keeping up within niche sectors can be incredibly hard.

Companies need to be receptive to technological opportunities and understand threats in their space.

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more and more prevalent and autopilot and driverless cars somewhat passé, companies are asking what they can do to keep up, or even get ahead of the opportunities tech can afford them.

Grant brings all this into focus around people and managing teams, while leveraging tech.

In the ever-accelerating race to improve and exceed the achievements of previous generations and iterations of everything, leveraging technology is inevitable.

However, it is our innate agility and creativity as humans that gives us the ability to adapt to this world of augmentation, altered realities, and constant disruption. Provided we’re willing to forego the premise of ‘business as usual’. 

Nowhere is this truer than in the leadership stakes.

As much as it may feel as though humans are moving into the background and technology is moving into the foreground, this need for innate creativity and agility ultimately secures our future as leaders and contributors to growth and success in our organizations.

Grant explores the top behaviors of global leaders that drive team dedication and performance and ultimately growth. Learn how your leadership team can cultivate and nurture those attributes.

Customers can be fickle, demanding and seemingly unreasonable at times, however their opinion of your business ultimately determines its future. 

Building a customer-centric company is a powerful way to future proof your business.

Providing tools and strategies for your team to become customer-centric will ultimately reduce the incidence of customer complaints, increase the traction you have in the marketplace, and help chart a course into the future based on customer’s needs and wants.

If you are serving your customer’s needs and wants, you in turn are positioning yourself as the preferred provider for the products or services you’re purveying. Happy customers refer their friends, peers, and family, ensuring growth for your company well into the future.

In this session Grant elucidates the benefits of the Net Promoter System and shares firsthand anecdotes and examples from multiple companies he has led that enjoyed industry leading Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) scores. These benchmark scores were not by accident, or coincidence.

Driving customer delight is a process that begins with recruitment and truly never ends. 

In today’s highly contested market space customer care defines the brands that have both high profitability and longevity. 

Grant also previews well-known NPS leaders such as Starbucks and lesser-known companies such as Zappos (online retail sales) or Voxeo (software and telecom), to outline a formulaic approach to improving NPS numbers and in turn driving growth and profitability.

Sometimes described as “fully absorbing experiences,” flow states describe the optimal state where we encounter a challenge that is testing our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is possible to meet this challenge.

If the challenge exceeds our skills, anxiety will rise. Or if our skills exceed the challenge, boredom sets in. In both these cases where the challenge either exceeds or underutilizes our capabilities, we’re not in a flow state.

This quest of Flow applies to you as a leader, to your team members in their daily pursuit of joy in their work, and to your company. When there is a state of Flow, productivity and performance follow.

In this session, Grant shares tools and tips to find and create a state of flow for you, your team, and your company.

John Maxwell describes “Level 4 Leadership” as “People Development.” He says that when you’re a Level 4 leader, “People follow you because of what you have done for them.”

He then describes Level 5 Leadership as the “Pinnacle of Leadership.” This is where, “People follow you because of who you are and what you represent.”

In both these cases, these leaders are Mentors.

A mentor can help develop leaders directly, or indirectly. In turn, this can inspire those new leaders to perpetuate the cycle of leadership growth, by growing leaders themselves.

What Maxwell would describe as a Level 5 Organization comes from this perpetuation of leadership growth.

Grant will share the intrinsic value of a Level 5 Organization and detail the clear increments needed to establish that perpetual motion of leadership growth in your organization.

The Growth Mindset is an attitude of prosperity and advancement. It is the ‘can do‘ of high-performance teams. When “Affinity” exists within your team, the Growth Mindset follows. 

Encouragement, curiosity, and learning are all by-products of “Affinity.” The growth mindset fosters a curiosity and passion for learning that was founded on a belief that intellect, creativity, and even less measurable attributes like love and friendship can be nurtured with passion, hard work and practice.

Grant will explain that when we have the growth mindset, we see failures and setbacks as learning opportunities. And this in and of itself minimizes self-imposed limitations.

