ATD Footer Logo

Neil Grant is the owner of Focal Leadership, a strategic leadership development consultancy based in Chicago. He majors on the design and integration of leadership development, talent management, succession planning, performance management and resource planning. He also is a leading authority on interim leadership to fuel organizational growth and transformation. Neil designs and delivers programs for clients as well as providing consulting services to develop strategy, programs and executive coaching interventions. Neil has a masters degree in leadership development and post-graduate qualifications in coaching and mentoring practice.

Neil Grant

March 2018 - TD Magazine

A New Gig for Senior Leaders?

Developing leaders to become better decision makers is a major challenge. Here are a few ways to build decision-making skills.

Making the Best Leadership Decisions

Any investment in leadership development must thoroughly consider its intent and value proposition to make it fit for purpose.

Is Your Leadership Development Strategy Focused on the Enterprise or Entitlement?

SEF Announces the 2015 Neil Rackham Research Grant Recipients

Prioritizing everyday acts of kindness in education is critical to support individual well-being, societal impact, and organizational success, and we are all a critical piece of the solution. George Mason University launched the Mason Chooses Kindness initiative in 2020 to inspire its community to engage in intentional kindness by doing caring and generous deeds every day. They are now working tirelessly to encourage others outside our community to do the same. Why? Kindness is always the right thing to do for society, especially in a world that has been termed “on fire,” and research links kindness-centered cultures to positive business outcomes for society, indicating that fostering inclusive, kindness-based cultures is an essential leadership skill. At the Costello College of Business at George Mason University (Costello), they passionately believe leaders educated in environments where kindness reigns are more likely to carry that value into the workplace and navigate a complex and diverse world in ways that benefit society at large. An extensive (and growing) body of research has revealed direct correlations between kindness-centered corporate cultures and positive business outcomes. For example, Mandy O’Neill, professor of management at Costello and senior scientist at George Mason’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being, has conducted research on this topic. She and her colleagues have found that organizations with cultures of “companionate love” (affectionate bonding between co-workers) can weather higher levels of collective anxiety without incurring increased operational costs or experiencing greater employee burnout, which can have a societal ripple effect. Education can and should happen everywhere — thank you ATD for accentuating this point— therefore our ask for each of you is to intentionally embed kindness into your daily interactions personally and professionally. We challenge you to think when you see less-than-kind behavior, to stop and ask yourself “If not ME, then who?” and act to lead with kindness to affect those around you. The following is excerpted from George Mason University’s 30 Days of Kindness Calendar.An Individual Roadmap to Kindness:Give someone a genuine compliment.Take a break to prevent burnout.Ask someone what they enjoy doing (and consider doing it with them).Practice active listening.Give thanks before a meal.An Organizational Roadmap to Kindness:Identify kindness champions.Align with strategy.Secure commitment from leadership.Foster true engagement.Measure progress. For more details, refer to our article in AACSB Insights. The ripple effect of doing so is proven. And as Adam Grant so nicely stated in his book Think Again, “When we think about how to plan our lives, there are few things that take priority over happiness…it’s one of the three unalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence.” Yet how many of us intentionally create steps to make this happen in our personal and professional lives? If not you, then who? Be the change. 

An Approach to Intentional Kindness: “If Not Me, Then Who?”

In 1996, Abraham Maslow (best known for his theorem of the hierarchy of needs in psychology) quipped that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Two years earlier, the American philosopher Abraham Kaplan made a similar observation: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”This adage came to life in my own family recently, when we learned that our future daughter-in-law found her new car covered with a half inch of ice after an overnight storm. Not sure what to do, she found a hammer in the trunk and proceeded to use it to smash the ice loose from bumper to bumper. Predictably, it was difficult to convince her insurance carrier to reimburse her for the multiple broken windows and sheet metal dents. (I’m sorry to confess that she will fit in nicely with our family!)What does this have to do with business and training? A great deal. Let me explain: Recently, I have become concerned that the “hammer du jour” in our metaphoric trunk is high technology.First, let me say that this article is not a Luddite rant against technology per se. This new millennium has brought to our training tool boxes a host of promising, wonderful technologies like web-based training, virtual instructor-led classrooms, simulations, gaming, and social media, to name a few. These tools make it easier to deliver training to more learners, less expensively, more consistently, and across broader geographies and time zones. In short, we can get more done with less as a result of the technology advances that have emerged.However, there is a tendency for people to use these technologies like the proverbial hammer. Some organizations have pushed forms of e-learning into cultures with little online learning interest and/or infrastructure. Others have insisted on taking an exclusively “high-tech” approach to teaching “high-touch” skills such as coaching and conflict resolution.More recently, the universal technology panacea in some quarters seems to be the application of new social media technologies to learning (a.k.a. “Learning 2.0”). The notion that most people learn better and enjoy it more in a social environment is inarguable. For that matter, the traditional classroom (when led by an interactive teacher or facilitator) can be a very social milieu within which to learn, particularly if the learning objectives are focused on human skills, such as leadership.The DownsideThe social media buzz, meanwhile, is about technology-based interactive experiences including blogs, chat rooms, and discussion forums, not to mention the wildly successful commercial social platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yammer. Clearly, these tools can be harnessed within our organizations to make learning more interactive, involving, and spontaneous, while also spanning geography and generation, and capitalizing on the collective wisdom of groups.However, some of these platforms can be risky for organizations in terms of security and legal liability. Technology can sometimes be surprisingly difficult and inconsistent. Corporate firewalls can be fussy about what they let through. And technology is always changing, which is good for progress but frustrating for infrastructure investments.In addition, corporate cultures differ, just like people do, and what is easily adopted in one organization may be ineffective in another. And finally, there are regional and international variances in uptake, technology, and governing laws and institutions. Thus, the promise of social media is tempered by the complexities and uncertainties experienced by organizations to varying degrees.Force-Fitting Doesn’t WorkUnfortunately, some learning and development professionals have tried to force-fit social learning tools and platforms into topics and cultures, whether or not they are necessarily well-suited. And regardless of the tools in our tool box, a few maxims about effective learning systems haven’t changed. Next week, I’ll post these tenets of learning systems design that are key, despite mode or technology. I’ll also list a few guiding principles for using social technologies.

Search results for 'Neil Grant'

Categories

Refine By

Search results for 'Neil Grant'

Categories

Refine By

Role

Topic

Industry