My cat makes me think I recently got a cat. Pebbles – a funny grey-brown British Shorthair. And as he shares my office with me (along with so many other things) I can’t help but observe him and, of course, learn from him. Like many other domestic cats, he has a good life from my human perspective. He is loved, cared for, cuddled, played with and gets everything we humans think he needs (and probably a bit more). Pebbles is quite headstrong when it comes to closeness and he makes this very clear. However, he also knows exactly when a cuddle warms our hearts and when he can use it to organise ac ..read more

Are you still leading or are you already manipulating? That’s the question I sometimes want to ask when people in companies or organizations proudly tell me that they no longer have a hierarchy and that the team makes its own decisions anyway. Often enough, it doesn’t feel like that at all from the team’s perspective. They do not perceive the “decisions” they can make as being independent of the opinions of the leaders/founders, because often enough this person makes it quite clear what he or she thinks the decision should be. Team members find this far more difficult than when there is a clea ..read more

International Women's Day It’s International Women’s Day and wherever I look on social media, I see either congratulations or references to injustices that still exist. Much rarer are the actual initiatives being taken to change things from the ground up or bring about systemic changes in depth. Personally, I always feel a bit strange when I receive a congratulations on Women’s Day. Well, I also feel strange when I receive birthday wishes. Neither is my own doing, and I didn’t choose it either. In my childhood, I sometimes struggled with being a girl. And I only really started to enjoy it when ..read more

Trust and Courage Trust in the organization and the accompanying structures and work processes is the basic prerequisite for creativity, innovation and genuine courage in the sense of an entrepreneurial mindset. The same applies to learning processes of all kinds, whether in a professional, educational or private environment. It is particularly the ambiguity of the current period of extreme changes that seems to stand in the way of this, even though the power of innovation for sustainable solutions is just as much in demand now as the ability to adapt, let go and start anew. Two movements that ..read more

Barriers in transformation Another Monday, another new week. Today I’m pondering a lot about how barriers in the transformation of organisations can perhaps be mitigated in advance. A demand that I (understandably) hear again and again. And certain barriers can certainly be avoided. On the other hand, the moments in which a team or an organisation fights its way through these barriers always uncover incredible potential – potential in the individual people, but also in the team as a whole. My grandmother used to say: “…if you want to get to know people well, go on a journey with them…”. On t ..read more

Monday, to-dos, emails and meetings Today is Monday and a sunny Monday at that. The mountains are glistening over towards me, and my heart is opening wide. I have a lot of different items on my to-do list this week and I need to juggle very different projects. Thanks to technology, this has now become a little easier, as I can constantly rearrange my backlog in Kanban and assign different colours to the different projects and then prioritise them. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a weakness: Emails. I always see them as a Pandora’s box – once opened, the flood is unstoppable. That’s why I ..read more

The old armchair I just had a call with a dear coaching colleague. I found it comforting to hear that he, too, is repeatedly questioned in a rather clumsy and old-fashioned way by people who have actually embarked on a transformation process and want to break new ground, in such a way that it ends up jeopardising all the relationship work that has gone into this organisation. I have also had this painful experience. Interestingly, again and again, it occurs in projects where the transformation process is already so far advanced that the first results of the work become clear to everyone inside ..read more

Driven Last week, someone asked me where my inner drive comes from. Drive is actually a very strange term. In a way, it sounds as if there is something that you can switch on and off. I often used to answer these questions by referring to my purpose in life, but now I’m no longer sure if that’s really the answer. Because I also know enough people who are very aware of their purpose in life and yet seem to have very little drive. Is it passion? Another interesting term. In German even more so than in many other languages – it is something that creates suffering. The English word passion also ha ..read more

Letting go Saying goodbye is a very peculiar thing. There is always both pain and a new beginning. In my work, I move from project to project, from team to team, from client to client, from country to country. Always letting go. Saying goodbye. Also sadness, followed by a sense of missing. But then also looking forward to something new: a new place, different people, new challenges. Right now I’m in one of those phases again. And reflecting. About everything that has happened, the small and big experiences. The wonderful people I’ve met who have enriched my life so much. The changes we have go ..read more

This time a founder’s blog? A blog on a company website is always a difficult matter. Should it be another advertising platform, should it convey content and knowledge, should it convey company culture and internal views or is it simply about ensuring that there are updates on the site so that algorithms recognise the site and classify it as good in order to display it high in the search results. Anyone who has been following us for a while knows that we have already changed the blog a few times and somehow we were never really satisfied with it, archived content again and again, changed who f ..read more