Alta — Leadership Development

What I do

Human change
that sticks.

Whether you are here to become a more effective leader, to find greater alignment in your life and leadership, or to help your team or organisation achieve more together — my approach is systemic, built on research-backed perspectives and over a decade of practice.

I work at the intersection of inner development and organisational leadership — where consciousness meets complexity, and where the personal and the professional become inseparable.

This is not about adding more tools to an already full toolkit. It is about expanding the very range of how you see, think, and lead.

I'm here to help you

Accelerate leadership effectiveness — so you can move faster, decide better, and bring others with you.
Identify the hidden patterns limiting your team's performance and unlock new levels of alignment and execution.
Build leadership bench strength across your organisation — developing the next generation before you need them.
Navigate complexity and change without losing momentum — grounding your people in purpose while staying adaptive.
Create cultures where high performance and human wellbeing reinforce each other, not compete.
Turn strategy into aligned action — ensuring the choices made at the top translate into consistent behaviour at every level.
Conversations are the smallest, biggest thing in making change happen — I help you and your organisation become better at the ones that matter most.

The work

Stories from
the field.

A selection of engagements from over a decade working with leaders and organisations across Europe — each one different, each one shaped by the people and the moment.

When the change-makers need to change

Leadership Development · Pharmaceutical

There is something quietly paradoxical about asking people to lead others through transformation when they haven't examined what they themselves are holding onto. That was the starting point for this work — a global pharmaceutical company in the middle of a significant ownership shift, whose internal change coaches were expected to guide the organisation forward.

I worked with the coaches on the patterns and stories — often long-held — that were shaping how they led, and what they unconsciously believed was possible. When people can genuinely see what they're carrying, something opens up. The cohort that emerged from this process was more honest, more grounded, and more capable of meeting others' resistance with real understanding — because they had met their own.

Culture that belongs to the people in it

Culture & Ways of Working · Technology

Most organisations know what it feels like when values are handed down from above. They look good on walls. They rarely change much.

When a leading Nordic technology company set out to shift how it worked, the design question we kept returning to was: how do you create the conditions for principles to emerge from within, rather than be imposed from above? The process we built together did exactly that — drawing out the ways of working that people themselves believed in, and that could genuinely guide collective behaviour. What struck me most was the quality of ownership people felt at the end. They weren't implementing someone else's framework. They were living something they had helped create.

You cannot guide others further than you have gone yourself

Partner Development · Management Consulting

This is one of the beliefs I keep coming back to in my work. And it was the animating idea behind a nine-month development programme for three hundred senior partners at a leading management consultancy.

The programme was built around the Immunity to Change framework — asking senior leaders to take on something genuinely difficult in themselves, not as an exercise, but as real work. What emerged was more than sharper consulting practice. It was a community of people who had a more honest relationship with their own edges — and who could therefore sit with clients in the hardest moments of change with something closer to genuine understanding.

Development that outlasts the programme

Leadership at Scale · Pharmaceutical

Six hundred leaders. Cohorts of sixty. The Danish landscape as classroom.

This was one of the most ambitious leadership initiatives I have been part of — a programme designed to reach the top of a global pharmaceutical company at a moment when the complexity of what they were navigating was genuinely outpacing the leadership capacity available to meet it. Taking people out of their normal context — into nature, away from the inbox — created a different quality of presence and reflection. But what I am most proud of is the design choice to build in leadership circles that continued after the programme ended. The development didn't stop. It just changed shape.

Meeting leaders where they are

Leadership Reach & Offsite Design · MedTech

Not all development happens in a workshop. One of the most interesting challenges in large organisations is simply reaching people — spreading ideas and inspiration across a leadership community that is dispersed, busy, and sometimes sceptical of formal programmes.

For a global MedTech company, I worked across several formats to do exactly that. A keynote opened up the conversation. A series of leadership podcasts brought ideas directly to leaders in their own time and on their own terms — making quality thinking accessible without requiring anyone to clear their diary. And when the moment came for ninety country leaders to come together in person, I designed a two-day offsite that gave them the space to connect, reflect, and leave with something they could actually use. Sometimes great leadership development is as much about good design as it is about deep content.

About

Katrina

Founder · Leadership & Organisational Development Consultant

I started Alta because I believe the inner life of a leader shapes the outer life of an organisation — and that real, lasting change begins not just with new skills, but with a new way of seeing.

