Grote was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, in 1963 where he was a member of Colgate's retired undefeated College Bowl team. He received a master's degree from Southern Methodist University in 1991. After initially working for General Electric, United Airlines and Frito-Lay, he became a management consultant in 1977 and remains active in consulting today. His biography has appeared annually in Who's Who in America for over thirty years.

Grote began his work life shortly after graduation from Colgate as an Industrial Engineer. He spent the first five years of his career with General Electric, graduating from GE's Manufacturing Training Program. At GE he spent one of his years as a second shift foreman and had assignments in union relations, hourly employment, and as a layoff coordinator.

He was recruited away from GE by United Airlines in 1967 to be the personnel manager for all of United Airlines' East Coast operations. This assignment also included shutting down United's maintenance base in Washington D.C. and laying off more than 2200 airframe and powerplant mechanics. He then moved to United's corporate headquarters in Chicago where he spent three years in the company's management development department.

In 1972 he was recruited away from United by PepsiCo. He joined Frito-Lay, PepsiCo's most profitable division, in Dallas, Texas as corporate director of training and development. While at Frito-Lay he developed the Discipline Without Punishment performance management system and installed it throughout the company. In 1977, after five years with Frito-Lay, he left the corporate world to become a full-time management consultant.

Grote has been a management consultant for thirty years, specializing exclusively in the field of performance management. As a consultant, he has created performance management systems for several hundred of the world's best known and most respected companies, including Texas Instruments, J. C. Penney, Miller Brewing Company, American Airlines, Macy's, Raytheon, QVC, Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railway, Churchill Downs, Fujitsu, and John Deere.

While most of his clients are Fortune 500 companies and large government agencies, he has also worked with international charitable organizations like CARE and the American Red Cross.

He was engaged by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey following the destruction of the World Trade Center, buildings that the Port Authority owned, on September 11, 2001. He was engaged by Lucasfilm to help George Lucas integrate his five companies (including Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light and Magic) into "one company, one culture." He was awarded a medal by the director of the National Security Agency for his work in creating a new performance management system for NSA. Grote is the rare management consultant who has been engaged by a labor union...he was hired by the Screen Actors Guild to facilitate their planned merger with AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

In 2001, Grote developed and brought to market GroteApproach, an online performance management system.

Grote is the author of the books, Discipline Without Punishment and The Complete Guide to Performance Appraisal. Both books were major book club selections and have been translated into Chinese, Arabic, and several other languages. Discipline Without Punishment has become a management classic and was issued in an updated second edition in 2006.

Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights to Discipline Without Punishment and produced the video series Respect and Responsibility with Grote as on-camera host. His highly popular book on performance appraisal, The Performance Appraisal Question and Answer Book, was published by the American Management Association in 2002.His most recent book, Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work,advocating the controversial human resources procedure, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in November 2005.

Grote's articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and many other business and professional publications.

For five years (1992-1997), Grote was a regular commentator on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" program. For over twenty years he was adjunct professor of management at the University of Dallas graduate school. In 2007 Grote was named a Rabin Award Nominator by the Dallas Theater League, in which capacity he is responsible for nominating theatrical productions for the League's prestigious Rabin Award. In 2009 he appeared as a supernumerary in The Dallas Opera's production of Rossini's comic opera, L'italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). A platform master, Grote speaks regularly on leadership and management at professional and management conferences. In 2002, Workforce magazine published a list of the eighty people, events and trends that have shaped human resources in the past century. Grote's work in the evolution of performance appraisal was listed at number 19.