Linda Lambert, Ed.D. is Professor Emeritus from California State University, East Bay, an international consultant and author of novels and texts on leadership. During Linda’s career extensive career, she has served as social worker, teacher, principal, district and county directors of adult learning programs, as well as university professor, state department envoy to Egypt, and international consultant. Her international consultancies in leadership have taken her to the Middle East, England, Thailand, Mexico, Canada, and Malaysia. Her work in leadership is in use in more than 80 countries.
Linda is the author of dozens of articles and lead author of The Constructivist Leader (1995, 2002), Who Will Save Our Schools (1997), and Women’s Ways of Leading (2009); Liberating Leadership Capacity: Pathways to Wisdom (2016), and Women’s Ways of Leading: Revisited (2025). She is the author of Building Leadership Capacity in Schools (1998) and Leadership Capacity for Lasting School Improvement (2003). Linda’s first historical novel, Cairo Codex, 2013, followed by The Italian Letters in 2014. The third novel in the Justine Trilogy, A Rapture of Ravens, Awakening in Taos, followed in late 2014.
She lives with her husband, Morgan, a retired school superintendent, in Santa Rosa, California.
Mary E. Gardner, MA. began her career as an English teacher in Rochester, New York. After teaching for five years and becoming a mother, her interest, how children learn language, developed and she entered a speech and language pathology program for an American Speech and Hearing (ASHA) certification. With her ASHA certification she worked in Rochester as a speech and language development specialist. In 1975 she moved with her two daughters to California and her career shifted to administration, beginning as an early childhood education coordinator. After getting her M.A in Administration, she worked as a director of special education and then as an assistant superintendent for curriculum and staff development. Gardner has been a superintendent of the Saratoga, California, school district, a visiting practitioner at Harvard University, a professor of educational leadership and has been a contributing author and co-author with Linda Lambert for five books on leadership. She has served on nonprofit boards and consults with schools and non-profit organizations and coaches women and men in leadership.
A Beautiful Friendship
The authors joined forces in the early 1990s when Gardner, fresh from her work at Harvard, was asked to take Lambert’s position at California State University just as Lambert was leaving for two years of work in Egypt. Upon Lambert’s return, the two women soon discovered that they were soul mates and set about to investigate leadership as a historically limited concept. The result of this stimulating partnership was two provocative best-selling books, multimedia presentations on women’s leadership and team teaching. Soon, Gardner moved to the Saratoga district as superintendent, and the friendship deepened, now involving a close examination of the application of constructivist leadership principles to a school district.
For three decades, Linda Lambert and Mary Gardner have worked together as colleagues, friends and co-authors on two best-selling books on leadership, The Constructivist Leader (1995, 2002). In 2016 they joined with Diane Zimmerman to write Liberating Leadership Capacity: Pathways to Educational Wisdom.
In the years that followed, the women’s leadership studies were expanded as broader study arenas were identified. In addition to the San Francisco Bay Area, where both women lived, Los Angeles, Seattle, the province of Alberta, Canada, and Malaysia became centers of inquiry. Themes emerged as women from the various places, ages and careers responded to questions, told stories and entered into dialogue with each other. The experiences of the women were remarkably similar, the struggles familiar. Gender issues became predictable, yet the level of maturity significantly influenced how each woman related to the themes. The result of these sixteen years of inquiry and colleagueship is the long-awaited book, Women’s Ways of Leading: Revisited (2025).
Lambert and Gardner’s work with constructivist leadership, leadership capacity, and women’s leadership is creating new patterns of relationships among individuals and within organizations, resulting in the fuller democratization of leadership. Such democratization ensures a resilient and replenishing fabric of leadership, the essence of sustainability.