He will further expound the fact that growth mindset does not mean that you’re an eternal optimist. It does mean that your passion for stretching yourself, for sticking with it when things aren’t going well, allows you to thrive in the toughest times of your life.

This session is a fun exploration of how to attract “can-do” talent and further develop a Growth Mindset in your business. 

We live in a highly competitive, fast moving and fickle business world. What is all the rage today can be sidelined overnight and replaced by bigger, better, smaller, taller alternatives. 

The lifecycle of a product or a service enjoying significant market share (without making continued and often significant adjustments) is getting shorter and shorter. Competition and commoditization are escalating at unprecedented rates.

As a result, leaders are continually asked to re-evaluate, re-think, re-tool, re-engineer, and re-birth elements of their products and services, and even their whole companies.

Therefore, innovation must be encouraged within organizations that hope to survive, let alone thrive and create a legacy. Challenging the status quo is a non-negotiable.

In this session, Grant shares the many ways in which to invoke innovation as an essential lever that increases profitability and growth within organizations.

Sometimes described as “fully absorbing experiences,” flow states describe the optimal state where we encounter a challenge that is testing our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is possible to meet this challenge.

If the challenge exceeds our skills, anxiety will rise. Or if our skills exceed the challenge, boredom sets in. In both these cases where the challenge either exceeds or underutilizes our capabilities, we’re not in a flow state.

This quest of Flow applies to you as a leader, to your team members in their daily pursuit of joy in their work, and to your company. When there is a state of Flow, productivity and performance follow.

In this session, Grant shares tools and tips to find and create a state of flow for you, your team, and your company.

Grant has consulted to numerous nascent, struggling, and successful companies over the years. If there was one indelible lesson that he garnered from every one of those experiences, it was the immeasurable value of communication.

During this session Grant will demonstrate the value of strong communication and share ways to build healthy and fruitful communication within your organization.

He will share platforms, tools, mechanisms, and forums to create healthy two-way exchanges throughout your organization.

It is antithetical to attract team members who may be significantly different from us or hold alternate views. On some levels, this can evoke a feeling of vulnerability. When we’re surrounded by like-minded people seeing the world the way we do, there’s a certain comfort in that camaraderie. 

Yet as we open ourselves up to differing opinions, without fear of vulnerability, we become more resilient. We must understand that we don’t have all the answers and allow for additional points of view to permeate our bubble and confront the inevitable confirmation bias we all have. 

Much like a GPS system, if all the data points come from the same single position (or viewpoint), it is hard to get a true perspective on where you’re truly located or how well you’re really performing. With singular viewpoints and lack of diversity, it is increasingly more difficult to prosper in this ever-changing world we find ourselves in today.

Grant will share viable ways to promote and leverage diversity for optimal outcomes and performance.

John Maxwell describes “Level 4 Leadership” as “People Development.” He says that when you’re a Level 4 leader, “People follow you because of what you have done for them.”

He then describes Level 5 Leadership as the “Pinnacle of Leadership.” This is where, “People follow you because of who you are and what you represent.”

In both these cases, these leaders are Mentors.

A mentor can help develop leaders directly, or indirectly. In turn, this can inspire those new leaders to perpetuate the cycle of leadership growth, by growing leaders themselves.

What Maxwell would describe as a Level 5 Organization comes from this perpetuation of leadership growth.

Grant will share the intrinsic value of a Level 5 Organization and detail the clear increments needed to establish that perpetual motion of leadership growth in your organization.

As with most attributes, inspiration can come in many shapes and forms. And what inspires one person doesn’t always inspire another. 

According to recent research conducted over three years by Mark Horwitch and Meredith Whipple Callahan at Bain & Company:

“The most inspiring characteristics of leadership emanate from how you connect with others and include attributes such as humility, empathy, listening skills, and vitality.”

The other key point from this study is that you don’t need all 33 characteristics detailed in the study to be inspirational. You can have as few as one. 

If your one distinguishing strength is in the top 10% of your peer group, you’re twice as likely to be inspirational.

