By ELEV8 Coaching Solutions  |  Catalysed by the work of Dr. Vidya Priya Rao  |  Estimated reading time: 6–7 minutes

The global executive coaching industry now generates an estimated $6.25 billion in annual revenue and is expanding at nearly 7% year on year. Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Association Resource Centre places the average return on a well-executed coaching engagement at seven times its cost. These figures, drawn from aggregated survey data rather than controlled trials, reflect self-reported outcomes across varied engagement types and organisational contexts; they carry directional weight rather than scientific precision. Those are not numbers any serious organisation should ignore — nor accept without asking the questions a board would ask: compared to what baseline, measured how, and over what timeframe? And yet, despite the investment, despite the credentials, despite the hours committed to reflection and dialogue — the needle on strategy execution stubbornly refuses to move.

Something is misaligned. Not in coaching itself, but in how a prevalent strand within the profession has defined its purpose — and in the organisational conditions that allow the wrong model to be commissioned.

This article, catalysed by the thinking of Dr. Vidya Priya Rao, argues that executive coaching under-delivers not when it is done poorly, but when it is aimed at the wrong target. A prevalent model treats leadership development as a wellness initiative — a space for introspection, emotional processing, and self-discovery. These are not worthless pursuits. Many coaches who operate within this model carry formidable psychological expertise, and their work has genuine value. But when a Chief Executive faces a predatory competitor, a collapsing margin, or a board demanding answers at 9am on Friday, self-discovery is not what the moment requires. Precision is.

THE FALLACY OF THE GENERIC PRACTITIONER

Consider owning a Bentley or a Rolls Royce. Specifically, consider handing its keys to an eighteen-year-old who passed their driving test last Tuesday. They understand the theory — the pedals, the mirrors, the highway code. What they cannot simulate is the visceral sensation of three tonnes of engineering at motorway speed in the fog; the split-second judgement required when the road narrows and the margin for error disappears. They are technically qualified and they are experientially blind.

Organisations make this misjudgement when selection focuses on credentials alone. A coaching qualification demonstrates competence in human psychology — and that matters enormously. But credentials, on their own, say nothing about P&L management, competitive positioning, merger mechanics, or the very particular pressure of presenting a revised forecast to a sceptical board. The coachee sits across from someone who understands them deeply as a human being, but who cannot see the pitch they are actually playing on. The reverse failure exists too: a consultant with deep commercial fluency but no psychological grounding defaults to frameworks and slide decks, missing the human dynamics that determine whether strategy actually executes.

The sports world exposed this logic long ago. You would not employ a tennis coach to prepare a football squad for the Champions League. The tennis coach understands peak performance, individual mindset, stamina, and the psychology of the big match — genuine expertise, genuinely irrelevant to a 4-3-3 formation, an offside trap, or the weight of a penalty shootout in front of fifty thousand people. Each discipline demands a different cognitive map of winning. Apply the wrong map, and you prepare your player for a game that will not be played.

Executive leadership is no different. It is the art of executing strategy under pressure, within systems, against adversaries who are moving simultaneously. The best practitioners in this space carry both maps simultaneously: psychological depth and commercial literacy. What Strategic Sparring challenges is the commissioning assumption that one without the other is sufficient. A practitioner who leads purely with feelings and interpersonal patterns leaves the business exactly where it was. A practitioner who leads purely with commercial frameworks leaves the leader’s behaviour exactly where it was. Neither half alone moves the organisation.

FROM THE REARVIEW MIRROR TO THE WINDSHIELD

The structural flaw in traditional coaching runs deeper than practitioner background. It sits in the architecture of the engagement itself. Conventional coaching is episodic and retrospective — it processes events after the fact, when the cement has already dried. A leader navigates a crisis on Tuesday, makes a high-stakes call on Thursday under incomplete information, and debriefs it with their coach the following Wednesday. By then, the narrative has been constructed. The learning becomes academic, interesting, and entirely disconnected from the moment it was needed.

“Strategic Sparring” — a term born at the intersection of competitive sports, military strategy, and executive consulting — is ELEV8’s answer to the windshield problem. Real-time. Forward-facing. Commercially grounded. Imagine a Chief Executive heading into a high-stakes acquisition negotiation. A traditional coach asks how they feel about the last board meeting. A Strategic Sparring partner sits down the week before, roleplays the opposing counsel, stress-tests the deal rationale, simulates the sceptical non-executive director, and punches holes in the logic before the market does. They do not ask how the leader feels. They ask whether the argument holds.

This demands a fundamentally different kind of practitioner — one who understands the business model as intimately as they understand the psychology. The fog of modern business is not lifted by reflection alone. It requires someone who has driven in it before.

MEASURING WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS

The industry’s addiction to vanity metrics compounds the problem. A coaching engagement is declared successful because the leader reported feeling supported, more confident, and better understood. These are not worthless outcomes. But they are insufficient measures for an intervention that costs between $15,000 and $75,000 for a six-month engagement and occupies significant hours of a senior executive’s most valuable resource: attention.

