Programme studied and graduation year: PhD Organisational Behaviour, 2019
A career spanning engineering, organisational behaviour, executive coaching and leadership development has given Dr Aurélie Cnop a unique perspective on how people and organisations succeed. Now teaching at LSE and Imperial, coaching senior leaders, contributing to AI leadership initiatives and writing on the challenges facing modern organisations, she continues to explore the intersection of people, leadership and innovation. In this Alumni of the Month interview, Aurélie reflects on her journey from engineer to educator and coach, shares the lessons that have shaped her career, and explains why understanding people is often the key to solving complex problems.
What are your current areas of focus, professionally or otherwise?
In a nutshell, I share my time day to day between education, coaching and advisory work: teaching on the MSc and executive programmes at LSE and Imperial, largely around organisational behaviour, negotiation and digital health leadership; executive coaching practice, which brings a systems-psychodynamic lens I've wanted to develop properly for years; and writing.
After collaborating last year on a compilation of cases for the Department of Management, which we offered in open source, my last book, Futureproofing Your Life, was co-authored with my friend Prof.Terence Tse and I. I am now working on the gap between AI hype and AI hope, aimed at business leaders trying to make sensible decisions in a (very) noisy market. I'm also supporting LSE's AI Leadership Career Accelerator, a very well-built six-month online programme for mid- to senior leaders who are being asked to lead on AI without a technical background.
It was built with faculty from the Department of Management and the Data Science Institute, and it is deliberately practical: participants work on real projects and leave with board-ready outputs. Alongside that I'm moving into non-executive and trustee work, which feels like the natural next chapter.
Tell us about your career journey since graduating from LSE?
I started out in engineering, and for a long time I thought that was the whole job. What changed things was discovering that I could not fix the engineering problems without knowing a great deal more about people. A design is only ever as good as the decisions behind it, and those decisions are made by people who disagree, who are protecting a position, or who do not say what they think while there is still time to say it.
So I went and did a PhD in Organisational Behaviour, largely because I wanted to understand properly the part I kept failing to fix. It made me a better manager and, I think, a better person: more curious about why people behave as they do, and more attentive to the structure they are working within.
What skills have you learnt along the way?
- Leadership & People Management: Understanding how to bring out the best in individuals and teams.
- Organisational Behaviour Analysis: Exploring how workplace dynamics shape decisions and outcomes.
- Strategic Problem-Solving: Identifying the root causes behind complex organisational challenges.
- Emotional Intelligence: Building empathy, curiosity and awareness of the people and systems around us.
What motivated your transition to a new role or industry?
The motivation behind the PhD was fairly self-interested at first: I wanted to be better at managing people than I had been, and teach this to managers as well.
What I did not anticipate was how much of the value lies in helping the people around you get better at it too. A well-run team outlasts any individual who happens to be running it. That is largely what my work is now, through teaching, coaching and mentoring, and it is the part I value most.
Has your career worked out the way you envisioned?
Yes and no, and that is why it is still so exciting. Yes, in the sense that the direction has been consistent even when the path was not. Every step has circled the same question of how people and organisations actually work, and each move made the next one make more sense. Looking back, the detours were the useful part.
What were the most valuable lessons you took away from studying at LSE?
Two things, one intellectual and one personal. The first is the LSE motto: rerum cognoscere causas, to know the causes of things. This is a working method, but also a life philosophy. LSE taught me to stay with a problem long enough to find out what is actually causing it, to argue from evidence rather than instinct, and to accept that the honest answer is often more complicated than the one people want to hear. I have carried that into every role since, and it is what I now try to pass on to my own students.
The second is that I found a second family in the Department of Management. A PhD can be a solitary business, but I found here supervisors who took the work seriously, colleagues who read drafts they had no obligation to read, and a group of fellow students who became lifelong friends. It is a genuinely generous place, and it is the reason my connection to LSE did not end at graduation and is still growing today.
What’s the greatest challenge you’ve had to overcome?
Arriving here as an expatriate, and the long business of turning a country you have moved to into a place you belong. I love London; I have never found anywhere to match that energy. And it is a truly international city in the fullest sense.
That openness and everyday diversity is the city's superpower: it keeps you curious, it keeps you sharp, and young at heart. London is home for me now, and being both an outsider and an insider here has turned out to be the best vantage point I could have asked for.
If you had one piece of advice you could give your younger self, what would it be?
I think it would be: make a plan, but hold it loosely. Treat your career and your purpose down here as a series of experiments rather than a straight line - try things, take calculated risks, and be ready to pivot when opportunity knocks. And measure the results against your own needs, not against somebody else's scoreboard, which is often our pitfall today due to social media pressure.
Share with us your fondest memory of the Department of Management.
The research meetings during my PhD. They were the most stimulating hours of my week. Someone would present work that was still half-formed, and the group would really engage with it, test it, re-build on it. What struck me most was the kindness of it. The instinct was always to help: a sharper framing offered here, a dataset or a reference passed along there, a quiet word afterwards about how to fix the argument. I learnt as much about how to be a better colleague in those meetings as I did about research, and it is the standard I still try to hold myself to.
If you would like to be our Alum of the Month or if you would like to nominate a Department of Management alumni, please email dom.alumni@lse.ac.uk.