Susan (Sue) Ashford is the chair of the Management and Organizations group at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan where she holds the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professorship in Management and Organization. She was previously on the faculty of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1983-1991) and received her MS and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University. Sue was the the Ross school’s Associate Dean for the PhD program (1994-1995), Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (1998-2002), and Associate Dean for Leadership Programming and the Executive MBA (2006-2010).

Sue’s passion is using her teaching and research work to help people to be maximally effective in their work settings, with an emphasis on self-leadership, proactivity, change from below, and leadership and its development. She teaches at the Ross School, focusing on negotiation and leadership. She also teaches in the Ascending to the C-suite program for Inforum, a professional organization committed to accelerating careers for women in Michigan and the Leading Women Executives program in Chicago.

Sue has made research contributions in the areas of leadership development and leader effectiveness, middle management voice and issue selling, job insecurity, and individual proactivity. Her research has been published in a variety of top academic outlets and as advice for managers in the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Business Review blog, and New York Magazine. Her latest podcast is “Why everyone should see themselves as a leader” in HBR’s Ideacast series.

In 2002, Sue was named a Fellow of the Academy of Management, recognizing the top 1% of scholars in a world-wide professional association of nearly 20,000 professors and practitioners interested in improving management scholarship, education, and practice. That association also awarded her the prestigious Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management in 2017.