As Founder and Principal of Griggs Leadership, Dr. Griggs designs and facilitates high engagement executive leadership development programs as vehicles to work with intractable organizational challenges and troubled executives. He is a specialist in conflict resolution and culture change with particular expertise in multicultural and cross-cultural dynamics and the application of chaos theory to organizational change. Thomas currently directs both on-site and online programs that serve organizational and community leaders around the world.
For over four decades Dr. Griggs has worked in every sector of the economy, from inside Fortune 50 companies to hand-in-hand with community organizations in the most impoverished regions of the United States. His unique expertise derives from study and experience in a variety of disciplines, including family systems therapy, acute psychiatric inpatient wards, Employee Assistance Programming, threat-of-violence management, critical incident stress debriefings and extensive training in the use of cultural group analysis. He has created and led three successful businesses prior to entering the distance learning field. He also knows how to play and loves to dance.
Dr. Griggs was formerly Area Director of Employee Assistance and Managed Mental Health Programs for Aetna Life & Casualty. He is also currently a Senior Consultant with VISIONS, Inc. for training and consulting in multicultural process in organizations across the U.S. and abroad.
After graduating from Duke University he received a Rockefeller Scholarship that permitted two years of graduate study at The Divinity School at Duke. He completed his first Masters degree in a ground-breaking clinical psychology program funded by the Lilly Foundation titled “Psychotherapy and Social Change,” in partnership with the University of San Francisco. He gained a second Masters and his Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology of Palo Alto University, where he received an Ark Foundation grant for peace research and the Murray Tondow Outstanding Dissertation Award for his doctoral thesis, Moral Judgment in Opposing Responses to the Nuclear Arms Race. He has been on the adjunct faculty at Duke University and the University of Richmond.
When he is not on the road he lives in Shoreline near his daughter and grandson.