• KDVI
  • 5
  • Individual Leadership Coaching

Individual Leadership Coaching

“With its potential to establish, fine-tune or rebuild the competencies needed to remain effective in the workplace, coaching has become one of the most powerful strategic and tactical weapons in the executive repertoire.”

Bespoke, transformative, and results-oriented development for senior leaders.

Get in touch

Overview  |  Approach  |  Our Coaches  |  themes  |  Formats 

Overview

Coaching is at the core of our work at KDVI. We provide tailored, high-impact coaching for senior leaders navigating complex challenges, transitions, and evolving expectations. Our coaching offers a confidential space to explore challenges, uncover blind spots, and develop more effective ways of leading. Each journey is customised to the individual leader’s needs and context.

KDVI brings over 40 years of experience, a distinctive methodology, and a global coaching community. We have pioneered approaches to individual, group, and team coaching that have influenced leadership practices at institutions including INSEAD, ESMT, and McKinsey.

Our Approach

KDVI’s executive coaching is grounded in a psychodynamic-systemic methodology developed by Professor Manfred Kets de Vries. This approach combines two powerful lenses:

  • A psychodynamic perspective, which explores the underlying emotional drivers, unconscious patterns, and past experiences that shape how leaders think, behave, and relate to others.
  • A systemic perspective, which examines how leaders operate within and influence the broader organisational system, including teams, culture, and stakeholder dynamics.

By working at both levels, we help leaders understand not only what they do, but why and how their behaviour impacts the wider system. The result is deeper self-awareness, more informed choices, and more sustainable change.

Our Coaches

KDVI brings together a global community of over 120 experienced executive coaches, representing 24 nationalities and 18 languages. Many have trained directly under Professor Kets de Vries and combine deep coaching expertise with senior leadership experience, including former C-suite and board-level roles. This diversity allows us to match each client with the most appropriate coach, ensuring contextual understanding and high-quality insight, wherever they are in the world.

Summary:

Coaching Retainer
Duration: custom, 6 months to multi-year
Delivery: In person or virtual
Pricing: Available on request

Mirror Coaching
Duration: 3 sessions
Delivery: Virtual
Tool: GELM®
Pricing: £2,300 (excl. VAT)

Tactical Coaching
Duration: 4 sessions
Delivery: Virtual
Pricing: £2,500 (excl. VAT)

KDVI t&cs apply

GET IN TOUCH

Coaching is at the core of our work at KDVI. We provide tailored, high-impact coaching for senior leaders navigating complex challenges, transitions, and evolving expectations. Our coaching offers a confidential space to explore challenges, uncover blind spots, and develop more effective ways of leading. Each journey is customised to the individual leader’s needs and context.

KDVI brings over 40 years of experience, a distinctive methodology, and a global coaching community. We have pioneered approaches to individual, group, and team coaching that have influenced leadership practices at institutions including INSEAD, ESMT, and McKinsey.

Our Approach

KDVI’s executive coaching is grounded in a psychodynamic-systemic methodology developed by Professor Manfred Kets de Vries. This approach combines two powerful lenses:

  • A psychodynamic perspective, which explores the underlying emotional drivers, unconscious patterns, and past experiences that shape how leaders think, behave, and relate to others.
  • A systemic perspective, which examines how leaders operate within and influence the broader organisational system, including teams, culture, and stakeholder dynamics.

By working at both levels, we help leaders understand not only what they do, but why and how their behaviour impacts the wider system. The result is deeper self-awareness, more informed choices, and more sustainable change.

Our Coaches

KDVI brings together a global community of over 120 experienced executive coaches, representing 24 nationalities and 18 languages. Many have trained directly under Professor Kets de Vries and combine deep coaching expertise with senior leadership experience, including former C-suite and board-level roles. This diversity allows us to match each client with the most appropriate coach, ensuring contextual understanding and high-quality insight, wherever they are in the world.

Common Coaching Themes

Every coaching journey is bespoke, but common areas of focus include:

  • Leadership transitions — supporting leaders through new roles, expanded scope, career crossroads, succession planning, or preparation for C-suite and board-level positions.
  • Enterprise leadership — developing executive presence, strategic influence, and broader organisational impact.
  • Reflective leadership — developing self-awareness around drivers, blind spots, behavioural patterns, values, purpose, and impact..
  • Courageous conversations — helping leaders handle conflict, deliver feedback, mediate differences, and strengthen relationships.
  • Leading organisations — navigating culture, change, resistance, ambiguity, paradox, and complexity.
  • Well-being and sustainability — supporting resilience, stress management, and sustainable work-life integration.
  • Diversity, equity, and inclusion — helping leaders address bias, lead inclusively, and create conditions where diverse talent can thrive.

Coaching Formats

We offer three coaching formats, designed to meet different needs and time horizons.

Coaching Retainers

Sustained, bespoke coaching tailored to the individual leader

A coaching retainer provides the depth, continuity, and trust needed to address complex challenges, support significant transitions, and enable meaningful, lasting change.

Mirror Coaching

Individual 360° Feedback & Coaching

A concise, data-driven development journey combining the Global Executive Leadership Mirror (GELM®) with three focused coaching sessions. Designed for leaders who want to understand how their leadership is experienced by others and translate that insight into a clear, actionable development plan.

