Arvid Buit
Executive Coach, Author, and Leadership Psychology Expert
About Arvid Buit
Arvid Buit is an international master executive coach whose work sits at the intersection of leadership psychology, organisational dynamics, and the particular set of pathologies that tend to cluster at the top of large organisations. He operates globally, coaches in English and Dutch, and has spent years in rooms with people who hold enormous power and are seldom told the truth. That, in essence, is the problem he solves.
His practice draws on deep training in clinical and organisational psychology, with a specific expertise in narcissistic dynamics in leadership contexts. Most executive coaches prefer to navigate around this subject. Arvid has made it his primary field of study, on the reasonably well-supported premise that understanding why a leader behaves as they do matters considerably more than coaching them to present better in meetings.
He is the author of three books on leadership psychology and narcissism, establishing him as one of the foremost published thinkers on the psychological dimensions of power and leadership. His writing is recognised for combining academic rigour with the kind of direct, unsentimental observation that only comes from sustained, close-range contact with people at the top of organisations. The books are not self-help manuals. They are frameworks for understanding the structural and psychological conditions that produce both outstanding leadership and spectacular failure.
Arvid has coached CEOs, board members, senior partners, and C-suite executives across sectors including financial services, technology, healthcare, professional services, and the public sector. He works across multiple national and cultural contexts, which produces a comparative depth of perspective that practitioners limited to a single geography rarely develop. The specific way that hierarchy, authority, deference, and face-saving operate varies considerably across cultures. His work reflects that complexity.
His approach is direct, psychologically informed, and built on the uncomfortable but empirically defensible premise that the majority of leadership problems are fundamentally psychological problems that have been dressed in strategic clothing. Removing that clothing is, predictably, something that most organisations find inconvenient. It is also, in most cases, the only intervention that actually works.
Why Arvid Buit? A Distinct Approach to Executive Coaching
There is no shortage of executive coaches available to senior leaders. The market produces them in industrial quantities. There is, however, a considerably shorter supply of coaches who combine deep psychological expertise, a published intellectual body of work, master-level professional credentials, and a practice genuinely built for the top of the organisational hierarchy. Arvid Buit occupies that narrower ground.
The first and most significant differentiator is his expertise in narcissism and leadership psychology. Narcissistic dynamics are disproportionately present at senior levels of organisations, for reasons that are fairly well understood: the selection mechanisms that produce senior leaders tend to favour confidence, assertiveness, self-belief, and a degree of ruthlessness, all of which correlate meaningfully with narcissistic traits. Most coaches either do not recognise these patterns or lack the framework to address them without causing the client to simply disengage. Arvid’s clinical grounding and direct experience allow him to work precisely here, addressing the dynamics that produce both the performance and the collateral damage simultaneously.
The second differentiator is his published record. Three books on the psychology of leadership represent something that intuition and accumulated practice cannot replicate: a coherent, evidenced, publicly examined theoretical framework. Clients engage not just with a skilled practitioner but with someone who has been required to think rigorously, defend positions, and organise knowledge into something transmissible. That level of intellectual investment tends to produce considerably sharper interventions than coaching guided purely by experience.
Third is his international reach and cross-cultural fluency. Leadership psychology does not operate identically across cultural contexts. The way power is held, challenged, deferred to, and abused varies across geographies and industries, and a coach whose frame of reference is limited to a single national or cultural context will consistently misread situations that operate by different rules. Arvid’s global practice has produced a calibrated awareness of this variation that sharpens rather than confuses his analytical lens.
Fourth is what might generously be called his directness. Senior leaders receive a great deal of carefully constructed feedback designed primarily to be palatable rather than accurate. Arvid’s coaching creates the conditions in which an accurate assessment can be delivered and examined without the usual diplomatic packaging. This is not a style choice. It is the approach most likely to produce the behavioural change that justifies the investment in coaching in the first place.
Professional Accreditations and Affiliations
The coaching industry has a credentials problem. There are currently several hundred coaching qualifications in circulation globally, distributed across a spectrum that runs from the genuinely demanding to the comprehensively meaningless. In the absence of universal regulatory standards, the responsibility for distinguishing between them falls to the client. Arvid Buit’s professional credentials make that task straightforward.
He holds accreditation from the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the world’s largest and most widely recognised professional coaching body. ICF credentialing requires demonstrated coaching hours, formal training from accredited programmes, and a structured, independently evaluated competency assessment. Credentials are time-limited and require renewal, which means they reflect current practice rather than past achievement. ICF accreditation is the global benchmark for professional coaching standards, and holding it at master level places a practitioner among a small minority of coaches worldwide.
He is also accredited by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), whose European Individual Accreditation framework is widely regarded as among the most thorough available, particularly in European and international corporate contexts. EMCC accreditation requires evidenced demonstration of competence across multiple dimensions of coaching practice, assessed against a rigorous competency framework. It is not decorative. It is a substantive quality standard with teeth.
The Association for Professional Executive Coaching and Supervision (APECS) is specifically focused on the executive coaching domain, as distinct from the broader and considerably more varied coaching market. Its membership requirements reflect that specialisation, and inclusion represents recognition of genuine expertise at the executive level. Arvid holds APECS accreditation, a credential that speaks directly to his focus on senior leadership contexts rather than the general coaching population.
He is also a master-accredited coach in the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching methodology. Marshall Goldsmith is arguably the most influential executive coach of the past three decades, and his Stakeholder Centered Coaching approach is distinctive in one important respect: it measures outcomes not through client self-report, which is an unreliable instrument, but through the observable perceptions of the stakeholders working around the client. The methodology is outcome-focused in a way that most coaching frameworks are not, and master accreditation within it places Arvid among a select group of practitioners globally who have been trained and certified in one of the most rigorous evidence-based coaching frameworks available.
Taken together, these credentials represent sustained, verified investment in professional excellence across four separate and demanding frameworks. In a market where anyone can print a business card describing themselves as an executive coach, this matters considerably.