Coffee and Coaching

Coffee & Coaching is an espresso, not a seminar.Each week, Bernhard Kerres explores difficult conversations leaders avoid—and why practicing matters more in the age of AI.Bernhard is an executive coach, founder of RolePlays.AI, and went from opera singer to tech CEO to Silicon Valley founder. He coaches executives at Henkel, PwC, and Strategy&, and teaches at London Business School.Leaders perfect slide decks but wing conversations that matter. Performance reviews. Restructuring. Feedback to high performers.Short. Intense. Actionable.www.bernhardkerres.com | www.roleplays.ai

Coffee and Coaching is a education podcast hosted by Bernhard Kerres, with 74 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Bernhard Kerres hosts Coffee and Coaching, a education show with 74 episodes published.

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  Coffee and Coaching

  Four Things to Do Before the Day Owns You

  Sep 27, 202614 min

  Press a button. Coffee in three seconds. Or: grind, measure, tamp, froth, wait. Which morning do you actually want? THE ARTICLE THAT STARTED IT Hana Kabele Gala, PhD wrote "Screw Your Efficient Mornings." She had a fully automatic espresso machine. Then a Nespresso. Five or six cups a morning, because it was so easy. Then she stayed with friends in Germany who owned no coffee machine at all. Just a small percolator. "Time slowed down. We were just there. It wasn't giving me anxiety. It felt like freedom." "I had pushed the efficiency so far that I had killed the one part of the ritual that was actually mine." "I don't want my coffee faster. I want the minutes back." FOUR AREAS THAT MAKE US HUMAN Ideally a morning touches all four. Realistically, one or two. That is enough. PHYSICAL. 15 to 20 minutes. Jumping jacks to wake the body up, then arms, belly, legs. No fixed plan. "I feel my body, I feel grounded, and it's really beautiful." Over the summer it was the mountain behind the house instead. 30 minutes up, 350 metres, then the lake, the birds, the wood cracking. SPIRITUAL. "For me, spirituality is often connected to nature." Not a religious person. But: "there are things which I can't explain, and there is this belief that there's something which is bigger than us." Last week in Wrexham, North Wales, a sign at the cathedral door: people of all faiths and no faith are welcome. EMOTIONAL. One or two minutes lying in bed. Grateful to wake up, to feel the body, to embrace yourself before the day starts. Then the people. A habit borrowed from a friend: a short Monday morning message to those closest to you. "Even if you live alone, think about the people who check in with you, the people who are there for you whenever you need them." INTELLECTUAL. Bernhard built his own morning briefing app. AI, coaching, executive education. Plus one item deliberately outside his field every day. Recently: the fine networks fungi use to communicate across a forest. "I find it always fascinating to learn something new every single day." THE EXPERIMENT Several coaching clients turned up stressed. Powering on with energy, but it was showing in their reactions. Bernhard asked about their mornings. Several had no routine at all. So he set them a two-week experiment. "After two weeks they came to me and said: Bernhard, wow, that is really amazing. It changed so much of what I'm doing and how I feel on that day." Not ninety minutes. Ten or fifteen. "When you run out of your home in the morning completely stressed, I can promise you that your day won't get less stressful, rather the opposite." "But when you find yourself again in the morning, when you're grounded, when you are yourself, your resilience will increase massively." YOUR TURN Start today. Not next week. Ten minutes. Run it for two weeks, then assess. Did anything change? And write in. Bernhard would like to share listeners' morning routines on the podcast. HANA'S ARTICLE: hanakabelegala.substack.com/p/screw-your-efficient-mornings HANA ON LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/in/hanakabelegala LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai #MorningRoutine #Rituals #Leadership #Coaching #Resilience #Coffee

