Adaptive leadership 2025

Leading under pressure, morning session.

How being in a powerful position influences stress and behaviors in the workplace? While power reduces stress, a perceived threat to this power can have the opposite effect. This, in turn, can affect risk preferences, power sharing and how you inspire and motivate your team. Participants learn a few simple tools to identify stress triggers and manage their stress and energy levels to continue to lead effectively, even in challenging times.

How to protect yourself, your team and individuals against the negative effects of stress?

Power and stress might be negatively affecting your behavior at work and, thus, your leadership. Power can be endowed by others (through networks, reputation, allies, etc.) or it can come from your expertise, your ability to punish and reward, your charisma.

The Leader as Coach, afternoon session.

Developing the ability of holding effective coaching conversations gives leaders the skills to empower others to develop themselves as leaders, inspire and engage their team, encouraging independent problem-solving, recognising opportunities and ultimately improving performance. Leaders that develop coaching skills also see increasingly higher levels of employee engagement, motivation and efficiency.

Utilising coaching within a leadership role allows top managers to be more effective in inspiring their teams and connecting with them, both as a whole and as individuals, on a deeper level. It helps you to develop trust among team members and create an emotionally balanced work environment.

To be an effective leader/coach, not only do you need to learn how to communicate well and help others to get results, you need to guide, encourage and inspire others to reach their full potential. A great coach is likely to have the following talents or qualities: listening skills; ability to provide constructive feedback; curiosity; empathy; asking powerful, open questions; integrity; collaborative. Some of these characteristics are inherent, others can be learned.

Prof. Andreas Bernhardt, Insead 

Andreas is an executive coach with the Global Leadership Centre at INSEAD; co-designer and convenor of ESMT's yearly Coaching Colloquium, was co-organizer of the International Coaching Research Forum in collaboration with the Institute of Coaching at McLean/Harvard Medical School, and regularly contributes to top academic and practitioner conferences. His current consulting and research interests focus on leadership development, executive coaching, HR management, and leading and coaching teams in tough times. He is co-editor of the new book "Tricky Coaching: Difficult Cases in Leadership Coaching“.

He teaches and coaches in the areas of Leadership, Organisational Behavior, Coaching, Negotiations and Change in MBA, Executive MBA, open enrollment, and company specific executive programmes. His executive education portfolio includes, programmes for, among others, Allianz, Deutsche Bank, Postbank, Hogan Lovells, Deutsche Telekom, E.ON, RWE, BSH Bosch and Siemens, Hitachi, Kaspersky, B. Braun, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, West Pharmaceutical Services, Johnson & Johnson, Axel Springer, McDonald's, and the European Union. Andreas consults globally operating companies on issues of executive coaching, leadership development, and leading people and teams in challenging times. He also regularly coaches executives on leadership and career issues.