Tactical Coaching

Focused Coaching for a Specific Challenge

A short, targeted engagement for leaders with a clearly defined challenge they want to resolve or unblock. Practical, purposeful, and results-oriented, this format is designed to deliver rapid progress without requiring a longer engagement.

Coaching at Scale

For organisations looking to support multiple leaders, KDVI can quickly establish a dedicated coaching pool. A KDVI coaching director and manager oversee the engagement, select and brief coaches, and ensure consistency and tracking. Where appropriate, we can also provide anonymised thematic insights and 360° feedback analysis to surface recurring leadership, cultural, and organisational patterns.

If you would like to explore how coaching could support your leaders or organisation, we would be happy to speak. Please get in touch.

Summary:

Coaching Retainer
Duration: custom, 6 months to multi-year
Delivery: In person or virtual
Pricing: Available on request

Mirror Coaching
Duration: 3 sessions
Delivery: Virtual
Tool: GELM®
Pricing: £2,300 (excl. VAT)

Tactical Coaching
Duration: 4 sessions
Delivery: Virtual
Pricing: £2,500 (excl. VAT)

KDVI t&cs apply

GET IN TOUCH

Margot Schumacher:

Senior Associate at KDVI, Adjunct Professor of Leadership Development at TIAS Business School, and executive coach at INSEAD. Margot has coached senior leaders across global organisations following senior roles at Unilever and Kraft Heinz. Since 2010, she has advised multinationals on leadership and organisational development, with a focus on enhancing effectiveness at the top team and board levels. She also serves on the Supervisory Board of Thales Netherlands. Her global perspective is shaped by living and working in Shanghai, Pittsburgh, and London before returning to the Netherlands

Oriane Kets de Vries:

Oriane Kets de Vries is CEO and owner of the Kets de Vries Institute. She leads a global team of coaches, consultants and educators dedicated to developing reflective, emotionally intelligent leaders and cultivating workplaces where people can thrive. In her faculty role, she draws on extensive experience designing and directing leadership programmes for senior executives, contributing her expertise in psychodynamic coaching, organisational culture, and transformational leadership development.

Oriane has served as consultant, coach, and programme director for clients including Pictet, Deutsche Bank, Merck, UBS, Mishcon de Reya, and Engie, and she has taught on open-enrolment programmes with leading institutions such as Cambridge Judge Business School, Oxford Saïd, INSEAD, ESCP, ESMT and CEDEP. Her interests centre on the human side of leadership, particularly identity, creativity, entrepreneurship and gender dynamics. She holds an MBA and Executive MA in Coaching and Consulting for Change from INSEAD, has trained at the Harvard Kennedy School, and brings more than a decade of professional experience in creative and entrepreneurial industries into her work with leaders.

Manfred Kets de Vries:

Manfred Kets de Vries is a pioneering authority in leadership development, coaching, and organisational change. He is a founder and director of the Kets de Vries Institute (KDVI) and served as Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organisational Change at INSEAD. With academic credentials in economics (University of Amsterdam), management (MBA and DBA, Harvard Business School), and psychoanalysis (trained in Canada), he brings a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective to leadership. His work bridges management theory and clinical insight, establishing him as a global thought leader in executive coaching and transformation. At INSEAD, he founded the Global Leadership Centre and led the flagship programme The Challenge of Leadership for 31 years. He also served as scientific director of Coaching and Consulting for Change, an 18-month Executive Master’s programme that has shaped over 3,000 senior leaders and executive coaches worldwide. He has advised and coached senior executives at global firms including Goldman Sachs, BP, Shell, Unilever, McKinsey, and Volvo. A prolific author of over 60 books and 400 articles, his work appears regularly in The Financial Times, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review. Recognised by Le Capital, Wirtschaftswoche, and The Financial Times as one of the world’s top 50 management thinkers, he is widely regarded for advancing more human-centred approaches to leadership.

Yulia Chupina:

Senior Adviser (Luminary) at Accenture and executive coach with over 12 years of board experience. Formerly a banker and McKinsey consultant, Yulia has led banking transformations in digital, agile, organisational change, and talent development. Her coaching spans the finance, tech, and consumer goods sectors, blending technological insight with emotional intelligence to guide leaders through transformation. Recently, she advised BBVA on agile methodologies and senior talent development. Influenced by thought leaders such as Manfred Kets de Vries and Gabor Maté, Yulia brings an analytical, reflective approach to leadership. She has lived and worked across the UK, Spain, the US, and Russia.

Elizabeth Florent:

Elizabeth has worked closely with Manfred Kets de Vries for many years and has served as a Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow at INSEAD. Her extensive background in leadership development spans organisational consulting, executive coaching, and academic research. She holds advanced degrees in Organisational Development and Clinical Organisational Psychology and is a certified Coaching Supervisor through the Tavistock Institute. Her doctoral research explored experiential domains in executive education, and she has authored or co-authored numerous academic articles, case studies, and books on leadership and organisational dynamics. Elizabeth led the development teams behind KDVI’s diagnostic instruments, including the GELM, OCA™, and ITI. Drawing on her diverse training and global experience, she brings deep cross-cultural insight to her work with leaders worldwide. Originally from California, Elizabeth has made France her home for over 30 years.