Gloria Burgess, Organizational Systems

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Gloria Burgess

Organizational Systems Faculty

LIOS Alumna

As a manager at a software company in the 1980s, Gloria Burgess struggled with problems that had no name.

There were all kinds of workplace issues that she could clearly see coming up:  too many departments that didn’t know how to talk to each other;  too many people had no idea how to act around co-workers from different backgrounds and cultures;  new technologies were starting to make old strategies obsolete.

All these things were happening, and nobody was talking about it – because nobody knew how to talk about it.

“We didn’t have names for these problems back then,” she remembers. “I certainly didn’t have the language I use now to describe how these things work, but I began to think about it.  This was my first management job, and I began to closely think about what an impact leaders could make, what a difference they could make, and how I could be a leader and make a difference with the choices I made.”

Twenty-five years later, the world has changed.  We have names for all of those problems, and have developed solutions that work.  Whole engineering departments are devoted to things like human factor design, and schools of management teach how to network within organizations.  Diversity is a mainstay at many workplaces.  

Today, Gloria Burgess is widely recognized as a leading management consultant who helped her clients get ahead of the curve in these issues.  They benefited from the challenging questions she asked, and the new approaches she found.

The author of several books on emerging trends in leadership, her corporate clients have included Boeing, AT&T, Microsoft, Girl Scouts of America, Lifelong AIDS Alliance, and the University of Washington, among many others.  She has served as the Senior Director of Learning for Casey Family Programs, where she lead leadership and cultural change initiatives for county, state, federal, and tribal collaborators throughout the United States.  She founded the Lift Every Voice Foundation, which is dedicated to providing leadership development to underrepresented K-12 youth and their teachers.  

She also teaches at LIOS, which she says is uniquely positioned to prepare the next generation of leaders to tackle the next set of problems that we don’t have names for yet.

“LIOS is one of the few programs in North America, and internationally, that really focuses on who we are as leaders, not just what we do,” she says.  “Given all the complicated situations that leaders in business, in government, in communities can face, the only tool in your tool kit that will be with you every time is your self.  Developing self-awareness, and that awareness in relationship to others, is really one of the primary models that we use with developing leaders in our program at LIOS, and I really do think that for the 21st century that’s the heart of developing leaders, understanding who you are in relation to other people.  It sounds easy, but it’s very hard.”

What are the emerging issues that the leaders of tomorrow will face?  

“We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, not just for organizations, but for our whole culture,” Gloria says.  “We’re trying to address problems and provide services in a world that has outpaced, outstripped, and outgrown all of the models that have come before.  Across the board, organizations are struggling to find new ways of organizing that address the enormous complexity of the world while also being manageable.  This will require something very different from the hierarchy, command, and control models of organizations we’ve been using for a very long time, and it’s going to require a new kind of leadership.  Once again, we know it’s coming:  we just don’t have the language for it yet.”

The leaders of tomorrow, she says, will best be served by “curiosity, and a passion for life-long learning, and a focus on their character and values as much as the structures of their organizations.”  Those structures will surely change, but organizations will still need leaders they can count on.  At LIOS, Gloria’s found a place where she can teach to those issues in a way that makes a difference in the world, and not just the classroom.