Gale Thompson

MBA, MA, MSS, LSW, PCC
Gale Thompson is an advisor at StarBridge Advisors, LLC. Gale is an experienced leadership coach with 25 years of leadership and business management experience in corporate and not-for-profit organizations along with expertise in leadership coaching and therapy. Gale enjoys coaching professionals seeking to bring more of themselves to their work and life while taking their leadership to the next level. She helps them identify and apply their strengths more effectively to manage their inner game. They create an environment of trust, support, and motivation bringing out the best in their teams, collectively driving better performance for the organization. Gale believes that cultivating inner leadership for guidance, clarity, and insight supports external leadership from a place of grounded wisdom.

Gale has worked with leadership teams in consulting, information technology, healthcare, and research enterprises. She has led global efforts to engage with technology partners in the health, life sciences, and public service areas. In that capacity, she drove the full lifecycle of defining strategic intent and criteria for partner selection, negotiating and contracting with technology partners, governing the relationship, and engaging at the team level. Gale held leadership roles in a translational research institute and an eCommerce start-up in pharmaceutical R&D after providing healthcare operational consulting.

Gale and Sue Schade, StarBridge Advisors Principal, together launched C-change to provide focused leadership coaching support to women in health IT.

She was trained as a Leadership Coach at Georgetown’s Institute for Transformational Leadership and is a Professional Certified Coach by the International Coach Federation. She has certifications in Dare to Lead ™ (based on Brené Brown’s work), Strengths Strategy and People Acuity (leveraging Gallup’s StrengthsFinder), Conversational Intelligence (based on Judith Glaser’s work), HeartMath®, and the Leadership Circle’s assessments of leaders and cultures.

Gale holds an MBA with Distinction from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She has an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, supplemented by a Fulbright Grant to study in Egypt, and an MSS from Bryn Mawr’s School of Social Research and Work with an emphasis in clinical work.