• KDVI
  • 5
  • Leadership Team Coaching

Leadership Team Coaching

“Most teams underperform not because of missing skills, but because of what goes unseen beneath the surface.”

Professor Manfred Kets de Vries, Founder, KDVI

Bespoke team coaching for senior leadership teams. KDVI helps teams build trust, surface hidden dynamics, improve collaboration, and embed lasting behavioural change. 

Get in touch

Overview  |  Why Team Coaching  | Experience | Format | Impact | Case Study

Overview

Whether it is an executive committee, board, regional leadership team, or newly formed senior team, performance depends on more than technical capability. It depends on trust, candour, accountability, and the quality of relationships. 

KDVI Team Coaching helps leadership teams understand how they really work together, surface what is difficult to discuss, and create new patterns of collaboration that improve performance. Our work supports teams in transition, teams facing strategic complexity, teams experiencing conflict or fragmentation, and teams seeking to move from good to exceptional. 

Grounded in Professor Manfred Kets de Vries’ psychodynamic-systemic methodology, developed over more than 40 years of research and practice, our approach combines rigorous diagnostic insight with courageous dialogue and practical follow-through. The goal is not a successful off-site. It is a team that thinks, relates, decides, and performs differently over time. 

Why Team Coaching

Across organisations, the same patterns repeat: silo thinking weakens collaboration; unspoken tension distorts decisions; accountability becomes diffuse; trust erodes under pressure; and leadership styles compete rather than complement one another. 

These issues are rarely solved by a single workshop. Sustainable change requires teams to examine how they operate, what they avoid, and what needs to shift. 

Although leaders can change their own behaviour, teams often pull them back into familiar dynamics. Team coaching works at the system level, addressing the relationships, norms, power dynamics, and assumptions that shape collective behaviour. The result is greater trust, stronger peer accountability, clearer decision-making, and more effective collaboration. 

    Experience

    KDVI combines psychodynamic and systemic thinking to help teams understand not only what is happening, but why it keeps happening. 

    In practice, our work follows five stages:

    • Contain – Create a confidential environment where honest dialogue is possible.
    • Explore and Confront – Surface hidden tensions, defensive patterns, and competing agendas through diagnostics, interviews, and coaching.
    • Use Live Dynamics as Learning – Work directly with the team’s interactions to build self-awareness, empathy, and insight.
    • Turn Insight into Action – Translate learning into concrete commitments, new norms, and accountability.
    • Embed Change  – Reinforce progress through follow-up sessions, coaching, and application to real business challenges. 

    Format

    Every engagement is tailored to the team’s context and objectives. Most programmes unfold over three phases across 6–18 months.

    Diagnose (Month 1): Using Team Compass™ and/or 1:1 interviews, we assess the team’s context, challenges, and readiness for change. Findings are synthesised into a diagnostic debrief that aligns the team around priorities and areas for development. KDVI’s Team Compass™ (link) diagnostic gives teams a shared language for understanding what is working, what is getting in the way, and where to focus development. 

    Develop (Months 2–6): Workshops and off-sites focus on the team’s most important challenges — psychological safety, conflict, working styles, decision-making, and leading through complexity. Teams establish explicit behavioural commitments and new ways of working.

    Embed (Months 4–18): Follow-up sessions, impact reviews, and accountability structures help sustain change over time. Optional leader coaching, meeting observation, and action learning reinforce new behaviours between sessions. 

    Throughout the engagement, we work in close partnership with the team leader while maintaining a safe and confidential environment. 

    Impact

    Team coaching strengthens communication, improves decision-making, and increases accountability — creating measurable shifts in how teams perform together. 

    • Teams working with KDVI commonly report:
    • Harder issues raised earlier and with less defensiveness
    • Sharper, faster decisions with clearer ownership 
    • Stronger peer accountability 
    • More intentional collaboration across boundaries 
    • Behavioural changes that sustain over time 

    Case Study: Building a High-Performing Global R&D Team

    18-person team the team | Germany, Switzerland and USA | 18 months 

    When a new leader joined a global pharma R&D team, the transition surfaced what had long gone unspoken: low morale, internal conflict, and fragile collaboration across three countries. The team was capable individually. Together, they weren’t functioning.

    KDVI designed an adaptive 18-month partnership that combined diagnostic work, peer coaching circles, immersive workshops, and a collaboration with Professor Bob Kegan at Harvard on immunity to change. The programme evolved continuously in response to what the team needed at each stage.

    By the end, the team had aligned around shared commitments on conflict, decision-making, and accountability. Members learned to give and receive honest feedback. The leader was freed to focus on R&D priorities, confident the team could self-manage and collaborate without him.

    Is Team Coaching Right For Your Team?

    Team coaching works best when there is a genuine commitment to working together, openness to honest dialogue, and a willingness to explore what lies beneath the surface. Some teams come to KDVI because trust is low, performance is stuck, or conflict has become costly. Others come because they are ambitious, newly formed, or navigating significant change. 

    If you would like to explore how KDVI could support you team, please 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.