A customer’s voice about the Executive Coaching experience
Listen to the interview with Karl Knipfelberg, VP at Kion, talking about his experience working with Bernhard as his coach
Customer voices on our Online Coaching
People, understandably, can be sceptical about being coached online and not face-to-face, as it is a very personal, often intimate experience. Hear Alan Graff, one of our customers, how his perception changed when working through virtual connection with Bernhard.
Empowerment with a coaching attitude
Empowerment has been around for a very long time. It's often missunderstood as straight delegation of tasks. To make it really work it requires leaders being a coach! Let me show you how...
Virtual Leadership effectiveness: 4 success factors
In this blog I want to focus on the most important factors I consider necessary for virtual leaders to be effective and successful. Presence is one fo the 4 keys, synchronos or asynchronos
Get your point across to non-expert senior managers
How to communicate as a subject matter expert and to influence senior decision makers effectively? If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that occasionally I share insights from my work as a coach. In such blogs I cover themes which have…
Advancing your leadership in the virtual world – Part 1 – Introduction
THE 7 key competencies which make you highly effective as a virtual leader Looking into larger organisations and how their structures have evolved over the past years I see the dispersion of functions and their teams across sites, national or global, as the norm. As a response…
Management and Leadership are both needed!
It is important to pay attention to both the short AND longer term In my work over the years I noted that a lot of companies, people and organisations use the words management and leadership interchangeably. However, as pointed out by several big thinkers and…
Focus – the gateway to effective and efficient work patterns
Creating focus through mindfulness - an experience with senior leaders On a regular basis my coaching clients bring up the theme of becoming more effective or efficient in their job. In some cases it's as simple as rebuilding the awareness for prioritisation and proper time…
Feedback tools can boost personal development
Checking your self-image using feedback instruments can help your personal development Looking in the mirror every now and then to check how you see specific elements of your leadership and how people around you perceive them can be painful but is also very helpful. Although…
The magic of silent retreats
My strategy to keep connected to myself in the high-paced business world Working with leaders in organisations I have noticed a continuous acceleration of the pace of business over the years. In some organisations it feels like they are breaking the sound barrier with their…
Choose your own perspective: be a drone!
Stepping out of the actual situation and change perspective really helps your personal development Over more than 25 years I had the privilege to work with people on issues related to their personal development. Moreover, in this period I also developed my own personal leadership,…
What makes a Matrix organisation work?
Behaviour is key to make any Matrix structure work Years ago I worked in a multinational company where we used a Matrix Organisation to run all global and local projects. This is of course a well-known approach and we spent quite some time to make…
Emotional Intelligence: essential for outstanding leadership
Although high IQ is a must have to be successful in your job, a high EQ, emotional intelligence, is the factor required to stand out as a leader. The concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been spread widely since the mid 1990’s partly due to…
Looking for answers and inspiration: visit the Why Café!
Recently I was asking myself some questions related to decisions I want to take in my working life. Moreover, I was looking for some inspiration to get a different look at the questions I asked myself. And then … a nice book came across my…
Have your finger in the P.I.E. – Part 2
Three dimensions to manage your career in an organisation In part 1 of this blog, last week, I have introduced the PIE-model, developed by Harvey Coleman, based on research he did on the dynamics of careers in organisations. Here is a quick re-cap: Harvey Coleman…
Have your fingers in the P.I.E. – Part 1
Three dimensions to manage your career in an organisation Recently the question how to best manage one's career has surfaced several times in my coaching engagements. These clients held firm beliefs that their performance would speak for themselves and foster their career. In addition, they…
Blaming others doesn’t help anyone
How I got myself and people around me out of a blame attitude There were times in my life when an attitude of "blaming others" had served me well in not feeling guilty and avoiding to accept responsibility for the situation I was in. On…
Power up your resilience
The mindset that drives your ability to recover from setbacks The first few weeks of 2018 have already gone by. Many people will have set resolutions for new behaviour or goals in private or business life at the beginning of January. Sometimes they are easy…
Know your WHY! – Part 2
It is a key element in leadership effectiveness. In the first part of this blog I outlined the WHY, our purpose in life, and explained why I believe it is important for you to know and talk about it. In this second part, I will write about how you…
Know your WHY! – Part 1
It is a key element in leadership effectiveness I have split this blog in two parts. In this first part, I will write about what I mean with the WHY and explain why I believe it is important to know about it and to talk about it. In the second…
Review VLD-Café session #7
Overcoming intercultural challenges when leading virtual teams ... ... was this months subject for the VLD-Café. In a lively discussion our diverse group of visitors came up with these fundamental challenges and ideas around the subject: the style of leadership the style and methods of…
Emotional Intelligence: how to calibrate your compass?