Obviously, the more strengths you have the more inspirational you can be and the more likely you are to create Affinity. The study shows that any four strengths combined can almost assure your status as an inspirational leader.

Explore these characteristics with Grant in this fun and informative talk about finding and driving inspiration within your organization.

Without trust in your organization, most attributes that define a functional team disappear.  

This in turn impacts growth and performance in your company, and ultimately happiness among your team.

In the World Happiness Report 2016, the research team found that lack of social trust significantly undermined a country’s happiness scores. This applies to the microcosm of business equally.

Grant explores the “Triangle of Trust” and other tools to help you grow trust among your team and demonstrate the integrity that underpins your growth goals.

One thing that courses through most teams’ veins is the desire to win. To be part of something special. 

This is where shared and well-articulated goals and encouragement can lead teams to significant performance improvements.

However, what works to inspire one team member may not work to inspire another. The performance-oriented company needs to find the resonant frequency teams and individuals need in order to focus their energy on the performance outcomes needed. 

This demands that performance-oriented leaders know as many facets of their people and teams as possible.

In this session, Grant illuminates ways to drive dedication and performance through relationships and performance orientation. This ultimately leads to a state of “Affinity” as Grant describes in his best-selling book, “The Affinity Principle”.

Grant has consulted to numerous nascent, struggling, and successful companies over the years. If there was one indelible lesson that he garnered from every one of those experiences, it was the immeasurable value of communication.

During this session Grant will demonstrate the value of strong communication and share ways to build healthy and fruitful communication within your organization.

He will share platforms, tools, mechanisms, and forums to create healthy two-way exchanges throughout your organization.

Long-term, mid-term and short-term strategic initiatives are essential to maintain focus.

Aligning, prioritizing and focusing resources on these initiatives can be challenging. In this presentation, Grant explores a range of approaches from simple tools to sophisticated information acquisition, analysis and implementation strategies. He also hammers home the importance of maintaining focus and avoiding ‘strategic creep’.

In the fast-paced business environments we compete in today, problem solving skills are essential to keep your team and company on its strategic course.

These course corrections are critical and Grant reviews tried and proven tools and techniques and also explores some unique and innovative ways to create a culture of solution providers.

Customers can be fickle, demanding and seemingly unreasonable at times, however their opinion of your business ultimately determines its future. 

Building a customer-centric company is a powerful way to future proof your business.

Providing tools and strategies for your team to become customer-centric will ultimately reduce the incidence of customer complaints, increase the traction you have in the marketplace, and help chart a course into the future based on customer’s needs and wants.

If you are serving your customer’s needs and wants, you in turn are positioning yourself as the preferred provider for the products or services you’re purveying. Happy customers refer their friends, peers, and family, ensuring growth for your company well into the future.

In this session Grant elucidates the benefits of the Net Promoter System and shares firsthand anecdotes and examples from multiple companies he has led that enjoyed industry leading Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) scores. These benchmark scores were not by accident, or coincidence.

Driving customer delight is a process that begins with recruitment and truly never ends. 

In today’s highly contested market space customer care defines the brands that have both high profitability and longevity. 

Grant also previews well-known NPS leaders such as Starbucks and lesser-known companies such as Zappos (online retail sales) or Voxeo (software and telecom), to outline a formulaic approach to improving NPS numbers and in turn driving growth and profitability.

In the ever-accelerating race to improve and exceed the achievements of previous generations and iterations of everything, leveraging technology is inevitable.

However, it is our innate agility and creativity as humans that gives us the ability to adapt to this world of augmentation, altered realities, and constant disruption. Provided we’re willing to forego the premise of ‘business as usual’. 

Nowhere is this truer than in the leadership stakes.

As much as it may feel as though humans are moving into the background and technology is moving into the foreground, this need for innate creativity and agility ultimately secures our future as leaders and contributors to growth and success in our organizations.

Grant explores the top behaviors of global leaders that drive team dedication and performance and ultimately growth. Learn how your leadership team can cultivate and nurture those attributes.