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  Coffee and Coaching

  A Summer Like in My Childhood - And What I'm Taking Back to Work

  Sep 15, 202611 min

  It's back to school. After a real break - from the podcast and from the busyness - Bernhard returns with a summer that felt like childhood, and three things that made it so good. "When my friends ask about my summer, I say it was a summer like in my childhood. An absolute dream." ONE - NATURE Morning workouts became boots on and up the mountain, or an hour kayaking on a glass-flat lake. No drives, no planning - just step outside. Back in Vienna, he misses it. The trees here sit between houses. There's a simple exercise anyone can try: look at a tree for 40 seconds. It calms you down, and there's research behind it. For Bernhard, nature is also part of the spiritual component of a morning ritual - something we rarely think about, and often need. TWO - NO COMMITMENTS Waking without an alarm. Refusing to put anything in the diary. Some mornings meant another hour of sleep, some a book, some a hike, some just coffee in the sun. "That gave me the chance to be much closer to myself. Normally my body has to function around my busy life. This summer it was the other way around - I listened to my body. When it needed rest, I rested. When the energy was pumping, I went for a swim." THREE - TINKERING Physical tinkering: baking a few cakes. (A small confession - though he's from Vienna, he baked his very first cake only a year ago.) Digital tinkering: a project with his friend Dietmar Muchitsch, founder of the Graz marketing agency wolke blau. The two got talking about the future of the web. Websites have a flaw - they are one-directional. You have to hunt for information, and no real conversation happens. So they built websites that talk back: a chatbot that holds a conversation with visitors, with strong analytics behind it that show what people are actually looking for, which questions the site answers, and which it doesn't. Try it at pausenlos.ai or on bernhardkerres.com - the chatbot there knows a little more than the page itself. WHAT COMES BACK TO WORK With Graz tomorrow, Wales next week, then Germany, the busy life resumes. But one practice carries over: every two months, Bernhard keeps a week completely free - a creative week. Nature, no commitments, no expectations about what to produce, and space to tinker, whether with technology, cakes, art, or writing. It refreshes him more than almost anything else. "I'm grateful for a summer like in my childhood. And grateful that I can create and work with many of you." LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | pausenlos.ai #Coaching #Leadership #Wellbeing #CreativeTime #BackToSchool

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  Coffee and Coaching

  The Road to Abilene: Why Teams Choose What Nobody Actually Wants

  Jun 21, 202618 min

  One hot Texas afternoon, four people climbed into a car with no air conditioning and drove 85 km to Abilene for dinner. The drive was brutal. The food was bad. They came home exhausted. Not one of them had wanted to go. THE STORY BEHIND THE PARADOX Jerry B. Harvey, professor of management science at George Washington University, told this story about his own family in his 1974 paper "The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement." His father-in-law suggested the trip. His wife said it sounded great. Everyone agreed. Only on the way back, in silence, did the truth come out—starting with his mother-in-law: "To tell the truth, I didn't enjoy it. I only went because the three of you were so enthusiastic." Every single person had gone along because they thought the others wanted to. THE COUNTERINTUITIVE CORE After several episodes on managing conflict, Harvey flips the question. "It's not about managing conflict better. The more dangerous organizational failure is the inability to manage agreement." Groups take actions that contradict what every individual privately wants—because each person wrongly believes everyone else is enthusiastic. The result is a decision nobody supports, frustration all round, and bewilderment about how it happened. The mechanics: members privately agree about the situation and what to do, but fail to communicate it. Everyone misreads the collective reality, acts against their own wishes, and then blames each other—which sets up the next trip to Abilene. WHY IT'S NOT GROUPTHINK A crucial distinction. In groupthink, people genuinely talk themselves into believing the bad decision is right. In the Abilene Paradox, they never believe it—they just go along. The engine is the fear of separation: the anxiety that voicing dissent will get you ostracized. People run "negative fantasies" about what happens if they speak up, and the imagined risk of exclusion outweighs the real cost of going along. "Clark's first stage of psychological safety is inclusion safety. Here we have the opposite—the fear of exclusion." WHY THE LEADER SHOULD SPEAK LAST A practical tip: in a meeting where you want honest input, be the last to speak. The moment you reveal your view, people read your face and align to it. The hope of belonging quietly overrides their real opinion. THE JAKOB SCENARIO ON ROLEPLAYS.AI This is exactly why Bernhard built a scenario to practise it. "Where Are We Actually Going?"—free in June. Five friends from their London Business School MBA plan a trip. It opens in a WhatsApp group. Jakob says: "Let's go to Greece." Jonah: "Greece is nice, I'm easy though." Another: "Croatia would be lovely…" And it drifts. Your job: get the group to a place everyone actually wants. Harder than it sounds. (Make all the personas agree on one location and you might win a prize.) "Reading about the Abilene Paradox is the easy part. Practice is where it shows if we actually inhaled what we learned." The scenario isn't negotiation or facilitation. It's closer to hearing what people are not saying—and slowing the group down long enough to find out what they actually want before the booking link goes out. ONE TOOL TO TRY The "three hats" exercise (adapted from DreamWorks): assign an optimist, a realist, and a pessimist, and argue the case from all three roles. Suddenly you're not the person saying "I don't want to go to Abilene"—you talk it through, see the pros and cons, then decide. Today's invitation: start listening for what people don't say but actually think. REFERENCE: Harvey, J. B. (1974). The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement. Organizational Dynamics. LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai #AbileneParadox #PsychologicalSafety #Teams #Leadership #Coaching

