EXECUTIVE COACHING · BOARD & C-LEVEL
Systemic Executive Coaching at board and C-level.
Coaching that strengthens leadership where the role demands it. Leadership that drives change. Confidential. At eye level. With the perspective only an outsider has.
Executive coaching at transformind is a sparring format and a confidential accompanying process for CEOs, executive teams, boards and senior leaders in Switzerland and the wider DACH region. One core element is strategic judgement: the assumptions behind a decision, the options that were never examined, and the objections nobody in the immediate leadership environment raises any more. Disagreement is part of the format.
The work combines systemic coaching with the Ambiflow diagnostic framework and focuses on the interface between you as a person, your leadership team and the organisation. You know what would need to be done strategically. The analyses are complete, the decisions made. Yet the organisation stalls. Resistances and conflicts that resist clear naming. Dynamics that won't resolve rationally. Coaching is not an improvement programme – it offers a space for reflection and action on the question of what makes you effective, or ineffective, in precisely this constellation.
Process Duration
3- 6 months
Intensity
6 - 12 session, every two to four weeks
Session length
90 - 12 min
First meeting
Get to know each other, listen, exchange expectations. Complimentary, no commitment.
TYPICAL TOPICS IN COACHING
What executive coaching actually addresses
Coaching is not the right path for every leader and every leadership question. The following four situations describe when a guided process over several months accomplishes more than individual sparring conversations or internal reflection.
01
Strategy is moving, transformation isn't
The strategy is approved, the budget is released, the project structure is in place. The organisation still won't move. When you sense that the blockage lies not in the plan but in the interplay between leadership team, organisation, and your own role: that is where coaching begins — beyond the reach of classical transformation programmes.
03
Leading under political pressure
A board that communicates separately from the executive team. A majority shareholder pulling at the strategy. A co-CEO splitting the team. When your effectiveness depends on reading political terrain rather than fighting it, coaching becomes work on your navigation in that field.
02
Role transition in senior leadership
New on the executive board. New as CEO. New at a level where formal authority matters less than positioning, timing, and the ability to read group dynamics. Coaching accompanies exactly this phase — when you still shape the role, before the role shapes you.
04
Role clarity and leadership identity
You know your style. You know where it carries you and where it overshoots. But it triggers automatically. Coaching here is not work on your personality. It is work on the moment when what you do no longer matches what the situation needs.
COLLABORATION BETWEEN COACH AND COACHEE
How the coaching works
The process has a clear frame and stays flexible. Three to six months, six to twelve sessions, in Kilchberg or by video. Pace and rhythm follow your context.
1
Initial conversation
60 minutes, complimentary, no obligation. You bring the situation, I listen and tell you at the end whether coaching fits or whether you need something different. If it fits, we agree on the broader frame.
60 min · Zurich or remote · No charge
2
Diagnostic start
The process begins with a structured assessment using the Ambiflow framework. Its six dimensions map where constraints, flow interruptions, balance questions, and leadership-system issues sit. The result is not a report but a shared working ground for the sessions that follow.
Typical: 1 to 2 sessions of 90 minutes each
3
Regular coaching sessions
Every two to four weeks, depending on the intensity of the current phase. Content alternates between current leadership situations, role reflection, and concrete intervention preparation. Between sessions, reachable by phone or email — for acute questions that cannot wait.
Typically every 2–4 weeks · 90–120 min
4
Closing with a final assessment
At the end, a structured review of starting point, work, and change. Often this is where we decide whether the process continues at reduced rhythm as a retainer or closes cleanly.
THE OUTSIDE CHECK, OVER MONTHS
Coaching installs the counter-argument the system lacks
Judgement shows in how a leader arrives at a decision: how much they ask before they commit, how close their confidence sits to the evidence, and whether anyone in their system still pushes back. How this reads in conversation is set out in the listening grid: four traces along which an external instance hears the quality of judgement.
A single conversation reads these traces once. A coaching process works their movement over months. Calibration drifts: confidence stays high while the hit rate falls, and from the inside the gap stays invisible. What carries here is the documented comparison of estimate against outcome over time, and a counterpart who insists on it. Corrective density cannot be produced in one session. It emerges when a voice pushes back reliably over weeks, until the leader carries the counter-argument themselves.
