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Leadership emerges from within — and expands outward through teams, organizations, and systems. In a world of accelerating change, the capacity to lead with clarity, courage, and coherence across these levels is essential. We help leaders grow vertically and systemically — developing the awareness, alignment, and adaptability needed to navigate complexity and co-create better business and better futures.
Leadership begins within. Your inner world — beliefs, triggers, purpose, and presence — shapes every action and relationship. Deepening self-awareness enables wiser decisions, deeper impact, and grounded authenticity, especially under pressure or uncertainty.
We help leaders:
Expand awareness and emotional regulation.
Grow through Vertical Leadership Development.
Lead from clarity, coherence, and purpose.
Teams thrive when relationships are strong and purpose is shared. Collective maturity transforms leadership groups into coherent fields of intelligence that can sense, decide, and act together — even in uncertainty.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
Build trust, dialogue, and shared meaning.
Strengthen alignment around vision and purpose.
Develop collective sense-making and adaptability.
Future-fit organizations operate as coherent systems where purpose, strategy, and culture reinforce each other. Alignment between structure, processes, and values creates the foundation for both performance and well-being.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
No business stands alone. Organizations thrive when they understand their interdependence within the larger ecosystem. Seeing the bigger picture unlocks innovation, resilience, and regenerative value creation.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
Map ecosystems and identify leverage points.
Align strategy with emerging trends and needs.
Build cross-sector partnerships for systemic impact.
At the outermost level, leadership becomes stewardship. Conscious leaders connect their purpose with humanity’s broader challenges — contributing to regeneration and collective evolution.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
Engage in transformative dialogue and foresight.
Learn from trailblazing examples and explore leadership as service to life.
Co-create initiatives for societal and planetary impact.
Leadership begins within. Your inner world — beliefs, triggers, purpose, and presence — shapes every action and relationship. Deepening self-awareness enables wiser decisions, deeper impact, and grounded authenticity, especially under pressure or uncertainty.
We help leaders:
Expand awareness and emotional regulation.
Grow through Vertical Leadership Development.
Lead from clarity, coherence, and purpose.
Teams thrive when relationships are strong and purpose is shared. Collective maturity transforms leadership groups into coherent fields of intelligence that can sense, decide, and act together — even in uncertainty.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
Build trust, dialogue, and shared meaning.
Strengthen alignment around vision and purpose.
Develop collective sense-making and adaptability.
Future-fit organizations operate as coherent systems where purpose, strategy, and culture reinforce each other. Alignment between structure, processes, and values creates the foundation for both performance and well-being.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
No business stands alone. Organizations thrive when they understand their interdependence within the larger ecosystem. Seeing the bigger picture unlocks innovation, resilience, and regenerative value creation.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
Map ecosystems and identify leverage points.
Align strategy with emerging trends and needs.
Build cross-sector partnerships for systemic impact.
At the outermost level, leadership becomes stewardship. Conscious leaders connect their purpose with humanity’s broader challenges — contributing to regeneration and collective evolution.
We help leaders and leadership teams:
Engage in transformative dialogue and foresight.
Learn from trailblazing examples and explore leadership as service to life.
Co-create initiatives for societal and planetary impact.
Transformative Executive Coaching in Vertical Leadership Development has several key elements. It clarifies purpose and intention, awakens awareness, coherence, and impact — guiding leaders from managing in business as usual, through strategic leadership, toward embodied executive presence and systemic stewardship. Leading wisely and compassionately in a world beyond business as usual.
At the very heart of vertical growth and leadership lies a higher purpose. We help you connect with your purpose and intention — aligning goals, energy, and attention around what truly matters for you and your organisation.
Transformation begins within. We start and finish our journey with self-assessments that help you expand your self-awareness. We help you explore your thoughts, emotions, triggers, and how habitual patterns show up in your daily leadership. By observing yourself in action and reflecting on your own patterns, you begin to lead from consciousness rather than conditioning.
True stability arises from nervous-system regulation. We help you explore and expand your window of tolerance so you can stay calm, curious, and present in uncertainty — becoming a steadying force in complexity, and able to ”hold the shake” in challenging times and situations.
Mature leaders have a calm and clear mind. We explore the unseen forces that shape your perception and behaviour: ego-attachments, fears, and inner narratives. By integrating shadow aspects, you reclaim energy previously bound in reactivity and increase your clarity and wisdom.
Leadership is relational. We help you strengthen your capacity to listen deeply, sense beneath words, and create psychological safety — enabling others to grow and perform at their best. Through authentic presence and compassionate curiosity, you learn to connect beyond roles and cultivate the trust that allows people, organisations — and transformation — to flourish.
Wise leadership takes multiple perspectives into consideration. We help you develop your ability to hold multiple perspectives and see interconnections across time and systems. This expanded awareness allows you to design and act from coherence and compassion rather than control.
Leadership needs to be embodied. We help you embody your growth and transformation. You learn to lead with integrity, curiosity, compassion, and courage — aligning intention and action so that your presence and leadership become catalytic across teams, organisations, and ecosystems.
True leadership emerges from deep within. As the world grows more complex and interconnected, your inner capacities become your most powerful resources. Together, we explore your growth edges, unlock deeper levels of awareness, and cultivate the capacities needed to lead with clarity and compassion in an increasingly interconnected world. As your inner capacities grow, your outer impact expands – enabling you to consciously guide your organization toward a better future for all.
