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A CEO we worked with recently described his first coaching experience in one sentence.

“I kept waiting for the advice,” he said. “It never came.”

He had spent the first three sessions mildly frustrated. He was paying for expert input, and the coach kept asking questions. Not bad questions. Uncomfortably specific ones. About his assumptions. About the decisions he was avoiding. About the story he was telling himself about why a particular situation kept recurring.

A large manufacturing company lost its CHRO last year. Sudden resignation. Two weeks notice. Fifteen years of institutional knowledge, vendor relationships, and leadership context walked out with her.

They were probably excellent at their work. Technically sharp. Consistently reliable. The kind of person who solved problems before they became problems. Their manager trusted them. Their peers respected them. They were, by every measure available, the right choice.

A General Manager at a mid-size manufacturing firm in Pune retired last year after 22 years with the company.

Picture a room full of senior managers, sitting around a table with a 3×3 grid on the screen in front of them.

The last time your organisation hired someone for a managerial role, how long did the interview actually last? Forty-five minutes? An hour? And in that time, how much of what you observed was the candidate’s genuine capability, and how much was their ability to perform well under artificial conditions that have almost nothing to do with the job?

Every quarter, leadership teams across Indian organisations ask the same question: what do we need to do to develop our leaders faster? The answers they reach for are usually the same too: send them to a training programme, pair them with a senior mentor, or bring in an executive coach.

There is a particular pattern that repeats in training budgets across Indian organisations. A department head flags a performance concern. L&D responds by booking a vendor and scheduling a programme. Participants attend. Feedback forms are collected. And three months later, the original performance concern has not moved.

Most training rooms carry a familiar rhythm. Participants arrive, settle in, and spend the first hour catching up with the basics. The facilitator repeats foundational concepts that half the group already knows. The other half feels rushed. By the time the real work begins, the energy has already fragmented.

Generation Z, broadly defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, now makes up a growing share of the Indian workforce. The earliest members of this cohort have been in employment for five or six years. The majority is entering the workforce now or will do so within the next two or three years. By 2028, Gen Z will represent a significant proportion of front-line employees, junior managers, and early-career professionals in most Indian organisations.