Together with my clients, depending on the pre-agreed goals of collaboration, I work on their personal and professional topics and whose connectedness. Sometimes this means developing directly applicable strategies and skills for action, and sometimes it means focussing on deeply personal, relational, emotional topics.

Working in a group setting, I use a variety of methods that derive from both my consulting and my psychological background. In general, my group work has many characteristics of a 'laboratory' - a developmental laboratory, that allows insight, awareness, learning, growth. I follow one of two approaches:

The most important approach is to work on very specific personal issues individuals seek guidance for.
Individual clients choose concrete and specific situations in which they want to proceed or expand their abilities; I provide the methods, techniques and my professional expertise; and together we examine the relevant dimensions of their situations (intrapersonal, interpersonal, organisational, role) and develop possibilities to learn, cope, act, succeed.
This approach of working means we invest into topics maximally relevant to my clients and our work has a massive impact on personal learning and development as on practical usefulness.
Usually, in a group, we work on ca. 4-6 issues a day. It is a reliable experience that all group members profit intensely of the topics brought in by a sample of them.

The alternative approach is to focus on selected and pre-defined topics. On these topics, we work by means of action and interaction, experiences and exercises, simulations and situations, dialogue and exchange, personal reflection and feedback. This way, topic-specific knowledge is personally connected and embedded in action, transforming it into applied knowledge and applicable skills.

Working on specific personal issues serves all levels of seniority. Working on pre-defined topics shifts the impact slightly more on 'skills' and can be a viable alternative e.g. in programs for talent circles.

Typical topics on which I work with talent circles (beyond 'mastering the basics', 'maps and toolboxes') are:

• personal orientation
  (my identity, my needs, my strategies, my skills)
• outlining my role
  (stakeholders' expectations, tasks and dimensions of a leadership respectively expert role, personal requirements, organisational networking and politics)
• leading yourself
  (integrity & authenticity, personal patterns, coping with the 'inner critic' and 'inner resistance' and intense emotions, stress- & performance management)
• presenting and connecting yourself
  (identifying and communicating your personal 'essence', story-telling, target-group specific communication strategies)
• leading teams in challenging situations
  (e.g. recently 'new' in the team leading role, agile working, conflict, teams needing skill development, virtual teams, massive transformations & change)
• understanding team and relational dynamics
  (rank, power and dependencies, social and emotional dynamics in teams, social processing of information, team structure and culture)
• diversity in cooperation
  (diversity of needs, diversity of values, diversity of potentials – and their implications for leadership and the building of well-performing teams)