Michael Koehler
CEO | Certified Executive Coach
Michael partners with his clients to choreograph powerful leadership development programs. A former national champion in Rock ‘n’ Roll Acrobatic Dance, he is attuned to tensions between technique and creativity, between order and improvisation, and the critical importance of timing.
To help changemakers bring about the organizational and societal changes that they envision, Michael supports (and provokes) his clients to make leaps in their own development. Michael's experiential methods build from pedagogical training at the University of Marburg, where he obtained a Master's in Education, and at Georgetown University, where he obtained a Certificate in Leadership Coaching.
Michael has experienced first-hand the frustrations of generating change within multi-stakeholder systems. He founded bilingual K-12 charter schools and has a long list of his own leadership failures from attempting to generate changes in the German education system. He reflected deeply on these failures during his studies at Harvard for the Master's in Public Administration degree and zeroed in on the importance of leadership development in creating systems change.
He now has one focus: developing leadership. He co-teaches “Practicing Leadership Inside & Out” in the program “Doctor of Education Leadership” at Harvard Graduate School of Education, exploring the intersection between role, adult development, and systems change. He also founded the Adaptive Leadership Network to create holding environments for adaptive leaders and adaptive leadership educators to support and learn from one another.
As a gay man born into a Seventh Day Adventist family, Michael has explored ways in which identity shapes how leadership is exercised. He thinks often about distinctions between “role” and “self.” In Michael's case, this includes the questioning of assumptions he's developed as a first-generation university graduate from a post-industrial German town and as a first-generation immigrant to the US.
