Ella Washington is a professor of practice at Georgetown University, an organizational psychologist, and a diversity and inclusion scholar.
A former Gallup consultant, Ella has extensive experience positively influencing Fortune 100, government and nonprofit organizations globally across many industries, including financial services, sports and entertainment, oil and gas, higher education, and government. Her work reflects subject matter expertise in diversity, equity, inclusion, culture, engagement and strengths development. She is also the founder of Ellavate Solutions, which provides diversity and inclusion strategies and training for organizations.
As a Gallup senior scientist, Ella researches the intersection of race and strengths-based development to determine how strengths can contribute to a culture of high performance and inclusion for teams. A passionate strengths coach, previous Gallup strengths instructor and lifetime advocate, Ella explores how strengths-based development fosters inclusion in the workplace, and how individual backgrounds, such as race and life experiences, affect how people respond to others' strengths.
During her time as a Gallup consultant, Ella provided insight to organizations on issues of culture, engagement, strategic diversity and inclusion, covering topics such as racial and gender disparities in corporate leadership positions, women in the workplace, barriers to inclusion, and strategies for building an inclusive culture. She has conducted inclusiveness audits, developed learning workshops and led strategic planning sessions with executives to support their goals of building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
Before joining Gallup, Ella was a talent management consultant at Ernst & Young where she advised clients on performance management, change management, learning and development, and diversity. Ella also worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago as a diversity and inclusion consultant. Her work focused on developing a sustainable pipeline for a diverse workforce in the Greater Chicago Area financial sector.
Ella has shared her expertise on podcasts and has published work in Harvard Business Review, in Psychological Science, on Gallup.com and in peer-reviewed academic journals. She also coauthored a chapter called "Workplace Engagement and the Glass Ceiling: The Experience of Black Professionals" in the book, Race, Work and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience.
Ella holds a doctorate in organizational behavior from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar at Spelman College where she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in psychology.