Elisabet Engellau

Adjunct Clinical Professor of Management
Director, IGLC Global Leadership Development Practice, INSEAD The Business School for the World

Elisabet Engellau is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Management at INSEAD Business School in France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and San Francisco and a Founding Partner - Director of the Kets de Vries Institute (KDVI), a consulting firm that specialises in organisational / leadership development and transformation.
Her professional activities focus on the dynamics of corporate transformation and change. In her work with family businesses, “C”-suite executives and top-executive teams in organisations worldwide, she combines her long-term interest in innovation with a clinical approach to human resource management. Her clients include Bain Consulting, Goldman Sachs, Hudson, Hypo Vereinsbank, Lundbeck, McKinsey, Nokia, National Australian Bank, Origin Energy, Sberbank, Septodont, Standard Bank of South Africa, SEB, SABMiller and Troika Dialogue.
As founding faculty of the INSEAD Global Leadership Centre, one of the largest leadership development centers in the world, and as one of the Centre's Coaching Program Directors, she was responsible for, among others, the Advanced Management Program (AMP), EMBA, company specific programmes as well as the INSEAD’s Fellows and Directors programmes for the World Economic Forum. Presently, she is co-faculty of INSEAD’s Top Management Program, “The Challenge of Leadership.”
Ms Engellau’s special interests also include women in business, particularly in the Middle East. She has been an invited speaker at the WIEF Businesswomen Forum, Kuwait, the New Arab Women’s Forum in Beirut, Lebanon, the Women Leadership Forum in Dubai, UAE, and the Women in Business Conference in Muscat, Oman.
She has held different faculty positions at McGill University, Harvard University, and Concordia University, Montreal. She also has been visiting faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership, the Stockholm School of Economics, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh and Skolkovo Business school, Moscow. KDVI partnerships include the Razak School of Government (RSOG) in Kuala Lumpur and the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) in Berlin, where she plays an active role.
In addition, she has produced and directed a number of video films for management education and designed feedback instruments, used in leadership development. She is the co-author of “Doing an Alexander: Lessons on Leadership by a Master Conqueror” (2004) and contributing author to the books “Conversations in Leadership: South African Perspectives” (2004), “Coach and Couch” (2006) and “The Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice”, Harvard University Press (2009).
Ms Engellau’s previous professional experience includes production and management in a variety of creative fields in an international context. She has studied at Uppsala,Harvard, and McGill universities, and has undertaken psychoanalytic training in Montreal and Paris. She is a member of the Research Group on Leadership Practices, the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO), the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Institut de Psychanalyse et Management, France and Harvard Institute of Coaching.
She has been on the Board of Governors of UWC Dilijan since 2010, and sits on the Nomination and Governance Committee, the Educational Committee and the Safeguarding Committee of the school.
In her free time she can be found in various museums or in the wilds of Alaska, Siberia or Africa, if she is not spending time teaching her grandchildren how to cook.