About Kurt Wargo
I’ve spent most of my career helping people grow.
Sometimes that meant teaching pharmacy students. Sometimes it meant leading faculty and academic programs. Sometimes it meant navigating accreditation, enrollment challenges, organizational change, culture, student outcomes, and the pressures that come with senior leadership. And sometimes it meant learning, often the hard way, how much growth still had to happen in me.
I’m Kurt Wargo, PharmD, BCPS, FCCP — an academic leader, author, speaker, consultant, and coach.
Over the course of my career, I’ve served as a professor, regional dean, interim dean, and dean. I’ve led teams, managed complex academic organizations, worked through difficult personnel and strategic decisions, and experienced the responsibility that comes with having your name on the office door.
I’ve also made mistakes. I’ve changed my mind. I’ve had seasons when I led well and seasons that forced me to take a much harder look at myself.
Those experiences have shaped how I think about leadership today.
Leadership is Personal
I believe leadership starts long before strategy, structure, or performance metrics.
It starts with self-awareness.
How we communicate, respond under pressure, how willing we are to listen, how we handle being wrong, and how we treat people when circumstances are difficult.
The longer I’ve led, the more convinced I’ve become that the health of an organization is deeply connected to the health, clarity, and self-awareness of the people leading it.
That belief is at the center of my consulting, coaching, speaking, and writing today.
The Wargo Group
Through The Wargo Group, I work with academic leaders and institutions navigating complex challenges.
For individual leaders, that may mean serving as a confidential thought partner around difficult decisions, communication, culture, conflict, organizational dynamics, or the transition into greater leadership responsibility.
For institutions, it may mean examining enrollment, retention, student success, academic outcomes, organizational culture, or operational performance to identify what is getting in the way and building practical strategies for improvement.
My approach is straightforward:
Listen carefully. Ask difficult questions. Understand the real problem. Then build solutions that can actually be implemented.
I’m particularly experienced in pharmacy, health professions, professional education, and highly regulated academic environments, but the leadership and organizational challenges I work on extend across higher education.
A Broader View of Growth
My work is not limited to organizations.
Over time, I came to realize that many of the same principles that shape healthy leadership also shape a healthy life.
You can perform well professionally and still be completely out of alignment personally.
You can be disciplined in one area and neglect another.
You can achieve a great deal and still feel stuck.
That realization eventually led me to create The Wellness Triangle.
The framework is built around three interconnected areas:
Physical. Nutritional. Emotional/Spiritual.
The idea is simple: lasting change is difficult when one area of life is consistently undermining the others.
The Wellness Triangle became the foundation for my book and for much of my personal coaching work.
Writing and Speaking
A large part of how I process what I’ve learned is through writing and conversation.
I write about leadership, failure, resilience, culture, personal growth, and the lessons that often become clearest only after we’ve lived through them.
My Fireside Leadership Chats explore many of those same ideas in a more conversational way — including the things I got right, the things I got horribly wrong, and what I would do differently now.
I also speak to organizations, leadership teams, and professional audiences about leadership, culture, resilience, personal growth, wellness, and the responsibility that comes with influencing other people.
What ties all of this together
At first glance, academic consulting, leadership coaching, speaking, writing, and wellness may look like separate things.
I don’t really see them that way.
They all come back to the same questions:
How do we become more self-aware?
How do we make better decisions?
How do we lead people well?
How do we build healthier organizations?
And how do we create lives that are aligned with what we say matters most?
That is the work I’m interested in. Not perfection. Growth.
Not another quick fix. Better alignment, better leadership, and better outcomes.
If that resonates with you, whether you’re an academic leader, an institution, an organization looking for a speaker, or an individual working through your own next chapter, I’d be glad to connect.