Linda A. Hill

Business school professor Linda A. Hill was born on July 20, 1956, in Wheeling, West Virginia to Lillian Gordon Hill and Clifford Hill Sr. She received her B.A. degree in psychology in 1977 from Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She received her M.A. degree in educational psychology in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in behavioral sciences in 1983, both from the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.

After receiving her Ph.D. degree, Hill was granted a postdoctoral fellowship in 1983 at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was hired as an assistant professor in 1984 with a focus on leadership development, innovation, and the implementation of global strategies. In 1992, Hill wrote her first book Becoming a Manager: Mastery of a New Identity, which was later followed by Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership (2003). She has authored numerous scholarly articles and books on leadership, including Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (2014) and Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader (2011). In 2016, Hill co-founded the leadership research and development firm Paradox Strategies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is Harvard Business School’s Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration as well as the faculty chair of the Harvard Business School Leadership Initiative.

Hill has served on the boards of directors for Cooper Industries (later Eaton Corporation), State Street Corporation, and Relay Therapeutics. She has also served boards of numerous non-profit organizations and institutions, such as The Rockefeller Foundation, the Global Citizens Initiative, Inc., the ArtCenter College of Design, Bryn Mawr College, and Harvard Business Publishing since 2010. She has chaired many Harvard Business School executive education programs, including the High Potentials Leadership Program, Leading in the Digital Era, and Leading and Building a Culture of Innovation.

Hill has received multiple awards and honors, including the Innovation Award from Thinkers50 in 2015, the Warren Bennis Prize for Excellence in Leadership in 2015, and the 2015 Axiom Business Book Award for Collective Genius (2014), which was also named to the inaugural Thinkers50 Booklist 10 Management Classics for 2022. Also in 2022, Hill’s article “Becoming the Boss” (published in 2007), was selected as one of the most influential and innovative articles from Harvard Business Review’s first hundred years.

Hill and her husband, Roger Breitbart, live in Boston, Massachusetts. They have an adult son named Jonathan.

Linda A. Hill was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on December 19, 2022.