Eithne Knappitsch works with teams at the point where high individual performance stops translating into collective effectiveness. Her work is grounded in relational intelligence — the capacity to read and shape the quality of connection in a team, and to design the structures that hold it. It is a discipline she has spent over two decades developing, teaching, and practising.
She is Irish, based in Klagenfurt, Austria, and works internationally. Her clients are senior leadership teams in global organisations, typically navigating post-acquisition integration or operating across multiple cultures and time zones.
Background
Eithne is Professor of Intercultural Management at FH Kärnten (Carinthia University of Applied Sciences), where she co-founded Austria’s first English-language Bachelor degree in intercultural management. Her research focuses on the relational dynamics of cross-cultural leadership teams — specifically, the mechanisms by which high-functioning individuals become low-functioning collectives.
She serves on the Board of IVEC (the International Virtual Exchange Conference), is an ambassador for the European Entrepreneurial Network, and curates TEDxKlagenfurt, where the programme has produced four TED editors’ picks in the past two years.
Her book, Relational Intelligence: Why Relationships Are Your Real Strategy, is forthcoming.
Klagenfurt
The Lab is based in Klagenfurt, in Austria’s Carinthia region. The choice is not incidental. Klagenfurt sits at the intersection of Germanic, Slavic, and Italian cultural zones, with a bilingual German-Slovene minority population and a sensitive twentieth-century history of suppressed and surfaced disagreement. It is a working example of the kind of complexity the Lab teaches leadership teams to hold.
The work
Eithne works with leadership teams, not individual executives. The unit of intervention is the team — the system of relationships that either makes or limits what an organisation can do.
Her approach is diagnostic and structural: she identifies the specific relational patterns limiting a team’s performance, then builds the practices and the conditions that shift them.
Contact
For enquiries about The Relational Intelligence Lab or bespoke engagements, write to info@therelationalintelligencelab.com.
For media and speaking enquiries, use the same address.
Klagenfurt, Austria.