Ashley Goodall

Background

About Ashley Goodall

I am a leadership expert, consultant, and author, and have spent my career exploring large organizations from the inside. I look for the lessons from the real world that help people and teams thrive, and that make work a more human place for all of the humans in it. I'm currently working on my second book, THE PROBLEM WITH CHANGE, which will be published in 2024. I am the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of NINE LIES ABOUT WORK: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019)—which was selected as the best management book of 2019 by Strategy + Business and one of Amazon’s best business and leadership books of 2019. I am also the author of two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy (March/April 2019)—which was Harvard Business Review’s most popular article of 2019—and Reinventing Performance Management (April 2015). My first experiences of teams and leadership were as a student musician and conductor. I was fascinated by the unspoken understanding between people playing together and carried this fascination into the corporate world. I most recently spent six years as a Senior Vice President at Cisco, where I led organizations focused on leadership, on teams, and on research, and which took on some of the most challenging questions about work. What is special about the best teams? Why do we follow one leader and not another? How can we measure our experience at work reliably? And how can we take what matters most to people and embed in into our people practices and systems? The new approaches I have introduced address everything from performance management, to feedback, to team activation technology, to real-time team intelligence, to social network mapping, to strengths-based leadership—and together these challenge much of the conventional wisdom of work today.