Joan V. Gallos is 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 UMKC, where she has also served as Dean and as Professor of Leadership at the School of Education, Coordinator of University Accreditation, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Strategic Planning, and Director of the Higher Education Graduate Program.

Gallos holds a bachelor’s degree cum laude in English from Princeton and master’s and doctoral degrees in organizational behavior and professional education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Joan Gallos is also an award-winning educator, author, and scholar in the field of leadership and management education 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.

In addition to her academic appointments at UMKC, she has taught at the Harvard University Radcliffe Seminars, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Babson College, as well as in executive programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the University of Missouri, Babson College, and the University of British Columbia.

Her scholarship centers on innovative leadership and management pedagogy for a diverse work world; organizational change; and expanding conceptions of what, how and why professionals learn. Current interests include understanding and developing healthy leadership and followership skills; the arts as a vehicle for leadership and organizational development; gender, diversity, and contemporary leadership; and the implications of developmental theory for teaching and learning and for enhancing professional effectiveness.

Gallos also blogs these topics and others as The Leadership Professor at http://theleadershipprofessor.com/

Gallos has published four books [Business Leadership; Organization Development; Reframing Academic Leadership (with Lee Bolman); and Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart (with V. Jean Ramsey)] with two others in process  [Managing Difficult People and The Work of Leadership: Essentials for Success in a Complex World]; more than fifty articles and chapters; and multiple sets of curricular and training materials for teaching in the organizational and administrative sciences.

Gallos has served on multiple national and regional professional advisory committees; on numerous editorial boards, including the Academy of Management Learning and Education as a founding member; and on civic and non-profit boards in greater Kansas City, including as a founding board member for Actors Theater of Kansas City and for the Kansas City Public Library Foundation. She is past president of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, the oldest international professional association committed to excellence in management teaching and learning, and the former editor of the Journal of Management Education.

Gallos has received numerous awards for her teaching, scholarship, leadership, and service. In 1990, for example, she received the Fritz Roethlisberger Memorial Award for the best article on management education (and was finalist for the same prize in subsequent years). In 1993, she accepted the Radcliffe College/Harvard University Excellence in Teaching award.  In 2002-03, she served as founding director of the Truman Center for the Healing Arts at Truman Medical Center, Kansas City’s public teaching hospital, which as a result of her leadership received the 2004 Kansas City Business Committee for the Arts Partnership Award for the best partnership between a large organization and the arts.

In 2008, Gallos was named University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor, the highest faculty rank awarded by the University of Missouri system and the only Curators’ appointment in the history of the Bloch School.  In 2009, she was named a Sage of the Society by a vote of her international colleagues for her lifetime contributions to management education. In the same year, she received the Distinguished Service Award from the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society for her work to further excellence in management teaching and learning.

In 2011, Gallos was named an Icon of Education by Ingram’s Magazine for her academic leadership and outstanding career contributions to education in Missouri and Kansas.