Dick Grote: Business Speaker

One of America’s most authoritative and engaging consultants, business keynote speaker Dick Grote is an expert on leadership, performance management and building organization excellence. A platform master, Dick Grote’s presentations are filled with useful advice, pragmatic insights, wonderful anecdotes and memorable stories — combined with practical, real-world solutions that make sense. Dick Grote speaks straight from the heart – no notes, no podium. He is comfortable engaging an audience of a few dozen to a few thousand with a style and structure that allows people to remember his key points and core message long after the presentation is over.

Watch this special message from Dick Grote about his promise to deliver both substance and entertainment in every presentation he makes (1:31m)

Speech Topics for Dick Grote

The following is a list of Dick’s standard presentations. All speeches can be tailored to your audience’s specific needs.

The Myths of Performance Management

One of the reasons managers find the performance appraisal process so hard is that they believe so many things that just aren’t true. Like The Myth of Quantifiability: the erroneous belief that in order to be objective, you have to find countable units to base your appraisal on. Or The Myth of Comfort: the false notion that if HR would only get the form and the procedures right, then doing performance appraisals would be easy. Or The Myth of Predictability: That somehow we should be able to tell a person at the start of the year what he will need to do to get an “Outstanding” rating at the end of the year. Dick Grote will lightheartedly explore — and explode — these myths. The end result? Not only will everyone in the audience have a wonderful time, but they will walk away with a genuine belief that performance appraisal is one of their most important leadership responsibilities.

View a video excerpt from The Myths of Performance Management. (2:26m)

Roses, Daisies and Weeds: How to Develop Performance Excellence

Imagine a bell-shaped curve. If your organization is like most others, that bell-shaped curve indicates the distribution of your employees’ performance. At one end of the curve are the small number of genuine stars who make outstanding contributions. In the center of the curve is the huge majority of good solid performers. And then there’s the other end: the small minority of misfits and malcontents, goof-offs and goldbricks, mavericks and malingerers. In other words: Roses, Daisies, and Weeds.

With tremendous depth of content and genuine good humor, Dick Grote will tell you exactly how to re-recruit your roses, motivate your daisies, and eliminate your weeds.

Motivating Excellence: Helping Regular People Perform in Exceptional Ways

What really motivates people? To find out, just ask someone who remembers the job he or she had that produced the strongest feelings of motivation, fulfillment, and bone-deep, genuine job satisfaction. Then ask this question: What caused those feelings? The answers, you’ll discover, have nothing to do with our usual assumptions about princely pay and lofty status, great job security, luxurious working conditions or congenial co-workers. The fact is that real motivation arises from other factors, such as challenges and opportunities which truly encourage performance excellence.

Dick Grote will challenge your audience to discover the source of authentic motivation by exploring their own experiences. Unlike any business keynote speaker you’ve ever heard before, he will then show them how to apply what they’ve just learned about themselves to build real motivation in others.

Discipline Without Punishment: Building Accountability and Personal Responsibility

America’s biggest snack food company wasn’t too concerned when one of its plants started firing a lot of people. But suddenly customer complaints began mounting about the products made in that plant. All the gripes were the same — obscene messages were written on the chips! This bizarre situation led to the development of the Discipline Without Punishment® system: Dick Grote’s unique, responsibility-based approach that quickly, confidently and permanently solves people problems.

This engaging presentation by business keynote speaker Dick Grote is based on 30 years of his professional experience. He has helped hundreds of America’s most respected organizations replace their traditional procedures for solving people problems with his unconventional Discipline Without Punishment approach.