Very sad news. 

Kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a Tane.

Professor Anthony (Tony) Grant was a key note speaker at our Jubilee Conference in 2018, running a workshop before the conference and coming back in October 2019 to run a week long programme on Coaching Psychology for the Institute of Organisational Psychology.

Tony, passed away at 1.30pm on Monday 3 February 2020 aged 66, surrounded by his family. It was a shock to many of us who were working with him as late as December 2019, with very few clues revealed as to his long term illness.

Tony has been credited as founding coaching psychology as a discipline, setting up the first Coaching Psychology Unit in the world in 1999 at the University of Sydney, and establishing graduate and post graduate teaching programmes for the field.

Tony was honoured with multiple roles from universities, business and industry groups in Australia and internationally. These include:

• Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University
• Senior Fellow at Melbourne University Business School
• Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University
• ABC Scientist in Residence (2014)
• Scientific Consultant for the TV series ‘Making Australia Happy’.
• Becoming a full professor at the University of Sydney in 2019, and Emeritus Professor in January, 2020.
• British Psychological Society Award for outstanding professional and scientific contribution to Coaching Psychology. 
• “Vision of Excellence Award” from the Institute of Coaching at Harvard. 
• Australian Psychological Society “Workplace Excellence Award for Coaching and Leadership”.
• “Contribution to Coaching Award” from Reading University’s Henley Business School. 

His list of publications is similarly impressive and includes 8 books, 27 book chapters, over 70 peer reviewed journal papers and host of academic conference presentations and invited keynotes. This is all the more impressive, as he worked as a carpenter until he was 38. His model of coaching played on this and was built around the structure of a house!

He will be remembered as a founder of coaching psychology, a prolific researcher, and a great teacher. But more importantly, Tony will be remembered as a kind and generous colleague, mentor and friend who has left an enduring legacy for all those he has touched with his insight and passion. He will be so sadly missed but long remembered.

Our thoughts and best wishes go out to his wife Georgie, his two sons Ben and Toby, his sisters Jane and Clare and his brother-in-law David, and to all his colleagues, students, friends and clients who will dearly miss him.