My background spans engineering, organisational design, and over a decade of leadership development practice across some of Europe's most complex companies. I am rooted in adult development theory, trained in trauma-aware facilitation, and deeply interested in what it means to lead well in a world that keeps asking more of us.

My thinking about what organisations can become was profoundly shaped by my work as a research collaborator with Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini during the writing of Humanocracy — a book that challenges the very assumptions most organisations are built on. That collaboration deepened my conviction that the gap between what organisations are and what they could be is far larger than most leaders dare to imagine.

I am based in Copenhagen, and I bring a Scandinavian sensibility to the work: directness, warmth, and a commitment to substance over performance. I believe the best leadership development is not a programme you attend — it is a shift that stays with you.

I work one-to-one, with teams, and across organisations. Always with curiosity. Always co-created.

Why I do this

I became interested in leadership development because I kept seeing smart, capable people hitting invisible ceilings — not from lack of effort or knowledge, but because their ways of making meaning had stopped growing with the complexity they were facing.

Adult development theory gave me a language for that. Trauma-informed practice gave me a more honest understanding of how human systems actually work. And years of organisational consulting gave me the context to bring these things together in ways that actually land.

What drives me is the moment when someone sees something about themselves or their system that they couldn't see before — and realises they now have a genuine choice about what to do next. That moment is why I do this work.

Frameworks & approaches

Key leadership
tools & approaches.

I draw on a range of frameworks — always in service of the work, never as an end in themselves. What follows is a map of the thinking and methods I return to most often.

Leadership Circle Profile

A powerful 360° assessment mapping the relationship between reactive tendencies and creative leadership capacities. It reveals how inner beliefs drive outer behaviour — and where the greatest leverage for growth lies. Moving from reactive to creative is not about fixing weakness; it is about expanding who you can be as a leader.

Immunity to Change

Developed by Kegan and Lahey at Harvard, this approach surfaces the hidden commitments and big assumptions that keep us stuck — even when we genuinely want to change. Transformative individually and in teams, it is one of the most honest conversations a leader can have with themselves.

Purpose & Values Work

Clarity about what you stand for is not a luxury — it is the foundation from which aligned, courageous decisions flow. I facilitate purpose and values work that goes beyond the wall poster: embedding it in how decisions are made, how people are developed, and how culture is shaped.

Adaptive Leadership

Drawing on Heifetz and Linsky, adaptive leadership distinguishes technical problems from adaptive challenges — those requiring shifts in values, beliefs, and ways of working. In a complex world, the ability to diagnose which is which is among the most critical leadership capabilities of our time.

Adult Development Theory

Rooted in the work of Kegan, Cook-Greuter, and Torbert, adult development theory maps how the complexity of human meaning-making grows across a lifetime. Leaders at different developmental stages face different challenges — and unlock different capacities. Understanding your own developmental edge is where genuine growth begins.

Trauma-Informed Facilitation & Coaching

Workplaces are human systems — which means they carry the full weight of human experience, including its wounds. A trauma-informed approach creates conditions for deeper honesty, greater psychological safety, and more sustainable change. It changes what becomes possible in a room.

Both/And Thinking

Polarities are not problems to solve but tensions to manage. Drawing on Barry Johnson's Polarity Management, I help leaders and teams navigate the inherent paradoxes of organisational life: stability and change, autonomy and alignment, individual and collective. Holding both sides of a tension is a hallmark of mature leadership.

Making Great Choices — Roger Martin

Strategy is a set of integrated choices. Drawing on Roger Martin's choice-cascading framework, I help leaders and organisations clarify the choices they are actually making — at every level — and whether those choices are coherent, explicit, and pointed toward what matters most.

Human change
that sticks.

Organisations
I've worked with.

Stories from
the field.

Principles
in practice.

Key leadership
tools & approaches.

Ideas worth
sitting with.

Start a
conversation.

Human changethat sticks.

OrganisationsI've worked with.

Stories fromthe field.

Principlesin practice.

Key leadershiptools & approaches.

Ideas worthsitting with.

Start aconversation.

Human change
that sticks.

Organisations
I've worked with.

Stories from
the field.

Principles
in practice.

Key leadership
tools & approaches.

Ideas worth
sitting with.

Start a
conversation.