Contact Details 
Karola Sakotnik creating culture e.U.
Keynotes & Coaching for Future, Innovation and Culture  
Wieladgasse 2/27, 8010 Graz | Austria Mobile+43 650 5265990 Email: office@karolasakotnik.com 
Webpage: www.karolasakotnik.com 
  
Areas of Expertise 
  • Keynote Speaker
  • Innovation Facilitation 
  • Creative Interventions  
  • Business & Improv Theatre
  • Executive Impact-Coaching 
  • Cultural Change  
  • Leadership Development   
 
Coaching Experience 
Karola has been actively and practically involved in coaching for over 25 years.
The roots were performing arts including professional music (singing & piano), as well as physical theatre (impro theatre, dance, acrobatics, 
pantomime, physical comedy). First it was about performance and stage, when she discovered that stage work is so closely related to leadership, self-leadership and impact. The challenges of our nowadays transformational business environment can be trained through creative interventions like impro theatre.  Her motto: “I assist you to increase your impact. Think big, create a culture. Be able to follow your gut feeling, knowing when it is giving you useful information and when it is freaking out. Know that creativity and humour are key to us humans. Make a vision, take all your courage, be empathetic, dare to name the truth and go for it!” She has worked with different organizations and cultures in many different countries, now focusing more on Board and senior levels.  
Corporate and Management Experience 
has now worked for over 10 years nationally and internationally in the fields of coaching and inspiring high potentials and leaders to exponentially increase their impact by creating a human culture. Her career is as complex and diverse so have become her assets. She names five milestones as crucial to her development: she started out as international performing artist, co-initiated the hospital clown movement in Europe (RED NOSES). An autoimmune disease made her stop her physical theatre career, she went back to University. As Manager Entertainment Program and Operations AIDAcruises, she arrived in the world of virtual leadership, leading teams on 4 ships, herself based in Hamburg and became then the Artistic Director of Hapag Lloyd Cruises, again award winning. At the top of the second success path she still knew to move on. She founded her own agency delivering both creative content and training. Learning from creative processes as used in arts for business and social needs was her main focus by then. The most challenging milestone was to be Artistic and Program Director of “Emergency Smile”, a program delivering psychosocial support through humour and clowning to war and torture traumatized individuals with an international team of 16 performing artists. At first the program was considered as too edgy for refugee camps, at the end of four years, partners like Doctors without Borders and IFRC even co-funded it. Now she passes on this expertise of leadership and impact. 
Academic Qualifications 
Coaching Education and Certification 
Recent Projects 
Karola coaches the HR Executive of a large transportation caterer in her transformation in work and life. The goal is to unwrap the true purpose and direction in (work) life as she needs to find ways of how to make the impact she desires.  
Karola is part of a  Senior  Managers  Leadership 
program with one of the leading car producers in Germany (DAIMLER) 
Karola is facilitating the process of uniting 30 regional independent culture producers and artists to develop a common marketing tools, based on cooperation, identity and synergy. 
Karola facilitates innovation processes with a regulation authority in Austria. Topics are: where does regulation need innovative ideas, how can a regulation authority impact the development of the energy market and set new standards or new sources.  
She also works with senior managers and professional speakers of all areas: preparing their speeches, developing their speaking capacities and in how to have an impact.
She also directs and develops their performance with them. 
Karola also hosts the first Austrian Speaker Platform “Speaking for the Future”  Memberships 
Working Languages