An Introduction to Musical Group Coaching
Online meetings get work done but rarely build connection. After the pandemic exposed that gap, Bernhard Kerres developed Musical Group Coaching: a ninety-minute format for four to six participants, a coach, and a specifically trained musician, built to reach the emotions that words alone miss. First published in Coach Magazine Global, Issue 4, 2023.
Published 2023-07-01 by Bernhard Kerres
When I first visited startups in Silicon Valley in the late nineties, the most critical piece of tech was not a supercomputer. It was the espresso machine. I saw companies with no furniture yet, but with a fantastic blinking espresso machine, because it was an essential part of team building. It brought people together for an informal chat. It was a kind of group coaching apparatus.
Most of the literature on group and team coaching assumes we meet in the same room. It is about personal exchange, close connection, and deep communication. Then a pandemic changed the world. People work from home, or from anywhere. Companies are shrinking their offices because staff come in a few days a week, if at all. Coaching has to adapt to that.
During the pandemic, I kept hearing the same thing from clients: online meetings get things done, but they are useless for building meaningful connection. People were missing the emotional link. That led us to develop a new format built specifically around emotional connection. We call it Musical Group Coaching.
What it is
Musical Group Coaching is a ninety-minute group or team format for four to six participants, a specifically trained musician, and a coach. It works face-to-face or online. Hybrid settings are not advisable.
A quick distinction. In group coaching, unrelated people meet for a session; they have no professional or personal tie, though they may work in the same company. In team coaching, the people work together and are connected hierarchically or organizationally. Musical Group Coaching works in both.
The aim is simple to state and hard to reach: strengthen each person's link to their own emotions, and the emotional links between them.
Why the music matters
Words move in one register. Music moves in another. Bringing a trained musician into the room lets us fit sound closely to the mood, and opens a different kind of conversation, one where participants use words and the musician answers in music. As Heinrich Heine put it, when words leave off, music begins.
That shift is where the deeper work becomes possible. It gives people a few minutes to think, and it connects them to feelings that the rational conversation had kept at arm's length.
The full article walks through the session itself: how the coach opens and sets safety, how the meta-topic emerges, what happens in the three minutes while the musician plays, the questions that turn emotion into insight, and how to close on something concrete. It also covers what to do when no trained musician is available.