“Leadership Cannot Be Reduced to a Set of Skills”: Elena Babina on Ontopsychology as the Foundation of Business Management

Genuine leadership in business, in the view of Elena Babina, founder of the Institute of Psychology and Entrepreneurship (IPE), requires more than formal managerial competencies. In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, she explained that for a successful manager, the ability to understand oneself and others, to adapt to change, to work in conditions of uncertainty, and to consciously develop one's own management style are critically important. That is precisely why, in her words, business education is increasingly intersecting with psychology, and classical management programs are being supplemented with tools for working with the human psyche.

The Path from Economics to Ontopsychology

Elena Babina's professional trajectory brings together economics, management, science, entrepreneurship, and psychology. She defines herself first and foremost as an ontopsychologist and emphasizes that the foundation of her development is the combination of constant work and continuous learning. “Many problems arise for us when we do not understand what is happening to us. That is why learning and work must go hand in hand,” she notes. In her words, fragmented knowledge in individual disciplines “is very limiting,” whereas combining different fields provides a significantly broader understanding of a person and their activity. It is precisely at the intersection of this knowledge, as Babina explains, that the Institute of Psychology and Entrepreneurship was born.

What Is Ontopsychology in Simple Terms

Ontopsychology, which is one of the key areas of IPE's work, remains a little-known term to a broad audience. Babina explains that this field primarily studies the human unconscious: its subject matter is psychic activity in its primary actuality, that is, “the human being in existence.” Unlike approaches that consider a person predominantly as a social construct — through roles, stereotypes, and reactions to stimuli — ontopsychology proceeds from the idea that a person is part of existence, which has its own laws. By studying these laws, the field describes a way of life that helps a person self-realize and understand who they are and why they came into the world. The founder of ontopsychology is the Italian scholar Professor Antonio Meneghetti, who combined knowledge from many fields and was particularly interested in the figure of the leader and the entrepreneur.

Leader: Natural Potential or a Skill

In the course of the conversation with RBC-Ukraine, the questions were raised of what makes a person a leader — natural potential or knowledge that can be acquired through learning — as well as how psychology helps entrepreneurs make decisions and how women build their own management style. Babina asserts that leaders and entrepreneurs “move life forward,” because they take on responsibility for development, create things and services that make other people's lives easier. In her assessment, a leader has a different psychic structure, a stronger potential, and a natural calling to serve others, which makes ontopsychology especially significant for this audience. The Institute, as its president states, teaches how to apply ontopsychology systematically in business.

IPE as the Operator of Ontopsychology in Ukraine

The Institute of Psychology and Entrepreneurship is a private educational institution established in 2016 in Kyiv. It trains bachelor's and master's degree holders in specialties related to management, communications, psychology, and business, and also includes a professional college. In addition to formal education, IPE operates a business school with an Executive MBA program “Psychology of Business” and courses for entrepreneurs. The main goal of the institute is to shape a new generation of managers capable of thinking strategically, understanding people's internal motivations, and managing business based on precise knowledge of the human psyche. IPE positions itself as the operator of ontopsychology in Ukraine: the institute translates Antonio Meneghetti's works into Ukrainian, and at the time of the interview's publication, seven books had already been translated.