Joan Gallos

Joan V. Gallos is Professor of Leadership Emerita at the former Wheelock College, where she also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and oversaw three major accreditations, as well as faculty development, academic programming, and educational innovation consistent with the College’s mission. She is currently a core faculty member in the Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) at Harvard and Senior Consultant on Leadership and Education to the Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership (CASL).

Prior to Wheelock, Gallos was tenured Professor of Leadership, University of Missouri Curators Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Director of the Executive MBA Program at the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), where she had also served as Dean of Education, Director of the Higher Education Graduate Programs, Coordinator of University Accreditation, and Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Strategic Planning.

In addition to her work at Wheelock and UMKC, Gallos has held academic or administrative appointments at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Babson College, and Princeton. She has also taught in executive programs at institutions such as Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Graduate School of Education, Notre Dame, the University of Missouri system, University of Michigan, University of British Columbia, University of Copenhagen, and elsewhere.

Gallos holds a bachelors degree cum laude in English from Princeton and a masters and a doctoral degree in organizational behavior and professional education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is an award-winning educator, author, and scholar in the fields of leadership and management education; a passionate program designer; and a consultant who has engaged in leadership development and organizational start-up and change projects for private and public organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

Her scholarship centers on innovative leadership and management education for a diverse work world; organizational change; professional effectiveness; and evolving conceptions of what, how and why professionals learn. Current interests include 21st century leadership and followership; academic leadership; and the arts as a vehicle for individual and organizational development. Gallos is active on social media: she blogs on topics such as these as The Leadership Professor at http://theleadershipprofessor.com/ and she tweets as @JoanGallos.

Gallos has six published books [Business Leadership; Organization Development; Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart (with V. Jean Ramsey); and Reframing Academic Leadership (1st and 2nd editions) and Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work (with Lee G. Bolman)], and multiple sets of curricular and training materials for the organizational and management sciences. She has a co-authored (and produced) play on teen health, multiple chapters for her first novel, work on a children’s book series of foundational values for leadership, and progress on a book about leadership for a changing world.