Teams
Team coaching and group dynamics — how teams actually get better together.
- 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 Fifth Stage: Why the Best Teams Need More Than Safety — Psychological safety gets teams to functional. It does not get them to extraordinary. Drawing on a Tour de France role reversal, Beethoven's late quartets, and three decades of leadership work, Bernhard Kerres argues that the best teams add a fifth stage: the collective capacity to hold discomfort together.
- 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.
- 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.