Jill Jolley
Lecturer in Management – Organizational Behavior
Jill grew up in Ann Arbor near the campus of the University of Michigan. Her youth was spent engaged with the social aspects of campus life and attending the abundance of intellectual offerings from music, art and theater to more business-oriented events around the university’s graduate business school. Jill is a 3rd generation MBA academic faculty and followed her father, who taught at UM, and her grandfather who taught at Harvard. Her mother and grandmother were teachers as well so teaching is deeply rooted in her history.
Exploring different career paths through the years, Jill left Merrill Lynch to join Charles Schwab & Co in their early days while they were still a small private company. For 13 years, Jill grew her career with Schwab from broker in Sunnyvale CA to Regional Director for much of the East Coast from Maine to Virginia (excluding NYC Metro & Long Island) with many stops along the way.
Following her career success at a young age, Jill left the corporate environment to complete her MBA at Simmons University in Boston MA – and had the youngest of her 3 children just weeks after graduation. To balance the needs of her family and career, Jill chose to start a consulting business assisting small social venture startups addressing the challenges of growth. Next came another career shift to construction management – both residential and a very public airport terminal seismic retrofit. Finally, succumbing to the aspects of her career she enjoyed the most, Jill became an academic at the College of Business at California State University Monterey Bay.
In 2018, Jill completed her PhD in Business Administration with a concentration in management from National University. Her dissertation was focused on gathering from neurodiverse workers about their successful work experiences - specifically, what were their direct managers doing that supported them appropriately, especially given the challenges which neurodiverse workers face in traditional workplaces. When her empirical studies were initiated in 2011, awareness of neurodiversity was limited, and the capabilities of neurodiverse adults was widely misunderstood. This lack of public discourse led to tragic workplace relationships between most neurodiverse workers and their direct managers so shining a light on successful practices was critical.
Although Jill continues to work as a neurodiversity workplace consultant and researcher, she embraces the emerging technology of Artificial Intelligence specifically as it enhances the access and success of neurodiverse adults to interesting workplaces. She also researches the evolution of management theory in the evolving organizational environment.
Jill joined Rice in 2022 teaching the Power and Influence class created by Dr Jonathan Miles. In her personal life, Jill is married with adult children (and a granddaughter) and fosters rescue Labrador Retrievers when she is not travelling around North America with her husband who works in the entertainment industry.