Executive Team | Senior Consultants | Consultants | Coaches | Renewal Faculty

Verena Kugi Costescu, PhD

Verena works as a leadership consultant and executive coach with C-level executives and top teams.

Her core belief is that the key to organizations’ growth lies in harnessing the energy and talent of their people. As such, she acts as a catalyst for leaders, teams and organizations to achieve their full potential. For her that means yielding impressive business results as well as creating environments that bring out the best in people.
Through a decade of experience as a management consultant with multinational organizations, Verena discovered the extent of the challenge people face in integrating the often stressful demands of work with the balance they ache for on a personal and physical level. She therefore decided to focus on a holistic approach that creates integration and balance in all parts of people’s lives.

Previously, Verena was a Managing Consultant at The Trium Group in New York where she led projects on leadership development, organizational transformation, and strategy alignment & execution. Examples of her work include building capability and increasing the effectiveness of a senior team at a life sciences company at a critical time in the company’s growth, partnering with the new CEO of an insurance company to realign his team around a new vision and strategy and roll out a cultural change program, and structuring a functional transformation for a leading technology business with a major behavioral change component. Her clients ranged from the technology sector, financial services, life sciences and public sector among others.

Before joining Trium, Verena was a consultant for McKinsey & Company in the German and Italian offices, where she helped leading European organizations in the fields of insurance, investments, telecom, and media clients on topics ranging from post-merger integration, strategic realignment, efficiency improvement to organizational redesign, among others. While at McKinsey, Verena shaped the integration process of two leading European financial institutions and got first-hand experience in managing the impact of two very different organizational cultures on the merger process.

Originally, Verena began her career in finance where she was trading derivatives for a hedge fund. She also completed the Series 3, i.e. the National Commodity Futures Examination.

Verena holds a PhD in Business and an MBA from the University of Vienna, Austria and Georgetown University as well as an MPA from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. During her time at the Kennedy School, Verena focused on topics of leadership and adult learning and worked as a teaching assistant for Ron Heifetz’ experiential leadership class entitled "Leadership: Mobilizing Group Resources". Verena is also trained as an executive coach through Columbia University’s Coach Certification Program. In addition, she is certified as a Vinyasa and Hatha Yoga Teacher with Yoga Alliance in the US and UK. She and her husband Manuel live in London.