Amy Gallo
PROFILE
Amy Gallo is a workplace expert who frequently writes and speaks about gender, interpersonal dynamics, difficult conversations, feedback, and effective communication. She works with individuals, teams, and organizations around the world to help them collaborate, improve how they communicate, and transform their organizational culture to support dissent and debate.
Gallo is the best-selling author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict, a how-to book about handling conflict professionally and productively. Getting Along was a finalist for the Next Big Idea Club, long-listed for several nonfiction book prizes, and named a Book of the Month by the Financial Times.
She has written hundreds of articles, including an advice column called “Getting Along,” for Harvard Business Review, where she is a contributing editor. Her writing has been collected in numerous books on a range of topics from feedback to emotional intelligence to managing others.
From 2019 to 2025, Amy co-hosted HBR’s popular Women at Work podcast, examining the struggles and successes of women in the workplace.
Gallo is a sought-after speaker, who has delivered keynotes and workshops at hundreds of companies and conferences, including SXSW (Featured Speaker), the Conferences for Women, the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Adobe, and the American Chambers of Commerce in Finland and Sweden. In 2019, she delivered a talk at TEDxBroadway about the positive benefits of conflict.
Her writing and thinking has garnered several awards. She is on the 2023 Thinkers50 Radar List, was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Talent award, and was named a 2022 LinkedIn Top Voice in Gender Equity. The Harvard Business Review Guide video series, which Gallo stars in, was honored by the Webby Awards in 2023, and the five-episode Women at Work podcast series based on her book won the 2023 Digiday Media Award for Best Podcast.
Gallo is frequently sought out by media outlets for her perspective on workplace dynamics, conflict, and difficult conversations. Her advice has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fast Company, Marketplace, Bloomberg Business, and NPR. She has been a guest on numerous podcasts and radio shows including Ten Percent Happier, HBR’s Ideacast, Hello Monday, WNYC, the BBC, and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Before working with Harvard Business Review, she was a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners, a strategy and organization firm based in New York. She contributed to the firm’s research on the “informal organization” – the unofficial networks and communities that govern how people work together in practice.
Gallo has three popular courses on LinkedIn Learning about managing conflict and difficult conversations. She has taught at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania and is a graduate of both Brown and Yale University.
SPEAKING TOPICS
Build a Culture that Embraces Dissent and Debate
Is there a lot of unspoken tension or gossiping on your team? Do colleagues shut down opposing views or blame others when things go wrong? Do you find yourself wishing everyone would just get along?
Research shows that teams in which people feel free to safely disagree outperform other teams. They make better decisions. And the friction that accompanies disagreement can allow for creativity and growth. But there’s a difference between healthy conflict and griping or backstabbing.
You can encourage productive tension without inviting drama, and lay the groundwork for valuable disagreements.
In this talk, Amy shares practical, easy-to-apply advice on how teams can smartly tackle uncomfortable conversations and how managers can make it OK for people to dissent, debate, and express their true opinions while fostering a sense of belonging.
Keeping Our Working Relationships Human in the Age of AI: What We Lose When We Automate Connection
Workplace relationships are built through thousands of small, human interactions that may seem inconsequential, however research shows that these moments are essential for fueling trust, performance, and resilience.
As AI increasingly affects how we communicate, leaders risk prioritizing efficiency over connection, hurting collaboration and connection in the process.
While AI can reduce friction, not all friction is bad, and outsourcing human connection to machines can lead to hidden costs.
In this talk, Amy demonstrates how the misuse of AI can lead to eroded trust, increased cognitive load, learned incivility, and a false sense of harmony that masks real issues.
Her practical frameworks support leaders as they make decisions on how to be transparent about AI use, which relationships benefit most (or least) from AI mediation, and how to use technology to strengthen human connection, rather than undermine it.
Audiences leave with clear guidelines for protecting trust, judgment, and humanity at work.
Getting Along with Anyone: A New Approach to Healthy Relationships
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get along? Unfortunately, that’s not always realistic, and when we’re dealing with difficult interactions, our creativity, productivity, and engagement suffer.
Conflict and stress compromise our ability to think clearly and make sound decisions. As a result, team productivity and culture suffer.
Informed by over 14 years of research and interviews with academics, social scientists, and other experts, Amy has identified eight common patterns of behavior and provides actionable, practical advice for dealing with each one.
Is your insecure boss taking credit for your work? A passive-aggressive colleague making your life miserable, but acting like nothing’s wrong? Through relatable, sometimes cringe-worthy examples, Amy provides audiences with the skills and confidence needed to improve all of their relationships. Ultimately, her frameworks for working with any type of person help to build interpersonal resilience: the ability to bounce back quickly from negative interactions, and feel less stress when you’re deep within them.
When Harmony Becomes a Liability: Productive Conflict on Senior Teams
Many executive teams equate smooth meetings and polite agreement with effectiveness. But that surface-level harmony is often a warning sign. When leaders avoid hard conversations, they also avoid the critical tensions and trade-offs that make strategy stronger.
Drawing on her books and years of work with executive teams, Amy shows leaders how to replace “artificial harmony” with productive, respectful disagreement. She helps executives understand why conflict feels threatening, even at the C-suite level, and how to reframe it as a leadership skill rather than a personal failure.
Leaders leave with concrete techniques to surface tough issues, strengthen relationships through honest dialogue, make better decisions, and model candor for their teams.
Tackle Difficult Conversations by Putting Psychological Safety First
We all want to work in an office where people are polite, considerate, and kind. But it’s possible to be too nice, failing to disagree when it’s important to do so and never surfacing new ideas or innovations.
Disagreements – when managed well – have lots of positive outcomes, such as better work products, opportunities to learn and grow, better relationships, and a more inclusive work environment.
In this talk, Amy offers guidance and tools on how to build psychological safety and lay the groundwork for open and honest conversations.
Audience members will leave with a deeper understanding of the interpersonal dynamics that affect collaboration and an expanded repertoire of skills to take on challenging conversations and build team cohesion.
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