As with most attributes, inspiration can come in many shapes and forms. And what inspires one person doesn’t always inspire another. 

According to recent research conducted over three years by Mark Horwitch and Meredith Whipple Callahan at Bain & Company:

“The most inspiring characteristics of leadership emanate from how you connect with others and include attributes such as humility, empathy, listening skills, and vitality.”

The other key point from this study is that you don’t need all 33 characteristics detailed in the study to be inspirational. You can have as few as one. 

If your one distinguishing strength is in the top 10% of your peer group, you’re twice as likely to be inspirational.

Obviously, the more strengths you have the more inspirational you can be and the more likely you are to create Affinity. The study shows that any four strengths combined can almost assure your status as an inspirational leader.

Explore these characteristics with Grant in this fun and informative talk about finding and driving inspiration within your organization.

Without trust in your organization, most attributes that define a functional team disappear.  

This in turn impacts growth and performance in your company, and ultimately happiness among your team.

In the World Happiness Report 2016, the research team found that lack of social trust significantly undermined a country’s happiness scores. This applies to the microcosm of business equally.

Grant explores the “Triangle of Trust” and other tools to help you grow trust among your team and demonstrate the integrity that underpins your growth goals.

One thing that courses through most teams’ veins is the desire to win. To be part of something special. 

This is where shared and well-articulated goals and encouragement can lead teams to significant performance improvements.

However, what works to inspire one team member may not work to inspire another. The performance-oriented company needs to find the resonant frequency teams and individuals need in order to focus their energy on the performance outcomes needed. 

This demands that performance-oriented leaders know as many facets of their people and teams as possible.

In this session, Grant illuminates ways to drive dedication and performance through relationships and performance orientation. This ultimately leads to a state of “Affinity” as Grant describes in his best-selling book, “The Affinity Principle”.

Getting everyone playing together in the sandbox is challenging. Done well, it can help engender cooperation and collaboration. 

This always takes a delicate balance of diplomacy and candor. As much as dedicated and high performing teams cite diplomacy as a preferred behavior for their leaders, it can cause the leader to hold back on delivering truth bombs that may potentially lead to a better ultimate outcome.  These compromises can blur the lines at times. 

The diplomatic style can be incredibly important in organizations seeking integration and collaboration. However, it’s not always the best style in start-ups, early stage, and fast-moving organizations.

Grant shares real-world examples of companies spanning the spectrum of that delicate continuum. He then examines how your executive team can help find that balance and amplify your company’s “Affinity”.

Sometimes described as “fully absorbing experiences,” flow states describe the optimal state where we encounter a challenge that is testing our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is possible to meet this challenge.

If the challenge exceeds our skills, anxiety will rise. Or if our skills exceed the challenge, boredom sets in. In both these cases where the challenge either exceeds or underutilizes our capabilities, we’re not in a flow state.

This quest of Flow applies to you as a leader, to your team members in their daily pursuit of joy in their work, and to your company. When there is a state of Flow, productivity and performance follow.

In this session, Grant shares tools and tips to find and create a state of flow for you, your team, and your company.

When consulting with companies, one phrase is often repeated to describe systems and methodologies:

“But that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Business and industry are moving at an ever escalating pace and simply doing things the way they’ve always been done rarely aligns with present challenges and demands.

Even though embracing innovation can challenge a company’s need to maintain control, it is actually about doing things we’ve always done more efficiently and effectively.

Being innovative is about solving problems and bottlenecks with creativity, technology, and new ways of thinking about old problems. Innovation is crucial for growth, facing future challenges, and gaining an advantage over competitors.

With innovation comes disruption.

The disruptive nature of innovation can allow companies to transcend their competition.

In this presentation, Grant focuses on disruptive technologies and solutions that illustrate the inherent value of challenging status quo.  The challenge for leadership is navigating this rocky path while retaining talent and managing the future workforce and technology needs of the company.