Already in 2005, Harvard Business Review published an article called The Seven Transformations of Leadership:
“… we’ve found that leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies.”
Today, we have realised that this – more specifically the Vertical Leadership Development underlying it – is key to utilizing our fullest potential.
As leaders, we are familiar with the relentless pursuit of goals, metrics, and outcomes. This Achievist mindset, while effective, often limits our capacity to see beyond immediate results.
In today’s VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) – called “a perfect storm of increasing complexity, accelerating change, and near-constant uncertainty” – most successful Achievist leaders hence sooner or later hit a mental and emotional glass ceiling.
There is simply a significant gap between the complexity of the task given, to that of the Achieveist mindset’s mental wiring and capacity.
Transformative coaching invites us to step into a new paradigm, where growth is not just about doing more, but about becoming more.
It challenges us to expand our self-awareness, understand the deeper currents of our motivations, and align our actions with a broader vision.
Vertical Leadership Development is an important key to help leaders elevate their perspectives, increase their positive impact, and move beyond business as usual. Ultimately to build a better business and a better future.
This is vital, because good business is simply good for business, and seriously needed in solving the world’s wicked problems.
And you as a business leader is crucial in this transformation. By growing vertically, providing purpose, direction and resources, you can contribute to meaning, purpose-led transformation, growth – and even help enhancing the wellbeing of both people and planet, while future proofing your business.
What you will need to develop to enable this is a wise, calm and strategic mind, insightful self-awareness, ability to create deep connection, and impactful change. Something that is now being picked up by the Inner Development Goals (IDG).
The IDG Guide points to the inner skills and qualities needed for leaders to successfully work with complex societal issues and co-create a prosperous future for all of humanity.
Our work is based on the decades of research underpinning the framework with a focus on Adult Development, Vertical Leadership Development and Transformational Coaching.
Our approach to Executive Coaching for Vertical Leadership Development is based on transformative leadership development, the StageSHIFT methodology, and Harvard professor Robert Kegan’s approach to adult development and change.
It helps create better self-awareness, expand presence, capacity and impact. Our focus is specifically to help leaders experiencing starting to question the typical “Achievist” mindset of business-as-usual, to explore and inhabit the “Catalyst” and “Synergist” mindsets.
We can help you better understand your current leadership capacity, leading edge, and shadows to be explored, through the StageSHIFT Vertical Holistic Leadership Profile (VHLP).
It will help you better understand your current behaviors in an organizational and leadership context, and what you might want to work on to expand your leadership capacity and impact going forward.
Leading transformational change asks for you as a leader – not only to understand the world around you, and your organization – but also to go inside of yourself to get in touch with your own purpose, to elevate your perspectives and go beyond business as usual.
Over 12-24 months, we will help you find your inner compass – and grow vertically – to support you on the journey to orchestrating impactful change across your organizational ecosystem and beyond.
This process is optimally run as preparation for, or in parallel to, a strategic and transformational journey of your organization aiming to co-create Better Business and a better future.
Contact us to set up a free discovery call.
StageSHIFT Coaching is highly innovative and integrative and helps liberate and connect mind, spirit, and heart to realize our unlimited human potential. The approach has proven to be four times more effective in 10 percent of the time invested compared to other vertical leadership development methods.
StageSHIFT Coaching also uniquely integrates vertical leadership development with organizational evolution and transformation.
StageSHIFT Coaching also uniquely integrates vertical leadership development with organizational evolution and transformation.
A StageSHIFT Coach adopts an explicit evidence-based transformative coaching approach. Transformative coaching involves dialogue, and asking leading questions offering deeper insights. It is also an invitations to work with proven StageSHIFT techniques and frameworks.
The pathway covers several areas (see image below). The goal is to help expand the leaders self-awareness, presence, capacity, and impact through vertical development to the Synergist level.
To receive a StageSHIFT certification – on top of their previous extensive leadership, consulting, and coaching experience – a StageSHIFT Coach needs to have their center of gravity at the later stage of Synergist or Alchemist, which is held by less than 10 percent of the executive population. They, therefore, have the capacity to hold an expansive coaching space that enables strategic leaders to extend their depth of meaning-making and expedite their development.
Elisabet Lagerstedt and Jessica Löwenhielm are both Certified StageShift Coaches trained directly by Dr Antoiniette Braks over several years. They both hold the following certifications:
As part of the StageSHIFT community and the StageSHIFT DEEPER Coaching Integration program (ongoing supervision and support), we can also help put you in contact with other StageSHIFT coaches and consultants globally.
There are several schools of thought within this field. Notable research has been produced by Jane Loevinger, William Torbert and Susanne Cook Greuter. Another school of thought was originated by Robert Kegan, building on the work of Jean Piaget, a famous psychologist with a focus on child development. Terry O’Fallon has instead taken an integral approach to vertical development, building on the work of philosopher Ken Wilber. Other researchers has then focused on specifical aspects
of vertical development, for instance on the more mature, or post-conventional stages, which have proven to be of utmost interest in the space of leadership due to their evolving capabilities to thrive in disruption and complexity.
Dr Antoinette Braks has later focused on the applied part of Vertical Leadership Development from an executive coaching and organizational development perspective, see for instance:
