Svenja is Affiliate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, where she directs Leading for Results, one of INSEAD’s flagship leadership programmes. She also directs the Women Leaders and Aspiring Women Leaders programme. Svenja teaches Psychological Issues in Management in the MBA, and directs experiential leadership development programmes for global corporations in the energy, technology, media and luxury goods industries. For the last decade, she has served on the faculty and coaching staff of numerous INSEAD open-enrolment and company-specific programmes, including the Leadership Transition Programme, Executive MBA, the Management Acceleration Programme, Advanced Management Programme and the High Impact Leadership Programme. Svenja also consults to and coaches executives in corporations around the world. She has won multiple awards for her teaching and programme directing.
Svenja’s research and practice is aimed at developing responsible and effective leadership by understanding the underlying systems psychodynamics. She draws on her extensive experience from working in multinational corporate organisations and her academic background in clinical and organisational psychology.
As a senior learning and development manager for Daimler and HSBC, Svenja led global initiatives on organizational development, change management, and talent assessment and development. Prior to those corporate roles, she worked in psychiatric institutions in Germany and the United States.
Her unique combination of experience and expertise enables Svenja to pay equal attention to individual, group, and organizational factors that affect leaders’ growth and success. She particularly focuses on senior leadership transitions. For the past decade, she has been involved in the design and delivery of executive programmes for senior women leaders, supporting their transition to the most senior leadership positions.
Svenja studied clinical psychology and Psychoanalysis at the University of Bremen and at Stanford University, California. She also holds an Executive Masters with distinction from INSEAD Business School. Born and raised in Germany, she now divides her time between London and France with her husband and two daughters.