Communication with your team and stake holders is critical in this process of change, and Grant illustrates the way major disruptors have embraced innovation while changing entire industries.

Technology intertwines every element of society, politics and business. Even keeping up within niche sectors can be incredibly hard.

Companies need to be receptive to technological opportunities and understand threats in their space.

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more and more prevalent and autopilot and driverless cars somewhat passé, companies are asking what they can do to keep up, or even get ahead of the opportunities tech can afford them.

Grant brings all this into focus around people and managing teams, while leveraging tech.

Group think: “The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.”

Group think means reduced performance and productivity.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but the best decisions come when we gather multiple data points and team members feel free to express a differing opinion without potential retribution.

Whether it’s your Board of Directors, your executive team, or your team itself, diversity is essential. Diversity of opinion, gender, race, disability, of age, etc.

In this presentation, Grant shares anecdotes and graphic examples of the power of diversity in your workplace. Studies abound that support these benefits of greater diversity within companies.

Grant also shares some of the challenges that come with diversity and puts them in perspective.

Fostering different ideas, viewpoints and perspectives demands establishing trust, mutual respect and a culture of inclusion.

Creating this culture of teamwork and respect will promote a positive and productive work environment and Grant  shares some simple tools to establish these touchstones.

This talk is a great lead in to implementing a diversity training program. Ongoing diversity training is an essential element in educating your team on the proper way to include and treat people of different backgrounds.

Long-term, mid-term and short-term strategic initiatives are essential to maintain focus.

Aligning, prioritizing and focusing resources on these initiatives can be challenging. In this presentation, Grant explores a range of approaches from simple tools to sophisticated information acquisition, analysis and implementation strategies. He also hammers home the importance of maintaining focus and avoiding ‘strategic creep’.

In the fast-paced business environments we compete in today, problem solving skills are essential to keep your team and company on its strategic course.

These course corrections are critical and Grant reviews tried and proven tools and techniques and also explores some unique and innovative ways to create a culture of solution providers.

COVID has triggered a spike in anxiety disorders across the globe. This is impacting individuals, households, businesses, and entire communities.

In this session, Grant unpacks what causes anxiety and addresses those things that individuals, family members, companies and communities can influence.

Genetics and trauma are common ingredients of anxiety, but environmental factors such as diet, common lifestyle stressors, and uncertainty, can play significant and ongoing roles as triggers and fuel for anxiety disorders.

Grant shares simple, achievable lifestyle tips that are underwritten by peer reviewed research.

He also elucidates the degree of uncertainty surrounding COVID and how it is at direct odds with our innate need to seek certainty and make contingency plans. 

He also brings into focus research which clearly demonstrates that resilience increases when we focus on the things we can change and when we reduce our fixation on those things that are out of our control.

This session is full of simple and practical tools to reduce and better manage this epidemic of anxiety on an individual basis. Grant provides insights and tools to address the environmental factors we can influence and to better bring our attention to the present, where we can reduce the uncertainty that clouds all our minds in these turbulent times.

Customers can be fickle, demanding and seemingly unreasonable at times, however their opinion of your business ultimately determines its future. 

Building a customer-centric company is a powerful way to future proof your business.

Providing tools and strategies for your team to become customer-centric will ultimately reduce the incidence of customer complaints, increase the traction you have in the marketplace, and help chart a course into the future based on customer’s needs and wants.

If you are serving your customer’s needs and wants, you in turn are positioning yourself as the preferred provider for the products or services you’re purveying. Happy customers refer their friends, peers, and family, ensuring growth for your company well into the future.

In this session Grant elucidates the benefits of the Net Promoter System and shares firsthand anecdotes and examples from multiple companies he has led that enjoyed industry leading Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) scores. These benchmark scores were not by accident, or coincidence.

Driving customer delight is a process that begins with recruitment and truly never ends. 

In today’s highly contested market space customer care defines the brands that have both high profitability and longevity. 

Grant also previews well-known NPS leaders such as Starbucks and lesser-known companies such as Zappos (online retail sales) or Voxeo (software and telecom), to outline a formulaic approach to improving NPS numbers and in turn driving growth and profitability.