At the level of the organisation, this axis is called leadership-system maturity, one of the six dimensions of Ambiflow. An example from practice: an executive team decides quickly, but every second decision is quietly reopened three weeks later. In coaching it becomes visible that no instance exists to hold a decision before it is settled, no devil's advocate, no pre-mortem, no duty to justify. The constraint sits in the maturity of the leadership system. Coaching works on both: on the leader's role in this system, and on the corrective the system lacks.
WHAT SETS TRANSFORMIND APART
Systemic Coaching+
Many executive coaching offerings follow a standard model: assessment, goals, action plan. That works – when the problem is clear. When the real challenge lies in the dynamics, something different is needed. If the real challenge lies in a mix of structural or methodological challenges and dynamics, something else is needed.
Conventional coaching
x Focus on behavioural patterns and techniques
x Structured programmes with fixed steps
x Coach as advisor or sparring partner without systemic view
x Linear problem-solving: problem → solution → implementation
x Focus on the leader in isolation
TRANSFORMIND
✓ Systemic perception: dynamics, not just behaviour
✓ No template – pace and form follow the situation
✓ Bernhard Nitz: his own experience as an executive and foundation-board member, coaching grounded in practice
✓ Circular thinking: interdependencies between person, team and system
✓ The leader in context – environment and relationship system included
How this work actually looks
A coaching process with transformind has three recurring qualities. They shape what happens in the sessions and what you take away.
First quality
The work doesn't stop with you as a person.
Most coaching approaches treat the executive in isolation: your patterns, your reactions, your personality. At transformind, the central question is not "Who are you?" but "What makes you effective or ineffective in this particular constellation?" That means we work on your interplay with the leadership team, with the organisation, with your role. Not just on you.
Second quality
The process has structure, but no script.
At the start, an assessment using the Ambiflow framework. From this emerges a shared map on which constraints become visible and priorities take shape. After that, sessions do not follow a programme — they follow what is currently urgent: a board meeting next week, an unspoken conflict in the leadership team, a decision that cannot be resolved rationally.
Third quality
You work with someone who knows both sides.
Most executive coaches are exclusively coaches. That has its strengths but reaches limits at one specific point: transformation questions that cannot be resolved from the person alone, because the blockage also sits in strategy, structure, or leadership system. Bernhard Nitz has worked on both sides for years. As a consultant in organisational transformations, and as a coach to the people who lead them. In a single session, both dimensions can surface without switching between roles.
Partner, Königswieser & Network
Bernhard Nitz is a partner at Königswieser & Network – one of the leading systemic consulting schools in the German-speaking world. This affiliation ensures conceptual depth and intellectual exchange that reaches beyond any individual case.
SPARRING WITHOUT A COACHING PROCESS
Sometimes one conversation is enough.
Not every situation calls for an ongoing coaching process. Sometimes the question is too specific for a longer engagement – and too complex for an internal conversation.
For those moments, there is a simpler format: a single sparring session. No preparation, no follow-up, no agenda but yours. You bring the situation – I bring an outside perspective.
TYPICAL SPARRING SITUATIONS
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An important people decision that doesn't feel right
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A negotiation or confrontation – clarifying your position before the conversation
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A strategic decision point with too many open variables
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Conflict in the management team
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A situation you can't – or don't want to – discuss internally
60 Min
Zurich or remote
Single session, no commitment
WHAT CLIENTS SAY
"The tailored leadership development and coaching helped me understand what matters in leadership and gave me the tools to know myself better and stay effective even in difficult situations."
Radu Stingaciu, Sales Leader for Growth at a leading technology company
Who leads the coaching
Bernhard Nitz
Founder, transformind GmbH · Kilchberg, Zurich
Coaching stance: Ambiflow as the diagnostic instrument, Königswieser as the school. The focus is not on personality development, stress management or rhetoric training, but on the question of what makes a leader effective in an organisation under change.
I am a leader myself, a management trainer, a consultant, an entrepreneur, and my own toughest critic. These experiences have left me with one observation: most leaders don't fail at knowledge or assertiveness, but at the lack of a space in which they can honestly acknowledge when they are in their own way. Creating and holding that space is the central work in coaching. It means listening closely, reflecting back what becomes visible, and asking the question that, in the situation itself, often goes unspoken.
