Hannah Ellermann
I am an expert in the field of communication, leadership, and team dynamics. Depending on the context at hand, my workshops bring different aspects of these topics to the fore:
- Communication and meta-communication skills
- Collectively-oriented leadership
- Self-organisation and agile processes
- Gender equity
- Dealing with conflict
My vision
I strongly believe that we need to be more collaborative and inclusive of women* and other discriminated groups in every aspect of social life in order to shape an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable, democratic social order and an individually and collectively fulfilling future.
To reach this goal, we need to tackle structural inequities and communication challenges at the root. My consulting sessions and my workshops achieve just that – within a concentrated setting in which participants collaborate on an equal footing.
My experience
After completing my postgraduate degree in politics, economics, and conflict studies at the London School of Economics and at King’s College, London, in 2013, I utilised the knowledge and skills I had gained to design and facilitate communication and process optimisation workshops for medium-sized companies in the financial and renewable energy sectors in London and Berlin. The workshops focused on developing efficient internal processes and optimising customer communication in relation to new and innovative products.
As the first employee of a renewable energy startup, I gained valuable experience in team development from 2015 to 2019. In the team workshops that I designed and facilitated, creative methods such as Design thinking were used to incite constructive collaboration in the development of customer communication strategies.
As a co-founder and collective leader of the FEMSO Women’s Collective (since 2018) and an early member of the SHE Choir Collective in Berlin (since 2015), I have highly appreciated the chance to actively instigate and shape the growth and evolution of self-organised project structures and to guide complex group processes over several years.
These two contexts in particular have enabled me to build upon my understanding of group dynamics and directly experience how collectively-oriented leadership can increase not only groups’ satisfaction levels, but also their performance. They have provided invaluable spaces in which I have explored approaches and developed my own unique workshop formats for groups of women*.
Skills
• Conceptualisation and facilitation of workshops and other participative events for individuals, teams and groups on the topics of the future of work, leadership, communication, self-organisation, gender equity, and dealing with and preventing sexism
• Public speaking, presentations, event facilitation, and advocacy on leadership, communication, self-organisation, gender justice and anti-sexism
• Analysis of team dynamics
• Team support to improve communication and cooperation
• German, English, and French at native speaker level
References
• Collective choir direction workshop with 60 participants; @feminist futures festival, Essen, September 2019
• Collective leadership workshop with 12 participants. Foci: leading and being led; understanding and establishing conditions that facilitate collectively-oriented leadership and self-organised processes, September 2019
• Individual coaching focusing on self-guidance and self-marketing, Phoma GbR, Berlin, August 2019
• Founder of FEMSO Women*’s collective. Objective: to support women to define and achieve their own goals. Projects: media salons and public events addressing social issues that particularly affect women*. Collective established in Berlin in January 2019, ongoing
• Introduction and guiding of affidamento practice in a self-directed group coaching with eight participants. Foci: discovering and developing one’s own fundamental motivations and interests; effectively communicating wishes, needs, and concerns; “taking up space” in everyday life. Berlin, since July 2019, ongoing