Jennifer Jordan

Why organisations work with Jennifer Jordan

• Her seven tensions framework, built from surveys of more than 1,000 senior executives and published in Harvard Business Review with Michael Wade, gives leadership teams a shared language for the contradictions that actually slow them down.
• She directs IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes, so the work she brings to a boardroom is the same work she runs with executive cohorts every month.
• Her doctoral training at Yale in social psychology means the advice on power, influence, and ethical lapse rests on peer-reviewed research, not anecdote.
• She translates academic findings into operational decisions: when to slow a leader down, when to add a shadow board, when a decision should be made by data and when by judgment.
• Recognised by Poets&Quants on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list and the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year, she sits in the small group of leadership researchers whose work senior executives are actively asking for.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, IMD Business School, Lausanne.
• Director of IMD’s Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes.
• PhD in Psychology, Yale University; postdoctoral fellow at Kellogg School of Management and Tuck School of Business.
• Co-author with Michael Wade of “Every Leader Needs to Navigate These 7 Tensions,” Harvard Business Review, 2020.
• Named by Poets&Quants to its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 business school professors list and nominated to the Thinkers50 Radar in the same year.
• Research published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, Journal of Management, and Business Ethics Quarterly.

Biography

Most leadership advice still asks executives to pick a side. Be visionary or be operational. Trust the data or trust your gut. Hold authority or share it. The senior leaders Jennifer Jordan studies do not have that luxury, and her research is built around the cost of pretending they do.

Jordan is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD in Lausanne, where she directs the Leading Digital Execution and Leadership Essentials programmes. Her 2020 Harvard Business Review piece with Michael Wade, drawn from surveys of more than 1,000 senior leaders, set out seven tensions that define the modern executive role, from expert to learner, from controller to architect, from constant to adaptor. The framework is now used inside leadership development at major firms.

Trained as a social psychologist at Yale, she works on the harder edge of the leadership question: power, influence, and the conditions under which capable people make ethical mistakes. That research is published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Management, and it underpins her work on leadership transitions, family business succession, and women on boards.

Her recognition is concrete. Poets&Quants placed her on its 2019 Best 40 Under 40 list of business school professors, citing close to 1,500 academic citations of her work. Thinkers50 named her to its Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the same year. With Mahwesh Khan, she has argued in HBR for shadow boards as a structural answer to generational distance at the top of organisations, a recommendation that several large European firms have since adopted.

Key speaking topics

• Leadership in the digital age
• Power, influence, and ethics
• Leadership transitions and succession
• Decision-making under contradiction
• Women on boards and inclusive leadership
• Family business leadership
• Shadow boards and intergenerational governance

Ideal for

• CEOs and executive committees are navigating contradictory strategic demands.
• CHROs and heads of leadership development are designing senior leader programmes.
• Board chairs and nominating committees are working on succession and governance.
• Family business principals and next-generation leaders are preparing to take over.

Audience outcomes

• A direct read on the seven tensions that define senior leadership today, with practical tests for which behaviour each situation calls for.
• A clearer view of how power changes a leader’s judgement, and the routines that keep that change in check.
• Sharper questions for succession and leadership transitions, including how shadow boards and reverse mentoring change board-level perspective.
• A research-grounded account of why digital execution stalls at the top of organisations, and what senior leaders can do about it.