Natalja is an organizational change agent and coach, with a wide portfolio of skills. Her primary expertise lies in working with leadership teams and coaching leaders, focusing on their performance, group dynamics, and decision-making patterns. This allows leadership teams to multiply their impact on the organization and contributes to the personal growth of the leaders involved. Natalja leverages her soft skills of understanding group dynamics, human psychology and coaching, when working with leadership groups.
Natalja is also a knowledgeable analytical coach. Her PhD experience allows her to structure her work based on relevant research, and use this knowledge to understand and bring change to highly complex systems and problem spaces. She applies critical thinking and system thinking approaches to gain better understanding of problem spaces for herself and for others.
Natalja’s key qualities are being action oriented, curious and very positive. Together with her expertise, these qualities allow Natalja to create REAL and SUSTAINABLE change to processes, culture and leaders, positively impacting many people within the organization.
Overview of portfolio
- Agile/Lean methods: a decade long experience educating in and applying Agile and Lean principles in dynamic world leading organizations
- Product Development and Product Coaching: nearly a decade long experience working with world leading product organizations, focusing on the perspective of the product and product development process, which relies on collaboration of multiple functions and stretches through multiple management levels.
- Executive/ Leadership Coaching: Certified Integral Professional Coach, with significant experience in coaching leaders, teams and organizations to improve performance and reach individual and collective goals
- Organizational research: Holds PhD from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) in fields of Information Technology and Organizational science, and experience studying over 30 software development organizations
- Working with groups: Highly experienced in understanding and improving team dynamics, organizational culture
- Facilitation and Training: Experienced in designing, and facilitating events for groups for up to 250 people, as well as designing and facilitating focused group trainings.
Roles
- Enterprise Agile Coach
- Leadership Coach or Executive Coach
- Organizational Researcher
- Product Coach
Past engagements
Enterprise Agile Coach @ Epiroc, Learning and Development 2023.05 – 2023.10
At Learning and Development part of Epiroc, I partnered with Epiroc leaders to create and execute on the strategy for Epiroc University , impacting the overall Learning and Development strategy in Epiroc. For that, I have analysed the organisational data and engaged with structural parts of the organisation that could be used for spreading the knowledge and learning.
I have also focused on sharpening the existing product portfolio of Epiroc University, adding suitable structure and visibility of the work, as well as sharpening the customer focus, and strengthening the above with new values and norms for the Epiroc University team.
Organizational Coach @ Spotify AB 2020.05 – 2023.05
As a Senior Agile coach at Spotify, I worked with leadership teams focusing on their performance, group dynamics, and decision-making patterns, multiplying the impact of those leadership teams on the values, norms, culture and structures of the organization. I have also defined structures and practices to guide operational work of an organizational unit of 400+ people. Moreover, I have designed and facilitated large events (of 200+ people), as well as more complex and strategic activities.
Agile Coach @ Spotify AB 2015.10-2020.05
As an Agile coach at Spotify, I worked with multiple software development teams focusing on creating and fostering an environment that makes high performance of teams inevitable. As part of it, I analyzed how teams worked, questioned the status quo, added clarity to their direction, as well as coached and guided people to adopt suitable processes, aligned with organizational culture and values. I also worked with leaders of leaders and drove organizational change in an inclusive and effective manner.
Agile Coach @ SVTi 2015.04-2015.07
At SVT I have worked closely with two agile teams. My responsibilities were to provide support and guidance to the teams in order to improve their software development process, support healthy group dynamics, as well as together with the teams and POs create vision, core values and a set of actionable metrics to guide future product development and measure its success.
Organizational Researcher @ KTH working with various Swedish IT companies 2008.10-2014.09
My research focused on social and cultural aspects of software process transformations and change, (such as e.g. cultural aspects of Agile/Lean adoption). As many as thirty software development or engineering organizations were involved in the research, in various research projects.
The research explored how change to software processes is affected by organizational, social and managerial aspects, and how this change should be managed. The results of the research were published in 13 scientific research papers, (see list of publications in my linked in page for details).
Courses and lectures I gave
– Dare to speak up, (lecture on Psychological safety)
– Psychological safety training, ( workshop/ training)
– The Art of giving feedback, ( workshop/ training)
– Remote ways of working, ( workshop/ training)
– Agile ways of working, ( lectures, workshops and training as part of course in KTH)
– Software development, its processes ( lectures, workshops and training as part of course in KTH)
Education and certifications
PhD (Doctor in Technology), in Organizational science and Information Technologies, from KTH, 2014
Integral Professional Coach, Integral Coaching Canada, 2022
Positive Intelligence Coaching , with Shirzad Chamine, 2023
Coaching Beyond the Team, with Esther Derby and Don Gray, 2015
Problem Solving Leadership, with G.Weinberg, E.Derby, 2016
Sociocracy 3.0, with James Priest 2016
Other courses or trainings
- Positive Intelligence Coaching , with Shirzad Chamine, 2023
- Integral Professional Coaching Program , Integral Coaching Canada, 2022
- Leadership: Finding Motivation and Purpose, 2022
- Making Effective Decisions, 2022
- Integral Associate Coaching Program , Integral Coaching Canada, 2021
- Leadership: Resilience, 2021
- Self- Leadership: Building Emotional Intelligence , 2020
- Distributed and remote ways of working: How to make it work, 2020
- Systems Thinking , 2019
- Fail Gloriously, with Josh Lenn 2018
- Leadership and Influencing, 2018
- Professional Facilitation, 2016
- Problem Solving Leadership, with G.Weinberg, E.Derby, 2016
- The art of coaching, 2016
- The art of giving feedback, 2015
- Agile ways of working, 2014
- Scrum and Kanban, 2010
Languages
English, fluent and professional level
Swedish, professional level
Russian, fluent
Latvian, intermediate level
Spanish, intermediate level