In previous blogs we wrote about the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and the use of feedback instruments. In this contribution, we want to combine these two aspects which lead to a very powerful combination for people in leading roles to strengthen their leadership. …
No R.O.I. without the investment – …
- that applies to business relationships too! It comes as no surprise that everyone who is in a leadership role knows how important relationships are. When I have conversations with leaders their focus is mainly on how to build relationships, whether it is in…
Part 2 – How to boost presence in virtual meetings
Very often I hear from leaders that they consider videoconferencing the ultimate way of interacting remotely and be present. This is true if you still rely on visual tools as the one and only form of expressing your presence. Research shows that the selection of technology…
Part 1: How to boost your presence in virtual meetings
In recent years virtual leadership has matured from an exception to being almost the norm in international organisations. Many conversations I have with leaders who are more and more exposed to virtual leadership show that different mindsets are necessary to be effective in a virtual context.…
Listening – a key step for building followership
How often have you experienced bosses you worked for giving you the impression that their behaviour was not really authentic but more of a simulated role they have learned in some of their training courses. How strong was your followership to those bosses? In the…
Emotional Intelligence: your stepping stone for 2016 to excel your leadership effectiveness
Although high IQ is a must have to be successful in your job, a high EQ, emotional intelligence, is the factor to separate the wheat from the chaff in outstanding performance. The concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) has been spread widely since the mid 1990’s…
Your ONE essential for being an effective Virtual Leader
Leading at a distance, being a virtual leader, is becoming the norm in international organizations. Yet research shows that less than 30% of virtual leaders are perceived as being effective and successful. I am sure no leader in that position is happy with such an…
Vision: Key to effective leadership in a virtual / dispersed context
In today's organisational reality leaders in medium to large companies name complexity and virtuality of their work as the key challenges. Especially working in a virtual context is becoming much more dominant and the norm in international business settings. The real challenge is, however, that…
Victim mentality in organisations – the ‘Greek effect’ – …
... and how to get people out of it Those who have been following the events in Greece over the last months and maybe even years may have noticed that a rather strange mentality seems to have developed. Everybody in Europe and especially the economically…
Coaching sales professionals
Usually we are asked to deliver coaching to managers in organisations where they have staff reporting to them and they are tasked with improving the functioning of their department. We coach mainly by taking the coachee through considering the tasks and challenges of managing money…
Lessons for effective leaders from latest insights into neurosciences
For the first time, the ICF (International Coach Federation) Germany organised a two-day Summer-University in August 2013 with a focus on the latest results of neuroscience and what leaders and coaches could learn from these. Over the course of two days eight key speakers, experts in the…
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Book recommendation: Managing Yourself
Honestly, how often did you come back from a training course and thought “I have heard that before”? It is human nature that we have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience which is stored somewhere in our brain and we know what should be…
Crisis management: Insights from brain research
Interview with Professor Dr. Dr. Gerhard Roth Professor Dr. Dr. Gerhard Roth is Neurobiologist and Director of the Institute for Brain Research at Bremen University, Germany. He is also President (Rektor) of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Delmenhorst, and President of the German National Academic Foundation. He published…
