Meet Inge de Clippeleer, a Leadership Professor and Head of Department who has found her calling in helping others find theirs
In another life - or maybe in this one as a side hustle - Inge De Clippeleer could have been a gardener. Not that she ever mentioned a green thumb, but she consistently lights up at the mention of watching things grow. In her case, those “things” happen to be people: students, executives, colleagues. She plants seeds and tends to them, first from close by, then from afar. As a coach, a teacher and a head of faculty, she has found her calling in helping others find theirs.
“I hope that by the time I retire, I’ve made a difference in some people’s lives” is how she starts our conversation. It’s a sort of North Star that has guided her career from the beginning, giving direction to what might otherwise have looked like a series of coincidences.
After a master’s degree in Pedagogical Sciences from Ghent University (Belgium), completed alongside a teaching qualification, she finds herself working as a young research associate at Vlerick Business School. “I loved the idea of transferring knowledge, helping out people”, she says. But teaching was not originally the plan: “When I signed up for the research, it wasn’t the intention that I was going to teach.”
Her first appearance on the blackboard side of a classroom happens almost by accident. She remembers being equal parts excited and nervous, but she managed to capture their attention in the first 15 minutes. After that, they were hooked, and so was she.
That first year she teaches MSc students about group dynamics. Two years later she is in front of an MBA class and discovers her love of teaching executive audiences. “I like the depth we can get into”, she says. “I love it when they ask me challenging questions, some of which I’ve never been asked before, and some of which I’m bringing home with me to ponder.”
After several years of intense and thrilling teaching and coaching, she starts her PhD adventure to solidify her place in academia. “I wanted to do more: build courses, manage programmes, be a full-on faculty member, and for that, I needed a PhD”, she explains.
So, a PhD she did, but in her own way. For someone so fascinated with people and their possibilities, there was little chance she would spend three years shut away in an office crunching data. She crafts a research project around her interests and her strengths, looking closely, through intervention studies, at how people and teams can personalise their careers and job environments. In 2017, she completes her thesis (1), “Being in the driver’s seat of your job: Investigating contextual and individual determinants and outcomes of job and team crafting”.
She arrives at EDHEC in September of that same year, which she describes as a very conscious choice. “I only applied there because they had two things extremely important for me: an entrepreneurial spirit, which meant I could take initiative and develop new things, and a strong commitment to quality in the classroom”, she says. Plus, people, so many people coming from all over the world.
At her newfound home on the other side of the Belgian border, she finds the ideal environment in which to bring her ideas to fruition. She develops and leads two development programmes, Lead360 and Transform360, embedded in the Global MBA and Executive MBA: entire pedagogical journeys dedicated to helping students find their direction.
As an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Leadership, she leads classes through complex, interwoven topics such as strategic leadership, career self-management, group dynamics, and self-management, reflecting the school’s growing emphasis on humanities across its curricula. “My starting point is always authenticity”, she says. “I hope people learn to know who they are, where they draw their energy from, and how they can lead according to their true selves.”
She also spends a lot of extra time in one-to-one conversations, sessions to tailor the core tenets of her teaching to individual needs or to respond to burning leadership and career questions students have.
Since 2021, she’s been bringing the care, energy and enthusiasm that define her classroom teaching to another type of audience: her colleagues. Becoming Head of Faculty for the Management & Humanities department is another one of those things she considers coincidental, but she took the role to heart right away, seeing in it an opportunity to help even more people flourish. It is also a deeply strategic role: professionalising faculty processes, strengthening the department’s research ambitions and helping make EDHEC a place where academics want to build their careers, and one they would recommend to others.
“It’s been like a passion project for me”, she explains. “I am really proud of the team we’ve built. It’s been a period of transition, with 14 recruitments over the past three years alone, and another 5 to 8 to come this year, with strong objectives in terms of research, programme development, talent attraction, and faculty professionalisation. But the human side of it all — crafting a team, watching it grow, bringing in new people and weaving all those threads together — has truly been one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career.”
With this latest role, one that she would be happy to continue for another mandate, Inge has simply found more ground in which to plant those seeds.
Through her classes and her role as an educator and coach, she gently leads students and experienced executives alike towards self-discovery and effective leadership; a challenge renewed with each encounter that ensures she can never be bored.
Through her research (2), she keeps exploring the concept of team crafting with studies that enable her to dive deeper into her favourite topic: people. And through her own leadership, she gets a rare opportunity in academia: to practise what she teaches. Judging from the students who ask for another hour, the alumni who write years later, and the team she has helped bring together, one thing is certain: she will not have to wait until the end of the line to assess whether she has made a difference. She already has.
References
(1) Being in the driver's seat of your job : investigating determinants, mechanisms, and outcomes of job and team crafting. Inge De Clippeleer (2017) https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8536123
(2) Selection - Enhancing team crafting through proactive motivation: An intervention study (2025), The inside effects of a strong external employer brand: how external perceptions can influence organizational absenteeism rates (2018), The Antecedents of Creativity Revisited: A Process Perspective (2014)
Key dates
Since 2021: Head of Faculty, Management & Humanities, EDHEC Business School, France
Since 2017: Associate Professor, Organisational Behaviour & Leadership, EDHEC Business School, France
2013-2017: PhD scholar, Ghent University, Belgium
2010-2017: Senior Lecturer & Executive Coach, Vlerick Business School, Belgium
2008-2010: Research Associate, Vlerick Business School, Belgium
2006-2008: Teacher’s degree in Pedagogical Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium
2003-2008: Master in Pedagogical Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium
