Contemporary professional leadership increasingly relies on self-organized teams instead of top-down employee management. It is a demanding transformation process for managers to change their behavior from a traditional directive leadership style to a partnership-based approach with a high degree of team autonomy.

A beekeeper leads bee colonies and is responsible for the boundary conditions under which they flourish: He takes care of their health, the location, adapted space in the hive, harmony in the bee colony and he must know the biological processes in detail in order to be able to intervene effectively if necessary. But he cannot instruct the individual bee which plants to fly to, how to add enzymes to the nectar, or when the bees should grow a new queen. Because the bees know that much better than the beekeeper.

In this way, the beekeeper's leadership work can give managers inspiring and illustrative impulses.

The garden beekeeper recently gave a keynote speech on this topic to 80 executives of a well-known corporate group in the Heilbronn area.