R. Kevin Grigsby
Association of American Medical Colleges
R. Kevin Grigsby, MSW, DSW, is senior director of leadership and talent development at the Association of American Medical Colleges. He served as vice dean for faculty and administrative affairs from 2000–2009 at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, PA, where he continues to hold an academic appointment as clinical professor of psychiatry. Dr. Grigsby’s clinical experience includes a history of program planning, implementation, and evaluation in the area of innovative home- and community-based health and mental health services. His clinical practice experience has been primarily in underserved rural and inner city areas and includes perinatal intervention with substance-abusing women, mental-health service delivery to children and adolescents in shelter care, provision of home-based services to parents and children with HIV-related illnesses, and the use of advanced telecommunications technology in health services delivery. During the past decade, the focus of Dr. Grigsby’s work shifted to organizational development in academic health centers including developing a future-oriented perspective in academic leaders and the alignment of resources with missions are focus areas. Dr. Grigsby remains active in promoting effective interpersonal communication within academic health centers and in implementing alternative conflict resolution/management strategies at the department and institutional levels. The use of teams and other nontraditional organizational models in higher education settings is another area of scholarship. As an expert on the use of teams in academic health centers, Dr. Grigsby has presented at regional and national conferences and has consulted with a number of academic health centers and professional organizations. He and his colleagues published an account of the use of teams to unify the clinical, academic, and research enterprises in an academic health center. This approach was instrumental in breaking down barriers that typically separate academic departments and resulted in reducing traditional barriers between employees and management, promoting faculty and staff participation in decision-making processes, and solving organizational problems that seemed to be intractable in the past. At the AAMC, he and his team offer programs to improve organizational and leadership performance at medical schools and academic medical centers, address the needs of women and underrepresented minorities at academic medical centers, and link individual professional development to improved organizational performance.