Listen to this article
Julie M. Jungalwala Ed.M. is a keynote speaker, leadership coach, advisor, and author. She is the President of the Academic Leadership Group, where she focuses on leadership coaching, leading through complexity and change, and helping organizations unleash the potential of their people. Julie is also an instructor at Harvard Extension School, where she teaches authentic leadership. Julie’s workplace skill-building programs have helped thousands of employees and managers step into their potential as leaders and increase their team’s creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving capabilities. She graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a master’s degree in education, specializing in adult development, learning technology, and behavioral change. Her book, The Human Side of Changing Education, was published by Corwin Press in 2018. She is a certified CliftonStrengths coach and a certified Stakeholder-Centered Coaching coach.
Jennifer K. (Jenny) Stine, Ph.D., is a leadership coach, Harvard instructor, and innovator. She is Vice President of the Academic Leadership Group, where her consulting work spans organizational development, leadership development, coaching, and program innovation. Jenny is also an instructor at Harvard Extension School, where she teaches organizational behavior, leadership, and teamwork. She is an expert in developing world-class executive and professional programs, with over a decade of leadership experience at Harvard and MIT, and she has worked with Accenture’s global HR organization to support its university-corporate partnerships. She holds three degrees from Stanford, including a Ph.D. She is a certified CliftonStrengths coach and a certified Stakeholder-Centered Coaching coach.
Below is our recent interview with Julie and Jennifer:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to the Academic Leadership Group, Inc.?
A: The Academic Leadership Group is a woman-owned consultancy in Cambridge, MA, founded in April 2019. Our focus is leadership coaching and higher education consulting. In the leadership coaching space, we work with senior faculty and administrative leaders from top academic institutions in the US. Our higher education consulting practice focuses on organizational assessments and continuing and professional education strategies.
Our coaching services include one-on-one coaching for senior leaders and scaled coaching programs for newly appointed and emerging leaders. We are proud to share that one of the scaled coaching programs where we worked with the Society of Women Engineers just won a Brandon Hall gold HCM Excellence Award in Learning & Development.
On the higher education consulting side, our focus is to improve organizational outcomes. We help people in higher education reinvent or revitalize their organizations by providing in-depth assessments and practical strategies to reach their goals. These assessments provide a holistic view of the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, and priority areas for growth. We typically provide input on: productivity and performance; morale and climate; systems, communications, and processes; role clarity and needed capabilities for the future; leadership; organizational structure; and organizational dependencies and redundancies.
We also specialize in strategy for professional and executive education organizations – these are groups within a university that offer externally facing short courses in topics ranging from engineering to leadership and beyond. Here we do in-depth market analysis, competitive analysis, and growth strategies.
Q: Who is your ideal client, and why?
A: A key differentiator for our firm is that we believe that transformation starts and ends with people. Our passion is to partner with organizations that want to bring humanity to the work of achieving their organization’s mission. We build partnerships grounded in these values: We put people and relationships first. We meet our clients where they are and partner over the long term. We work with our clients to balance the important and the urgent and to succeed at both. We celebrate learning and excellence. These values are critical because what we share in terms of our expertise and knowledge means nothing unless it comes with a future vision embraced by those who do the work every day.
Our ideal clients share this vision. They are looking for a coaching or consulting partner who will take the time to understand the context within which they work and create positive paths forward that engage the hearts and minds of people in the organization.
Q: Can you tell us more about your coaching services?
A: Our approach to coaching is grounded in adult development and behavioral change theories – we mainly follow the work of Robert Kegan and Richard Boyatzis – and strengths-based coaching using the CliftonStrengths assessment. Our coaches also come with a great deal of expertise in leadership development which we also bring into the coaching. Our university clients are often faculty who have taken on major administrative roles in their department or school but were never trained for that work. We help them succeed in these broader people-leadership roles.
Q: What can we expect from the Academic Leadership Group in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: We are fortunate to be growing quickly. While we had no idea at the time, April 2019 turned out to be an unexpectedly challenging time to start a business. When the pandemic came in 2020, universities had to pivot to online learning quickly, which took up a tremendous amount of time and energy. As we have emerged from the pandemic over the last year and a half, we find that more and more of our clients are looking for ways to innovate and grow. It is an exciting time to do the work we are doing!
We also have an exciting research project that we’ve been working on since 2020 into human reinvention – how people evolve their careers and professional identities. This is especially relevant now, given how rapidly work is transforming. Several exciting outputs relevant to general audiences will be available in the next six months, including a keynote address, an online assessment, an online course, and a book of reinvention stories.
Q: What is the best thing about the Academic Leadership Group that people might not know about?
A: Such a great question! I think it is that we are fun to work with. We do serious work for important institutions and always try to make it fun.
Activate Social Media:
