Ruth Wageman, PhD

Ruth Wageman is one of the foremost scholars and practitioners studying and working with teams, especially leadership teams. The core of Ruth’s research, teaching, and consulting for the last 30 years has been focused on the conditions that influence superb team performance. Ruth’s work places particular emphasis on teams whose purpose is to solve complex problems and lead system transformation. She builds collaborative leadership capacity within and across organizations, especially with multi-stakeholder leadership groups working to transform regional health.  

Ruth has been a professor at Columbia, Dartmouth, and Harvard, where she has led many original research programs about the design and leadership of teams.  Widely published in both academic literature and in the business press, Ruth wrote “Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make them Great,” (HBS Press) with Deb Nunes, Jim Burruss, and Richard Hackman, as well as many seminal articles published in Organization Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review and Journal of Organizational Behavior. Ruth designed the Team Diagnostic Survey with Richard Hackman and Erin Lehman. It is a powerful, well-validated assessment that measures team effectiveness and how well the six conditions that drive effectiveness are established for a team; she also leads accreditation workshops and supervises coaches in the use of the instrument in their practice.