About

"There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

- Albert Einstein

Susan (Sue) Ashford is the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She joined the Michigan faculty in 1991 after spending eight years on the faculty at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College.

Sue’s research focuses on employee proactivity and leadership within organizations; and how to survive and thrive as an independent worker in the gig economy. Her examination of employee proactivity addresses the ways that individuals seek feedback about their own performance to survive and succeed in different organizational settings and how middle managers raise issues and influence those above them to pay attention to those issues (issue selling). Her interest in leadership focuses on how individuals come to see themselves as leaders in the first place. It also examines the risks that exist in leading and what we might do to mitigate those risks to prompt more leadership from more places in organizations. Sue has also developed a perspective on leadership development (currently labeled mindful engagement) focused on how individuals can develop their own leadership by engaging in practices that enable more learning from their various experiences in organizations.

Sue’s research is published in all of the leading journals in the management area such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organizational Science, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Her research has been summarized as advice for managers in the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Business Review blog, the Washington Post, and New York Magazine. You also can find her work described in the following blog posts:

https://hbr.org/ideacast/2017/08/why-everyone-should-see-themselves-as-a-leader

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-world-without-bosses/id1346314086?i=1000408655200

http://www.workandlifepodcast.com/blog/sash

Sue has held various administrative roles at the Ross school including serving as the school’s Senior Associate Dean (1998-2002) and faculty director of the executive MBA program (2002-2012). Sue also led the development and launch of the Ross Leadership Initiative (now the Sanger Center (2007-2010). She teaches electives on negotiation and leadership, is the faculty director of the Emerging Leaders Executive Education Program at Michigan, and teaches in other executive education programs, including two specifically aimed at women.

Sue serves on the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal and is currently an Associate Editor for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Sue has been elected to leadership positions within the Academy of Management (where she was division chair of the Organization Behavior Division). In 2002, Sue was named a Fellow of the Academy of Management, recognizing the top 1% of scholars in a worldwide professional association of nearly 20,000 professors and practitioners interested in improving management scholarship, education, and practice. The Academy of Management also awarded her the prestigious Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management in 2017.

Sue is a native Californian and the daughter of two native Californians. She has a Bachelor of Arts in environmental studies from San Jose State University with a minor in economics. She did her doctoral work at the Northwestern University. Sue lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, also a University of Michigan faculty member and with whom she raised three daughters.

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