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Linda Powell Pruitt, Ph.D.
Using an interdisciplinary set of skills as Educator, Organizational Consultant, and Psychotherapist, Linda Powell Pruitt has been working with groups and individuals on issues of power and change for thirty years. She began her career in the not-for-profit world, working with caregiving organizations (social service, religious and educational institutions.) She later moved to the corporate sector, creating and managing a variety of executive development programs at American Express and Marine Midland Bank. Later, Dr. Pruitt provided consultation to Fortune 100 companies on issues of executive development and succession planning.
Dr. Pruitt is specifically interested in issues of authority and social identity, and how these two interact in the routine challenges of organizational life and leadership. Her teaching, research and advocacy efforts bridge Dr. Pruitt’s personal, political and professional interests in the importance of the individual to organizational and social change.
Since 1989, Dr. Pruitt has been involved in efforts to reform and transform urban public education. During her four years on the faculty at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, she developed a series of courses using techniques more typical of schools of management to prepare urban school leaders. Her course “Understanding Authority and Exercising Leadership” is unusual and controversial, requiring an intensity of feeling, thinking and action rarely found in academic settings. From 1997-2001, Dr. Pruitt served as Associate Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. She later served as President and CEO of Leadership Metro Richmond, a leadership development and citizen engagement organization. She is currently Senior Fellow at the Research Center for Leadership in Action at the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University.
In addition to corporate consultation and coaching efforts, Dr. Pruitt continues her work with caregiving organizations, including schools, churches and health care organizations. She was also one of the co-authors of the 2000 nationally-noted research report “Small Schools, Great Strides.” This report, which was influential in persuading Congressional support for small public schools, investigates the impact of the Chicago small-schools movement. One of the Chicago Study Working Papers, “Small Schools and the Issue of Race,” was reprinted in Principal magazine.
Dr. Pruitt routinely provides professional and leadership development for school superintendents, their staffs, principals, teachers, school boards, college faculties and advocacy organizations. Dr. Pruitt’s most recent work includes projects as varied as consulting to a newly elected reform-oriented school board in a small mid-western city, advising a major foundation on its approach to supporting urban education, creating a leadership seminar for associate pastors in a growing mega-church and training high school students to conduct research on the achievement gap.
Dr. Pruitt is an internationally-known group relations consultant, in the tradition of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, England. She has worked on staff of numerous group relations conferences in this country, including the National Conference at Vassar College, the annual Bryn Mawr Conference and the Authority and Religious Institutions Conference at the College of Preachers in Washington, DC. She has served as a Large Group Consultant at the University of Leicester, Great Britain, as a Small Group Consultant at the Irish Management Institute and as Conference Director for the Institute for the Study of Leadership and Authority in South Africa.
Dr. Pruitt has authored articles and book chapters on leadership and urban school reform from a variety of perspectives, including “Savage Inequalities Indeed: Irrationality and Urban School Reform” with Margaret Barber (in the Group Relations Reader 3, edited by Solomon Cytrynbaum and Debra Noumair) and “From Charity to Justice: Toward a theology of urban school reform” (in Stories from the Courage to Teach by Sam Intrator.) An essay on using poetry in professional development efforts appears in the collection “Teaching With Fire,” edited by Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner. “Labouring in the Counter-Story Factory” in the International Journal of Critical Psychology, documents an experiential pedagogy for teaching leadership.
She is also the author of “Facing Reality: Using Racial Identity Theory in Family Group” with Margaret Barry and Gwendolyn Davis (in Racial Identity Theory, Thompson and Carter, eds.) She is a co-editor of the first and second editions of Off-White: Readings on Race, Power and Society (Routledge Press, 2004). The recent report “Taking Back the Work” (2009) a collaborative inquiry sponsored by the Research Center for Leadership in Action at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, explores the particular challenges faced by leaders of color of movement building organizations.
Linda Powell Pruitt received her B.S. from Northwestern University and her Masters and Doctorate in clinical psychology at George Washington University. She is life professed in the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis (TSSF), a religious order within the Anglican Communion. She lives in Virginia with her husband, The Rev. Canon Dr. Alonzo Clemons Pruitt, Under Sheriff and Chief of Chaplains of the Richmond City Sheriff’s Office.