About the Firm

As your partner in ensuring your institution's long term success, we are attentive to the importance of aligning your mission, people, and organizational capacity. We have committed our careers and our own civic leadership to strengthening public-purpose organizations, so that they can better serve their constituents.

Our commitments: 

• The firm's senior leaders handle all critical elements of the search
  
• We stay with the search until it is completed to our clients' satisfaction
  
• We follow-up regularly with candidate and client to ensure a smooth transition
  
• We will not recruit the candidate you hire
  
• Client and candidate information is held in strictest confidence
  
• If the successful candidate leaves his/her post within one year, we will redo the search with no additional professional fee

Who We Are

The firm's senior leadership team possesses decades of experience in executive search, consulting, civic and nonprofit leadership, and international engagement.

Gale Batchelder, Principal

Gale founded New Leadership Group in 2005 after twenty-five years in nonprofit leadership and consulting, including twelve years in executive search for educational, philanthropic, and health care organizations.

In 1990 Gale joined a national executive search firm, serving as Senior Consultant and Vice President. She has extensive experience working with academic and medical school search committees, and specializes in helping committees to assess the emotional intelligence, leadership competence, and strategic fit of candidates with an institution's challenges and aspirations.

Early in her career, Gale was a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in social services agencies in the Boston area and at McLean Hospital (a Harvard teaching hospital). Her interest in the application of psychology to organizational management and leadership coupled with a continuing commitment to mission-driven organizations led to a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she earned a Master's in Public Administration in 1989.

Gale's own leadership experiences also inform her work as a consultant. She was the first Executive Director of a 93 year-old volunteer community-service organization and has consulted to health care organizations on both fund raising and program planning initiatives. She has served on the boards of several institutions and civic organizations and was Chair of the New England Alumni Association of Harvard's Kennedy School, and President of the Board of the Mystic Chorale, Inc. 

Gale is a partner in Off the Park Press, a poetry press in New York City.  She earned her B.A. in Philosophy from Beloit College and a M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology from Boston University.

Lida Junghans, Ph.D., Senior Associate

Lida joined New Leadership Group in the spring of 2009 after twenty years of experience in higher education and the international nonprofit and healthcare sectors.  Before entering the consulting field in 1999, Lida taught at Harvard and conducted ethnographic research in the People's Republic of China and in Boston's teaching hospitals. 

As a search consultant, Lida has led searches for academic leaders in public and private institutions nationwide, and for program officers and senior leaders in international nonprofit organizations and philanthropies. 

Lida's anthropological training in qualitative research methodologies provides a substantive foundation to her work as a consultant guiding institutions through times of leadership change.  Her doctoral research focused on the strategies of innovation used by individual and collective actors in an early stage of China's market transformation.  Her dissertation, Workers in Transit:  Chinese Railway Workers and the Journey from Plan to Market is based on fifteen months of participant observation in the PRC. 

Fluent in Mandarin and Italian, Lida has extensive international experience and has worked in a variety of settings including the Library of Congress, Colonial Williamsburg, the U.S. Consulate in Teheran, and the United Nations. Lida earned her B.A. from the College of William and Mary. She received masters degrees in Anthropology and Regional Studies-East Asia and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University. 

New Leadership Group collaborates with other independent consultants who bring special expertise to our assignments.