People Lab is built on a simple belief.
The teams we work with are not broken. They are ready for something more than they have been able to build on their own.
Andria Gillis is the founder of People Lab, a systemic team coaching practice based in Toronto, Canada. She works with leadership teams, co-founders, and organisations navigating complexity, transition, and growth.
When a team is stuck, the instinct is to look at the individuals. Andria looks somewhere different. She looks at the relationships, the roles, the conversations that keep getting avoided. That's where the real work lives.
Before becoming a coach, Andria spent 20 years working inside organisations — leading teams in retail and healthcare operations across North America. That background shapes everything about how she works. She knows what it's like to be inside a leadership team that isn't functioning the way it needs to. She came to systemic team coaching because it was the only approach she found that addressed what was actually happening, not just the surface.
People Lab was founded in 2018 and is based in Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat.
How We Think About Working with our Clients
Teams are systems, not collections of individuals.
When something is not working in a team, the instinct is to look at the individuals. But the team does not exist in isolation. It exists inside an organisation, inside a sector, inside a community. The patterns we see inside a team almost always reflect something larger. Systemic coaching works with all of it, not just what is happening in the room.
Real change takes time and relationship
A two-day offsite can shift a conversation. It rarely shifts a system. The teams People Lab works with are willing to go deeper than a single intervention and to stay with the work long enough for something to actually change. That requires a different kind of commitment from everyone involved, including the coach. We prioritize sustained engagements because that is the best context in which lasting change becomes possible.
Complexity requires a different kind of leadership
Most leaders we work with are not lacking knowledge or commitment. They are working in conditions that make it genuinely hard to lead well. Navigating rapid change, holding competing priorities, building cultures that sustain performance without burning people out. These require new capacities. Not frameworks to follow, but the ability to think systemically, stay present under pressure, and lead from genuine relationship rather than positional authorityThe best work happens when a team is ready to look honestly at itself. That readiness is rarer than it sounds.
It is also where everything becomes possible.
Background and Training
Andria Gillis holds an Advanced Certification in Team Coaching and is a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation. She is a Certified Senior Practitioner in Team Coaching with the Global Team Coaching Institute, a Faculty Member and Systemic Team Coaching Supervisor at Renewal Associates, and has completed Supervision Training at Oxford Brookes Business School.
Her coaching approach integrates systemic thinking, applied neuroscience, and adult development theory. She has worked with startups, nonprofits, founder-led companies, and large organisations across healthcare, technology, media, and social impact, with particular focus on mission-driven organisations building the capacity to grow with integrity.
People Lab works locally and globally, with clients across Canada, the United States, and internationally.
Advanced Certification in Team Coaching – International Coaching Federation (ICF)
Professional Certified Coach (PCC) – International Coaching Federation
Certified Senior Practitioner in Team Coaching – Global Team Coaching Institute (GTCI)
Faculty Member – Systemic Team Coaching, Renewal Associates
Associate @ Renewal International Global Coaching Network
Organizational Mindfulness Facilitator, Institute for Organizational Science and Mind
Systemic Team Coaching Supervisior, Renewal Associates
Advanced Coach Supervision Training – Oxford Brookes Business School
Collaboration is Key
People Lab draws on a global network of certified systemic team coaches, facilitators, and practitioners. Rather than a fixed roster, every engagement is staffed based on context — matching the right mix of cultural fluency, lived experience, and expertise to the specific situation.
The network includes specialists in systemic team coaching, experiential leadership development, startup and founder dynamics, coach supervision, and social innovation. Many are long-standing professional relationships built through shared training, co-delivery, and peer supervision across Canada, Europe, and beyond.
When you work with People Lab, you are not getting a solo practitioner working alone. You are getting access to a carefully curated network of practitioners who share a commitment to deep, rigorous, values-driven work.
COLLABORATOR PROFILES COMING SOON
People Lab is located in Toronto, Canada, on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, in Treaty 13 territory.
We are grateful to work and live on this land and learn from and with Indigenous ways of knowing and working.