Gianpiero Petriglieri
Senior leaders are expected to be authentic and adaptable at the same time. Their people are loyal to a craft, not a company, and trust in institutions has thinned. The question for the executive team is what holds a leader together when the organisation around them keeps changing shape.
Gianpiero Petriglieri is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and a trained psychiatrist who helps organisations develop leaders capable of holding their ground in workplaces defined by mobile talent, mistrust, and continuous change.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Gianpiero Petriglieri
- He gives senior teams a clinical reading of leadership. Trained as a psychiatrist before joining INSEAD, he can speak about identity, authority and anxiety inside an organisation in language that a CEO recognises and a HR director can act on.
- He owns a named idea. “Nomadic professionalism,” developed across his Harvard Business Review essays, gives boards a clear way to think about leading people who are deeply bonded to their work but loosely tied to the company.
- He directs INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive development course for emerging leaders, which means his frameworks are tested every year on the next layer of senior management at global firms.
- He has been ranked twice in the Thinkers50 Top 50, in 2017 and 2021, and shortlisted across the Future Thinker, Leadership, Talent, and Coaching & Mentoring awards. The recognition is consistent, not a single moment.
- He pushes back on the wellness-industry version of leadership. His work is about humanising leadership without sentimentalising it, useful for executive teams tired of trainings that confuse care with capability.
Biography highlights
- Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, holding the Alumni Fund Chair in Leadership Development.
- Director of INSEAD’s Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive education course for emerging leaders.
- Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist by training; has practised as an executive coach and psychotherapist.
- Thinkers50 Top 50 (2017, 2021); shortlisted for Future Thinker, Leadership, Talent, and Coaching & Mentoring awards.
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review; quoted in the Financial Times, The Economist, BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian.
- Former Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership; visiting positions at Harvard Business School and Copenhagen Business School.
Biography
Most leadership development assumes the organisation is the stable thing and the leader is the variable. That assumption no longer holds. People build careers across firms, geographies, and modes of work, and the bond they trust most is to their craft, not their employer. The work of leading anchors itself somewhere else.
This is the territory Petriglieri has spent two decades mapping at INSEAD, where he is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive education course for emerging leaders. His framing of “nomadic professionalism,” developed across essays in Harvard Business Review, gives senior teams a precise way to talk about why competent people drift, why authenticity has replaced loyalty as the language of work, and what holds them in place.
The clinical training matters. Before academia, Petriglieri trained as a Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist, and has worked as an executive coach and psychotherapist. That background lets him speak about identity, authority, and anxiety inside an organisation in language that is neither clinical jargon nor corporate hygiene. His peer-reviewed research appears in Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Studies; his commentary appears in the Financial Times, The Economist, the BBC and the New York Times.
He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership and has been ranked in the Thinkers50 Top 50 in 2017 and 2021. The argument that runs through all of it is that leadership is not a set of behaviours bolted on top of a career. It is what makes a person trustworthy enough to hold authority in a workplace that no longer holds itself together.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership development in an age of mobile careers
- Nomadic professionalism and meaningful work
- Trustworthy leadership and authority in low-trust workplaces
- Authenticity, identity and the practice of leading
- Humanising leadership in the digital age
- Executive development and the role of HR
- Self-awareness as a leadership discipline
Ideal for
- CEOs, executive committees and boards setting leadership direction during sustained organisational change.
- CHROs, CLOs and heads of executive development designing senior leadership pipelines.
- High-potential cohorts and emerging leader programmes inside global firms.
- Talent and culture leaders rebuilding the relationship between the firm and people who think of themselves as professionals first.
Audience outcomes
- A named frame, nomadic professionalism, for diagnosing why competent people stay, leave, or drift.
- Sharper language for talking about authority, authenticity, and trust at the top of an organisation.
- A more clinical view of what leadership development is actually doing to the people inside it.
- A useful argument against treating wellbeing programmes as a substitute for trustworthy leadership.
- A clearer set of questions for senior teams designing the next generation of leaders.
Talks
A talk on what holds leaders steady when their people are bonded to a craft, not a company.
Key takeaways:
- Why competence stops being the differentiator at senior levels
- How nomadic professionalism reshapes loyalty, advancement and authority
- What organisations can build into leadership development to keep good people grounded
A talk on identity, authority and the inner work of becoming a leader other people can rely on.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between holding a role and exercising leadership
- Why authenticity without authority is unstable
- How senior leaders can use self-awareness as a working discipline
A talk on rebuilding leadership credibility in workplaces and societies where institutional trust has thinned.
Key takeaways:
- What erodes trust inside organisations and how leaders amplify or repair it
- The link between purpose, performance and credibility at senior level
- Practical positions a leader can take when goodwill is low