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  Coffee and Coaching

  The Obsession for Excellence Drives Teams - Not Friendship.

  Jun 15, 202623 min

  Last week Bernhard claimed you don't need to be friends to be a high-performing team. Then he found a study that, at first read, said he was wrong. Was he? THE HARDEST POSSIBLE TEST A string quartet is the purest intense work group that exists. Four people, completely interdependent, who cannot produce a single bar alone. They rehearse six hours a day, tour together, sit beside the same three people for years—one quartet in the study, for 34 years. The musicians described it as a marriage—not to one person, but to three. If friendship matters anywhere, it matters here. Murnighan and Conlon (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1991) studied 20 of Britain's professional quartets, interviewing 80 musicians. Nine years later, they checked who survived. Over half had folded. THE COMPLICATION—AND THE REFRAME The successful quartets did tend to be friends. So on the surface, the study contradicts last week's claim. But dig into why. They weren't held together by friendship—they were held together by an obsession with the music. Members of the best groups independently, almost unanimously, called it exactly that. "The friendship was not the engine. The shared, non-negotiable commitment to excellence was the engine. Friendship grew out of it." It's not liking each other that produces performance—it's a shared, obsessive commitment to the same standard. THREE TENSIONS EVERY TEAM LIVES WITH Three paradoxes no quartet can resolve. The successful ones managed them quietly; the unsuccessful ones tried to fix them and broke. 1. Leader vs. Democracy. The music gives the lead to the first violinist, but every player joined for an equal voice. The successful first violinists led totally—and sincerely advocated democracy at the same time. The researchers called it "effective inconsistency." The lesson: pretending the hidden hierarchy isn't there breaks groups. 2. The Second Fiddle. The second violinist is often more technically skilled than the first—the parts are harder—yet gets none of the acclaim. A famous second's metaphor: a quartet is a bottle of wine. The first violin is the label, the cellist is the bottle, and the second violin and viola are the wine—the actual contents. Successful quartets made their second feel essential; failing ones treated them as a lesser first. 3. Confrontation vs. Compromise. The successful quartets did not resolve conflict through open confrontation. Their saying: "Either we play or we fight." They let trivial disagreements dissolve; the ones that mattered worked themselves out in the playing. This complicates challenger safety—and refines it. It isn't challenging everything all the time; it's building enough safety that you can challenge, then choosing what's worth it. THE DEEPER PATTERN The standard advice was to confront your paradoxes openly. The data said something truer: the best quartets recognised their contradictions and did not try to untangle them. We're trained to resolve, fix, align—but the highest-performing teams develop the maturity to live inside unresolved tension. And they worked through disagreement not by talking it to death, but by playing. The thesis behind the Rehearsal Gap and RolePlays.ai: you resolve the hard things in the doing, not the discussion. THE CORRECTION "You don't need to love the people you work with. You need to be obsessed, together, with the same excellence. The friendship, if it comes, comes after." Ask of your own team: do we share a drive for excellence, or are we just trying to get along? That's the difference between a quartet that lasts 34 years and one that folds. REFERENCE: Murnighan & Conlon (1991), The Dynamics of Intense Work Groups: A Study of British String Quartets. Administrative Science Quarterly , 36(2). LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai #PsychologicalSafety #Teams #Leadership #Coaching #HighPerformance

