Guest Contributors

Sharon Daloz Parks has been described as “a keen observer, a probing listener, a rich and subtle theorist, and a resourceful teacher.” She received her doctorate from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied human development and the formation of meaning and faith across the lifespan. She subsequently held faculty and senior research positions at Harvard in the schools of Divinity, Business, and the Kennedy School of Government. During her time there, the Lilly Endowment invited Parks to observe, describe, assess, and interpret the work of Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues at the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. Her study, published by Harvard Business Press under the title “Leadership Can Be Taught”, describes an approach to re-casting the art and practice of leadership that responds to the conditions of our dramatically complex and changing world and also addresses the challenges of how such an approach may be learned.

After moving to the Pacific Northwest, she was associate director and faculty at the Whidbey Institute where she led “Leadership for the New Commons,” and she also taught at Seattle University in the Executive Leadership Program at the Albers School of Business and Economics where she was honored as Distinguished Faculty.

Her other publications include the co-authored “Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World” and “Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Quest for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith.”

Sharon speaks and consults nationally across sectors, addressing leadership and ethics—particularly in relationship to Business, Higher Education, and Religion. She lives in Hanover, NH, with her husband Laurent (Larry) Parks Daloz.