Strategic Sparring demands harder metrics. If the coaching objective is strategic vision, the measure is not a subjective confidence score — it is the quality of the three-year roadmap delivered in Q4. It is clarity scores on the employee engagement survey regarding organisational direction. It is the P&L, the talent retention rate, and the speed of decision-making under ambiguity. These are metrics that a board will recognise without translation.

At ELEV8, we operationalise this through what we term Alignment Triads: a pre-engagement process in which the sponsor, the leader, and the coach co-create the success criteria before a single session begins. The sponsor must articulate precisely what visible, commercial change they expect to observe within six months — and the coach’s first obligation is to stress-test that definition, because a precisely wrong objective is no better than no objective at all. This embeds the coaching directly into the strategy and decision cadence of the enterprise. It prevents the common failure mode where coach and leader run a committed, well-intentioned marathon — in entirely the wrong direction.

THE SYSTEMIC IMMUNE RESPONSE

Even when coaching is commercially oriented, it faces a structural antagonist that practitioners rarely address: the organisation itself. When an executive returns from a coaching engagement energised to challenge assumptions and operate differently, the system frequently reacts as a biological organism responds to a foreign body — it moves to neutralise the perceived threat. Colleagues revert to established patterns. Managers interpret new behaviour as deviation. The culture, risk-averse and status-quo-protective, quietly reasserts its gravitational pull.

A coaching model that ignores this dynamic sets its clients up for a particular kind of disappointment: the leader who changes, surrounded by a system that refuses to. Strategic Sparring treats this as a primary design consideration. Before the engagement begins, we ask the question that traditional models typically avoid: if this leader changes, what in the surrounding system will break — and how do we address that in advance? The sparring partner does not simply prepare the executive for a different version of themselves. They prepare the leader for the organisational friction that awaits them.

CONTEXTUAL FLUENCY ACROSS CULTURES

Dr. Rao’s work draws particular attention to a dimension that the Western-dominated coaching profession has been slow to confront: the WEIRD problem. Most executive coaching frameworks emerge from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic contexts — cultural assumptions so deeply embedded that practitioners rarely recognise them as assumptions at all. Applied uncritically to leaders operating in Mumbai, Riyadh, Singapore, or Nairobi, these models do not simply underperform. They can actively mislead. A coaching model built on the Western cultural norm of direct individual challenge, for instance, can fracture trust irreparably when applied to a senior leader operating within a collective decision-making culture in the Gulf or East Asia.

Contextual fluency, in a globalised economy, means understanding not only the business model but the cultural operating system through which that business runs. The tools, cadence, directness, and relational architecture of an effective engagement in London are not transferable wholesale to a family-owned conglomerate in the Gulf or a state-adjacent enterprise in South-East Asia. Strategic Sparring requires radical customisation — co-created with the leader, calibrated to their specific market reality, and built around the conditions in which high-stakes decisions must actually be made.

HIGH-PERFORMANCE PREPARATION, NOT THE FIX-IT TRAP

One final reframing is required — perhaps the most important of all. The moment coaching is positioned as a remedial tool, the engagement is already compromised. Nobody submits willingly to a process designed to fix what is broken about them. The defensive posture that this triggers consumes the very psychological bandwidth that genuine development requires.

The more accurate frame — and the more motivating one — is elite athletic preparation. No serious sports organisation sends a world-class performer onto the pitch without a coaching infrastructure embedded across every training session, every tactical debrief, every pre-match preparation. The coach is not there because the athlete is deficient. They are there because elite performance demands a partner in the work. The Lionel Messis and Serena Williamses of the world did not reach the apex of their disciplines despite intensive coaching. They reached it because of it.

The modern executive deserves the same standard. Not a therapist in the boardroom. Not a sympathetic ear once a fortnight. A partner who understands the weight of the decisions, knows the terrain, has studied the opposition, and can sit across the table and ask the question the market will ask — before the market asks it.

THE CASE FOR STRATEGIC SPARRING

The data on coaching ROI is not the problem. Seven times return, 529% uplift in Fortune 500 programmes, an 88% productivity premium when coaching accompanies structured training — these figures are directionally compelling, though any board worth its salt will note that they emerge from self-reported surveys and proprietary studies with limited methodological transparency, no common baseline, and significant variance across contexts. The problem is that the industry continues to measure the wrong things in the wrong timeframe for the wrong purposes.

When coaching is wired into commercial reality — when it operates at the windshield rather than the rearview mirror, when it demands a practitioner with genuine business fluency, when it is measured against the P&L rather than a satisfaction survey — the returns justify every investment. And more importantly, the leader arrives on the pitch already stress-tested. Their logic is sound. Their strategy has been challenged by a partner who wanted them to win.

The days of check-the-box coaching are over. The boardroom is a high-speed motorway in the fog, and it has no patience for a learner’s permit.