Every CEO has a boardroom. Almost none of them have what Andrea Schwarz calls the boardroom behind the boardroom — the place where people tell you the truth instead of the version that's safe to say out loud. In this episode of Work Matters, Thomas Bertels and executive coach Andrea Schwarz talk about what leaders actually need from the people around them now that AI can produce a competent answer to almost anything.
Andrea Schwarz runs IMUA OLA, a coaching house she founded after more than 20 years in senior leadership at Adidas, Reebok, and Novartis. Her model isn’t built around a single methodology. She calls it a set of “balloons”: stakeholder-centric coaching, sustainable-performance coaching, embedded strategic advisory - pulled situationally depending on what a leader actually needs: judgment, opinion, wisdom, connecting the dots.
We also get into what’s actually driving anxiety and fear around AI and her approach for how to deal with that. Her method borrows from Pixar’s Inside Out: invite the fear in, let it say what it came to say, thank it, and do it anyway, scared. It’s a practical answer to a real problem — leaders who won’t publicly admit uncertainty about where AI is taking their own jobs, let alone their teams’.
The conversation closes on a genuinely open question about her own field: if AI absorbs the scripted 90% of coaching, what’s left is a smaller, more valuable slice — the actual human connection. Schwarz isn’t worried about that trade. She’d rather be the last piece in the block, doing the work only a human relationship can do, and she’s comfortable holding two truths that seem to contradict each other — that the work is genuinely at risk, and that there’s more room for it than the anxiety suggests.
Key Takeaways
- Most boardrooms run on “acceptable truth,” not the truth people actually carry — a “boardroom behind the boardroom,” where people leave titles at the door, is how leaders get real signal.
- As AI becomes an “answering machine” rather than a search engine, the human edge shifts to discernment, judgment, and connecting dots the machine hasn’t been asked to connect.
- Coaching doesn’t need to compete with AI on the scripted 90% of the work — give the framework away, and reserve the human relationship for the 10% that’s genuinely emotional and high-stakes.
- Naming a fear precisely (of poverty, of criticism, of loss of independence) and inviting it in, rather than suppressing it, works better than reassurance — then do it scared.
- Two contradictory truths can both be real at once: AI will replace real work, and there’s more room for human judgment than the anxiety suggests.
Chapters
00:00 Room for the machine and room for humans
00:16 Andrea's journey
01:51 What makes IMUA OLA’s coaching model different
03:48 Where advisory coaching ends and coaching begins
04:54 Case study: coaching a founder and his team through change
07:43 When coaching creates a conflict of interest
09:20 What it takes to join the coaching house
09:58 Three themes she’s seeing right now
13:57 Why leaders won’t say what they’re actually afraid of
16:44 The boardroom behind the boardroom
21:21 Naming the fear AI adoption is actually triggering
25:59 How to coach someone out of that fear
29:39 Sometimes coaching means helping someone leave, not stay
32:18 How much of coaching is just being heard
33:11 Will AI replace human coaches
Guest Bio
Andrea Schwarz is the founder of IMUA OLA, an executive coaching house based in Hawaii. She spent more than 20 years in senior leadership roles at Adidas, Reebok, and Novartis, before founding her own coaching practice. IMUA OLA blends embedded strategic advisory coaching with stakeholder-centric and sustainable-performance coaching methodologies, working with founders, C-suite leaders, and their teams.
Website: imuaola.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/imuaola