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  Coffee and Coaching

  What Orchestras Teach Us About Psychological Safety

  Jun 7, 202618 min

  Flutist Agnes Vass asked Bernhard a question: what if you applied the Fifth Stage of psychological safety to an orchestra? It turns out an orchestra is one of the best models we have for how high-performing teams work. (With thanks to Agnes Vass, co-principal flute at the Bremerhaven Philharmonic and founder of the Body Mind Music Lab.) WHY ORCHESTRAS? Peter Drucker used orchestras constantly as a model for organisations. So has Bernhard, given his background. The reason: an orchestra of 70 to 150 musicians creates an outstanding performance in three days—often led by a conductor they have never met before. The analogies for management write themselves.--- DUNBAR'S NUMBER British anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that humans can maintain around 150 meaningful relationships at once (his average: 148.6). The proof arrived with social media. Remember the early joy of Facebook—reconnecting with old friends? Then somewhere around 150–200, your feed filled with people you didn't really care about. Dunbar's number, demonstrated at scale. Orchestras sit right inside that number. So does W.L. Gore, the company behind Gore-Tex—they cap units at around 200 people and build a new site rather than exceed it. The belief: people at work should genuinely know each other. THE REFRAME: RELATIONAL SAFETY ISN'T FRIENDSHIP Are 140 orchestra members all good friends? No. Some are close. Some can't stand each other. And yet the best orchestras deliver extraordinary performances. "The safety a good orchestra has is this: even if I don't like my colleague, I know they are committed to the highest performance, just as much as I am." Relational safety, properly understood, is built on a shared, explicit common goal—the same standard of quality, the same drive, the same dedication to practice. Not affection. "If you're a flutist and you haven't practiced, every person in the audience will hear it." FUZZY GOALS vs. MOTIVATIONAL GOALS Organisations often run on fuzzy goals—"increase turnover by 10%." That's like telling an orchestra to finish five minutes early by playing faster. Nobody is moved by it. Motivational goals are about a meaningful outcome: electrifying the audience, leaving the customer completely wowed. When everyone is committed to it, everything changes. Underneath it: a commitment to practice. Musicians practice. Most managers wing it 80% of the time. That's why Bernhard built RolePlays.ai—a place for leaders to practice the difficult conversations. DIVERSITY: HACKMAN'S ORCHESTRA RESEARCH In the 1980s, J. Richard Hackman of Harvard studied women in orchestras. At the time, many were all-male—the Vienna Philharmonic didn't admit women until a US tour forced the change. What Hackman found: Below 10% women: high turnover, mobbing, sexism. Women leave. Between 10% and 33%: a hard struggle. Around 33%: an equilibrium. Men and women playing together become natural. Sexism drops. Performance improves. Women stay. You can even hear it—diversity changes the sound. Not only a values argument: listed companies with diverse boards significantly outperform all-male ones. THE THREE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE GROWTH ZONE To bring a team into the growth zone—where breakthroughs happen—you need three things beyond relational safety: a shared, motivating sense of purpose; a genuine commitment to practice; and space for diversity. True for a 140-person orchestra. Equally true for a team of five. Jon Katzenbach put it well: what separates a high-performing team from a merely good one is that its members are committed to their own learning—and to each other's. REFERENCES: Dunbar, R. How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Hackman, J. R. Leading Teams. Katzenbach, J. R. The Wisdom of Teams. Agnes Vass — Body Mind Music Lab (Instagram). LINKS: bernhardkerres.com | roleplays.ai #PsychologicalSafety #Orchestra #Leadership #Teams #Diversity

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