Coaching
Executive and team coaching in practice — the questions, the supervision, the group work, and what actually shifts behaviour.
- The Doorbell — A leadership team talks smoothly, agrees readily, and says nothing that matters. Underneath, each person is managing an imagined audience: what she thought about the fumbled presentation, whether he still holds the missed deadline against them. The bandwidth goes into face management, and the work suffers quietly. Bernhard Kerres traces how that spiral forms, from Robert Kegan's socialized mind through Watzlawick's man who arrives at his neighbor's door shouting about a hammer he never asked for, and then shows what the research actually measures. The liking gap is real, it is larger among peers than between bosses and reports, and its consequence is that colleagues stop asking each other for help. The Doorbell is the practice that interrupts the spiral before a thought hardens into a conviction. This teaching note gives facilitators the full design, the timings, the conditions under which the exercise must not be run, and the one framing error that will cost you the room.
- The Subconscious of Groups — Team performance rarely tracks with individual talent - Bernhard Kerres has found no correlation between how capable a team's members are and how well the group works. Drawing on psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, he argues every group has a hidden subconscious life that quietly drives, and derails, its conscious work. First published in Coach Magazine Global, Issue 7, 2024.
- Embrace Curiosity! — Whitmore's GROW model drives coaching toward goals and action, and for good reason. But Bernhard Kerres argues it leaves out something essential: curiosity, which recent research links as closely to the human drive as hunger. Sometimes the sharper question is not "what will you do?" but "what will you explore?" First published in Coach Magazine Global, Issue 6, 2024.
- What If? — Standing at Fisterra, the End of the World, where people once believed the earth simply stopped, Bernhard Kerres reflects on what it takes to question a deeply held belief. He turns that into one of coaching's most powerful moves: the "what if" question, and shows why asking it before examining a client's belief system is what makes real exploration possible. First published in Coach Magazine Global, Issue 5, 2023.
- 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.