In one workshop, senior leaders confidently described their organization as inclusive, collaborative, and committed to hearing every voice. A week later, employees from the same company sat in a different room and described who actually spoke in meetings, whose ideas moved forward, and who had learned that speaking up felt pointless. The values statements were identical in both rooms. The lived experience was not.
That gap between what organizations declare and what they repeatedly do is where Sara Louise Muhr has built two decades of work. After years of academic research into leadership, power, and organizational behavior, she made an Important discovery: most change efforts fail not because leaders lack good intentions, but because intentions alone cannot alter the structural patterns that govern daily work life.
The Professor Who Refused to Stay in the Classroom
Sara Louise Muhr is Professor of Diversity and Leadership at Copenhagen Business School and Founder and CEO of InLead Agency, a research-driven advisory practice that translates organizational science into behavioral change. What sets her apart is not just her academic credentials, but her willingness to hold rigorous research standards and real-world accountability in the same hand, without letting either one compromise the other.
Building the Foundation for What Would Come
Muhr’s intellectual formation began at Copenhagen Business School, where she completed degrees in Business Administration and Philosophy, followed by a Master of Science in Business Administration and Marketing. A detour to the University of Glasgow for a master’s degree in Finance gave her early exposure to how organizations think about performance and risk, before she had developed the language to explain why those systems so often exclude the people who could improve them.
She returned to CBS for her PhD in Organization Theory, completing it in 2008 with research that would become the foundation for everything that followed. A four-year postdoctoral research position at Lund University deepened her understanding of how professional identity, power, and norms interact inside organizations, while concurrent lecturing roles at both Lund and CBS trained her to translate complex theoretical insights into language that practitioners could actually use.
When CBS brought her back as Associate Professor in 2012, she began building the research agenda that would eventually define her practice. She moved through the academic ranks, becoming Professor with special responsibilities in Human Resource Management and Organization in 2018 and full Professor of Diversity and Leadership in 2022. Along the way, she served as Academic Director of the CBS Leadership Centre, Academic Director of the CBS Business in Society Platform on Diversity and Difference, and Board Member of CBS itself. From 2022 to 2024, she chaired the Ministry of Culture’s Research Council, a governance role that put her at the intersection of public policy and institutional decision-making. She is currently a board member of Kvinfo – Denmark’s knowledge center for gender and equality.
Each position added a layer of understanding. The research gave her the evidence. The leadership roles showed her how institutions actually make decisions, and how rarely those decisions reflect the values printed in the annual report.
Where Research Meets the Monday Morning Meeting
In January 2026, Sara Louise Muhr launched InLead Agency. The timing was deliberate. After two decades of research, she had reached a conclusion that demanded action: the gap between organizational intentions and everyday behavior is not a communication problem that can be solved with better workshops or clearer value statements.
“Organizational culture is not primarily shaped by what people say they value, but by what they repeatedly do, reward, tolerate, and expect from one another in everyday interactions,” she explains. “Many organizations invest significant effort in defining values. The challenge is that values alone rarely change behavior.”
InLead is built around that insight. The practice brings together PhD-level researchers and consultants connected to leading academic institutions, and works with organizations that have moved past awareness campaigns and are ready to examine the everyday interactions where culture is actually produced.
A recent engagement with a large national organization illustrates the method. Rather than beginning with a generic diversity program, Muhr and her team started by listening. They facilitated separate workshops with leadership and employees, using what she calls a combination of norm critique and design thinking to surface assumptions, barriers, and potential solutions.
“For me, applied research should not stop at diagnosis,” she says. “When people across the organization are actively involved in generating insights and solutions, the result is not only better data, but also stronger ownership of the changes that follow.”
The process culminated in a joint session where employee perspectives and leadership priorities were brought into direct conversation, creating a shared evidence base that neither group could have produced alone. The outcome was not another report, but a concrete implementation roadmap built from the organization’s own data.
This approach reflects the framework that runs through her published work. In books like Leading Through Bias: 5 Essential Skills to Block Bias and Improve Inclusion at Work, co-authored with Dr. Poornima Luthra, and How to Fight Everyday Discrimination, she uses what she calls the KAB structure: knowledge, attitude, and behavior. The premise is that lasting change begins with individual interactions, repeated daily, across every level of an organization.
“It starts with me, you, and everyone,” she writes, reflecting a philosophy that rejects the idea that culture change happens through grand declarations from the top.
Her advice to leaders facing what many call “DEI fatigue” is characteristically direct: stop treating inclusion as a parallel agenda and embed it into the systems that already govern performance. Leadership evaluation criteria, meeting protocols, talent and promotion processes, team-level accountability. “Inclusion work only survives long-term when it is no longer framed as a ‘value initiative,’ but as a strategically prioritized structural design principle for how work gets done.”
One leadership development process she designed focused entirely on meeting dynamics. Through observation and reflection, her team identified consistent patterns in who spoke first, who was interrupted, and whose contributions resurfaced only when repeated by someone with higher status. Rather than writing another training module, they introduced simple but disruptive practices: structured turn-taking in parts of discussions, brief reflections at the end of meetings to identify whose perspectives had not been heard.
“At first, some leaders found it artificial,” she recalls. “Then they began to notice who spoke up for the first time, and how the quality of discussion shifted.”
The Courage to Build What Research Demands
There is a particular kind of intellectual honesty required to spend twenty years building a research career and then conclude that research alone is insufficient. Sara Louise Muhr made that conclusion public and built a practice to prove it works.
The organizations that seek out InLead are not looking for frameworks to present to their boards. They want evidence that change is actually possible, and a partner who has spent long enough studying failure to recognize what success requires. The real work of culture, in her world, happens not in the values statements on the wall, but in the patterns that persist when no one thinks they are being observed.
Sara Louise Muhr is Professor of Diversity and Leadership at Copenhagen Business School and Founder and CEO of InLead Agency, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works with organizations across private, public, and institutional sectors on leadership development, culture transformation, and evidence-based inclusion strategy. To connect with Sara or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/sara-louise-muhr-374365 or visit https://inlead.agency.
