The front stage
Joan V. Gallos is an award-winning educator and author who has devoted her career to understanding how people lead, learn, and build satisfying and rewarding lives and to teaching others how to do the same. She draws on a wealth of diverse training and experiences as a professor and scholar of organizations and human development; as a senior leader in public and private universities and on numerous civic and non-profit boards; as a coach and consultant to organizations around the world seeking more innovative and equitable ways to do business; as a pioneer whose life choices and research on gender and two career marriage intersect with seismic social transitions in love and work for women and men; and as an advocate for the arts as a vehicle for personal, community, and organizational development.
Dr. Gallos has published six books: Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart (with V. Jean Ramsey); Business Leadership; Organization Development; and Reframing Academic Leadership (1st and 2nd editions) and Engagement: Transforming Difficult Relationships at Work (with Lee G. Bolman). She has three additional works in development: a book on leadership for a changing world; a novel on university life; and a series of children’s books on foundational values for healthy leadership featuring her beloved Springer Spaniel, Charles Darwin. She has also co-authored a produced play on teen health, has published a wide variety of management teaching and training materials (including highly-acclaimed, instructor teaching guides for many best-selling management texts), has built a long queue of ideas for novels and screenplays, and is a sought-after keynote speaker and consultant for leadership development projects in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Gallos has been honored among her many awards as an Icon of Education, a Sage of the Society, and for the lasting impact of her writings on women’s voice.
The backstage
Joan grew up in a tight-knit, deeply religious, ethnic community in New Jersey. Her grandparents were immigrants who arrived on Ellis Island with the clothes on their back and the American Dream in their hearts. Her mother, an invalid who rarely left their home, never went beyond 8th grade. Her father, a self-taught electrician at a smelting plant, worked two jobs most of his life to make ends meet. Education made all the difference in her life. First in small parochial schools, and later when the college down the road took an interest in her and admitted her to the first class of women at Princeton. Joan is grateful for the interest of caring educators who challenged the limits of her world view and showed her that hard work, persistence, and learning make anything possible. Embracing the full range of her lived experience is Joan’s leadership superpower and the source of understanding and compassion she strives to bring to her work and life.
Joan has been married to the same man for more than forty years and is devoted to her two sons and extended family. She is an avid dog lover with a wide range of artsy interests and talents, gives fabulous dinner parties, and regrets that it took so long to discover her love of kayaking.