Susan (Sue) Ashford

is the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor in the Management and Organizations group at the University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business. She was previously on the faculty of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and received her MS and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University.

Sue’s passion is using her teaching and research work to help people to be maximally effective in their work lives, with an emphasis on self-leadership, proactivity, change from below, and leadership and its development. She teaches across several programs at the Ross School, in the Leading Women Executives program of the Corporate Leadership Center, and for various companies.

Sue is an award-winning scholar, having published papers in the fields’ best journals in the areas of leadership development and leader effectiveness, middle management voice and issue selling, job insecurity, and individual proactivity (e.g., self-management and feedback seeking). Her research has been summarized as advice for managers in the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard Business Review blog, New York Magazine and The Conversation. Sue is a Fellow of the Academy of Management. She was awarded the prestigious Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management by that Association in 2017 and the OB Division Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020.

Sue is a native Californian and the daughter of two native Californians. Sue lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, also a University of Michigan faculty member, and with whom she raised three daughters.