In the ever-accelerating race to improve and exceed the achievements of previous generations and iterations of everything, leveraging technology is inevitable.

However, it is our innate agility and creativity as humans that gives us the ability to adapt to this world of augmentation, altered realities, and constant disruption. Provided we’re willing to forego the premise of ‘business as usual’. 

Nowhere is this truer than in the leadership stakes.

As much as it may feel as though humans are moving into the background and technology is moving into the foreground, this need for innate creativity and agility ultimately secures our future as leaders and contributors to growth and success in our organizations.

Grant explores the top behaviors of global leaders that drive team dedication and performance and ultimately growth. Learn how your leadership team can cultivate and nurture those attributes.

As with most attributes, inspiration can come in many shapes and forms. And what inspires one person doesn’t always inspire another. 

According to recent research conducted over three years by Mark Horwitch and Meredith Whipple Callahan at Bain & Company:

“The most inspiring characteristics of leadership emanate from how you connect with others and include attributes such as humility, empathy, listening skills, and vitality.”

The other key point from this study is that you don’t need all 33 characteristics detailed in the study to be inspirational. You can have as few as one. 

If your one distinguishing strength is in the top 10% of your peer group, you’re twice as likely to be inspirational.

Obviously, the more strengths you have the more inspirational you can be and the more likely you are to create Affinity. The study shows that any four strengths combined can almost assure your status as an inspirational leader.

Explore these characteristics with Grant in this fun and informative talk about finding and driving inspiration within your organization.

Without trust in your organization, most attributes that define a functional team disappear.  

This in turn impacts growth and performance in your company, and ultimately happiness among your team.

In the World Happiness Report 2016, the research team found that lack of social trust significantly undermined a country’s happiness scores. This applies to the microcosm of business equally.

Grant explores the “Triangle of Trust” and other tools to help you grow trust among your team and demonstrate the integrity that underpins your growth goals.

One thing that courses through most teams’ veins is the desire to win. To be part of something special. 

This is where shared and well-articulated goals and encouragement can lead teams to significant performance improvements.

However, what works to inspire one team member may not work to inspire another. The performance-oriented company needs to find the resonant frequency teams and individuals need in order to focus their energy on the performance outcomes needed. 

This demands that performance-oriented leaders know as many facets of their people and teams as possible.

In this session, Grant illuminates ways to drive dedication and performance through relationships and performance orientation. This ultimately leads to a state of “Affinity” as Grant describes in his best-selling book, “The Affinity Principle”.

Getting everyone playing together in the sandbox is challenging. Done well, it can help engender cooperation and collaboration. 

This always takes a delicate balance of diplomacy and candor. As much as dedicated and high performing teams cite diplomacy as a preferred behavior for their leaders, it can cause the leader to hold back on delivering truth bombs that may potentially lead to a better ultimate outcome.  These compromises can blur the lines at times. 

The diplomatic style can be incredibly important in organizations seeking integration and collaboration. However, it’s not always the best style in start-ups, early stage, and fast-moving organizations.

Grant shares real-world examples of companies spanning the spectrum of that delicate continuum. He then examines how your executive team can help find that balance and amplify your company’s “Affinity”.

Sometimes described as “fully absorbing experiences,” flow states describe the optimal state where we encounter a challenge that is testing our skills, and yet our skills and capacities are such that it is possible to meet this challenge.

If the challenge exceeds our skills, anxiety will rise. Or if our skills exceed the challenge, boredom sets in. In both these cases where the challenge either exceeds or underutilizes our capabilities, we’re not in a flow state.

This quest of Flow applies to you as a leader, to your team members in their daily pursuit of joy in their work, and to your company. When there is a state of Flow, productivity and performance follow.

In this session, Grant shares tools and tips to find and create a state of flow for you, your team, and your company.

Grant has consulted to numerous nascent, struggling, and successful companies over the years. If there was one indelible lesson that he garnered from every one of those experiences, it was the immeasurable value of communication.

During this session Grant will demonstrate the value of strong communication and share ways to build healthy and fruitful communication within your organization.

He will share platforms, tools, mechanisms, and forums to create healthy two-way exchanges throughout your organization.

It is antithetical to attract team members who may be significantly different from us or hold alternate views. On some levels, this can evoke a feeling of vulnerability. When we’re surrounded by like-minded people seeing the world the way we do, there’s a certain comfort in that camaraderie. 

Yet as we open ourselves up to differing opinions, without fear of vulnerability, we become more resilient. We must understand that we don’t have all the answers and allow for additional points of view to permeate our bubble and confront the inevitable confirmation bias we all have. 

Much like a GPS system, if all the data points come from the same single position (or viewpoint), it is hard to get a true perspective on where you’re truly located or how well you’re really performing. With singular viewpoints and lack of diversity, it is increasingly more difficult to prosper in this ever-changing world we find ourselves in today.

Grant will share viable ways to promote and leverage diversity for optimal outcomes and performance.

John Maxwell describes “Level 4 Leadership” as “People Development.” He says that when you’re a Level 4 leader, “People follow you because of what you have done for them.”

He then describes Level 5 Leadership as the “Pinnacle of Leadership.” This is where, “People follow you because of who you are and what you represent.”

In both these cases, these leaders are Mentors.

A mentor can help develop leaders directly, or indirectly. In turn, this can inspire those new leaders to perpetuate the cycle of leadership growth, by growing leaders themselves.

What Maxwell would describe as a Level 5 Organization comes from this perpetuation of leadership growth.

Grant will share the intrinsic value of a Level 5 Organization and detail the clear increments needed to establish that perpetual motion of leadership growth in your organization.

The Growth Mindset is an attitude of prosperity and advancement. It is the ‘can do‘ of high-performance teams. When “Affinity” exists within your team, the Growth Mindset follows. 

Encouragement, curiosity, and learning are all by-products of “Affinity.” The growth mindset fosters a curiosity and passion for learning that was founded on a belief that intellect, creativity, and even less measurable attributes like love and friendship can be nurtured with passion, hard work and practice.

Grant will explain that when we have the growth mindset, we see failures and setbacks as learning opportunities. And this in and of itself minimizes self-imposed limitations.

He will further expound the fact that growth mindset does not mean that you’re an eternal optimist. It does mean that your passion for stretching yourself, for sticking with it when things aren’t going well, allows you to thrive in the toughest times of your life.

This session is a fun exploration of how to attract “can-do” talent and further develop a Growth Mindset in your business. 

We live in a highly competitive, fast moving and fickle business world. What is all the rage today can be sidelined overnight and replaced by bigger, better, smaller, taller alternatives. 

The lifecycle of a product or a service enjoying significant market share (without making continued and often significant adjustments) is getting shorter and shorter. Competition and commoditization are escalating at unprecedented rates.

As a result, leaders are continually asked to re-evaluate, re-think, re-tool, re-engineer, and re-birth elements of their products and services, and even their whole companies.

Therefore, innovation must be encouraged within organizations that hope to survive, let alone thrive and create a legacy. Challenging the status quo is a non-negotiable.

In this session, Grant shares the many ways in which to invoke innovation as an essential lever that increases profitability and growth within organizations.

For a long time, we have heard about, and no doubt experienced, “generation gaps”.

Grant approaches this topic from a very different perspective and looks at the opportunities that exist between and across generations. Most companies have a spread of generations across their workforce, and Grant explores the benefits of this cross section.

Some companies are more monochromatic, typically hiring within a narrow band of age.

Grant shows some very tangible ways in which a more age diverse workforce can benefit your brand. He also explores the differences that exist when it comes to retaining, engaging, and understanding different generations in the workforce.

This presentation spans the Baby Boomers through to Post-Millennials and can focus on the areas in which your company has the most relevance.

NOTE: Grant can also cover targeting different generations as customers.