Veiko Valkiainen is a researcher and faculty member in the Chair of Management at the University of Tartu. His work is driven by an overarching mission: to help leaders and teams unleash their full potential by distributing authority, boosting autonomy and fostering genuine self-management.
Central to Veiko’s research is identifying the enabling conditions that make — or break — self-managing organizations. He has shown that “learned helplessness,” deeply ingrained in high power-distance, traditionally hierarchical cultures, is the primary obstacle to adopting autonomous frameworks. Alongside this, he investigates how teams can become truly independent and self-sufficient, reducing reliance on classic managerial hierarchies.
Passionate about translating these insights into practice, Veiko is a trained Holacracy practitioner and seasoned leadership coach who has guided organizations through the practical adoption of self-management practices. At the University of Tartu he teaches How to Deliberatepy Craft Your Own Leadership Style, The Challenges of Teamwork as well as Strategic Leadership and Self-Managing Organizations. He also hosts the nine-year-running weekly podcast Leadership Is a Competitive Advantage, which has featured nearly 500 international and Estonian guests and amassed over 600 000 downloads.
His academic grounding spans psychology, psychotherapy and coaching — including gestalt-therapy training at the Gestalt Institute of Scandinavia (in Orø, Denmark) and certification from Erickson Coaching International (in New York, US). His most recent academic paper, The Human Side of Self-Managing Organizations: Unlearning Learned Helplessness, is currently under revise-and-resubmit at a top-tier management journal.