The math has never worked. A single executive coach engagement runs $25,000–$40,000 per person, per year. For a company with 8 C-suite members, that's a line item the CFO can justify. For the 35 directors and VPs who actually manage most of the company's headcount, run its day-to-day operations, and sit in its hardest cross-functional meetings — the budget never quite reaches them.
This isn't a new problem. L&D teams have known about the "frozen middle" for decades. What's changed recently is the cost of ignoring it. As companies hold headcount flat and ask VPs to do more with less, the capability gap in that middle layer is showing up directly in execution speed, retention of high performers, and the quality of decisions being escalated to the C-suite.
We spent the first year of building Coachvyne talking to HR and L&D leaders at companies ranging from 180 to 1,400 employees. The pattern was strikingly consistent: the executive coaching model fails below the C-suite not because of one obvious flaw, but because of three compounding structural problems.
Problem 1: The Coverage Ratio Is Unsustainable
At its core, one-on-one executive coaching is a 1:1 delivery model applied to a problem that exists at a 1:30 or 1:40 ratio. A company that has 40 director-and-above leaders outside the C-suite would need to spend $1–1.6M annually to cover all of them with traditional coaching. Almost no mid-market company does this. The typical approach is to pick 3–5 "high potentials" for coaching engagements and hope the development trickles down through observation and osmosis.
It doesn't. Leaders who didn't receive structured development don't reliably pass structured development habits to their teams. What gets passed down is style — how a particular VP shows up, what they prioritize, how they handle conflict — without the metacognitive scaffolding that explains why those choices work in some situations and fail in others.
The coverage problem also creates resentment. When a VP of Engineering knows that their peer VP of Product was selected for a coaching engagement and they weren't, the implicit message received is that leadership has pre-decided who has a future. That perception does real damage, regardless of whether it reflects actual intent.
Problem 2: The Timing of Feedback Is Wrong
Traditional executive coaching is structured around retrospective reflection. A session happens every two weeks, usually 60–90 minutes. The coach asks the leader to walk through situations from the past two weeks, helps them find patterns, and suggests alternative approaches. The leader goes back to work and tries to apply those insights the next time a relevant situation arises.
The problem is that the "next time" may be three weeks later, by which point the learning has decayed substantially. Research on skill acquisition consistently shows that feedback is most effective when it arrives close to the moment of behavior. A VP who navigates a difficult conversation poorly on a Tuesday morning gets almost no developmental benefit from processing that conversation on a Thursday two weeks later with a coach.
There's a secondary issue here: the situations that most need development work are often the ones that are hardest to discuss in a coaching session. A VP who handled a termination conversation badly is unlikely to give their coach a fully accurate account of what they said and why. Memory is selective, especially around moments of discomfort. The coach ends up working with a reconstructed, partially sanitized version of the event.
Problem 3: Generic Coaching Can't Reach Specific Skills
Executive coaches are generalists by necessity. A good coach can help a leader develop self-awareness, notice behavioral patterns, and build the habit of reflection. What most coaches can't do is drill a specific, narrow capability in a controlled, repeatable context.
Consider what happens when a VP consistently struggles with Accountability Framing — meaning they have difficulty attributing outcomes to clear decisions and owners when speaking upward. This shows up as vague language under pressure, as responsibility-diffusing answers during board questions, as updates to the CEO that identify problems without identifying whose problem they are. A good executive coach can help this person become aware of the pattern over 8–10 sessions. That's useful but slow.
What would actually move the needle faster is deliberate practice: repeated, scored exposure to scenarios that require precise Accountability Framing, with specific behavioral feedback after each attempt. The kind of practice that athletes and surgeons and airline pilots use to build specific skills under pressure. Traditional coaching doesn't deliver this. It can't — the format isn't designed for it.
What L&D Teams Are Actually Doing
The more interesting companies we've spoken with have stopped waiting for the executive coaching model to scale. They've moved to a different frame: if structured development for director-to-VP leaders has to work at 30× the capacity of traditional coaching, the delivery mechanism has to be fundamentally different.
One approach is cohort-based development programs — group workshops, peer learning circles, and leadership intensives built around case discussions. These work for general leadership concepts but struggle to create the individual specificity that meaningful development requires. A VP who scores well on Stakeholder Navigation but has real gaps in Conflict De-escalation doesn't benefit from a group session on conflict that's pitched at the median of the group.
Another approach is 360 feedback programs combined with individual development plans. These are better because they create individual data. The challenge is that 360 feedback is a snapshot, typically collected once or twice a year, and the development plans that result from them are notoriously unenforced. A VP fills out their IDP in January and revisits it in December's performance review, having done little structured work in between.
We're not saying 360 feedback is bad — it's a useful diagnostic tool. We are saying that a diagnostic without a practice mechanism is an incomplete system. Knowing that a VP has a gap in Decision Under Uncertainty doesn't help them develop that capability. Regular practice in situations that actually require good decision-making under uncertainty, with feedback tied to specific behavioral markers, does.
The Design Constraint Nobody Is Solving For
Here's the design constraint that we think gets underweighted in most L&D conversations about the middle layer: VP-level development has to be worth the opportunity cost of the VP's time.
A VP of Sales at a 400-person company has almost no discretionary time. If you schedule them for a 90-minute coaching session every two weeks, you are competing against pipeline reviews, board prep, customer calls, and a team of 25 people with daily needs. The ROI threshold for that time block is high, and most L&D programs don't clear it.
Consider a specific scenario: a 350-person SaaS company with an L&D director who ran a well-designed executive development cohort for their 12 VPs. The program was thoughtful — curated case studies, external facilitator, monthly full-day sessions. Midway through the year, participation started slipping. VPs were missing sessions or sending delegates. The L&D director's read was that the program wasn't connecting to the VP's actual immediate challenges. The scenarios being discussed felt abstracted from the specific pressure they were under right now.
This is not a program design failure, exactly — it's a fundamental challenge with any development program that isn't tightly coupled to a leader's present context. The question we're trying to answer with Coachvyne is whether scenario simulation, pitched at specific current challenges, can create a development experience that feels relevant enough to be worth a VP's time at the moment they need it.
Where This Points
The executive coaching model will continue to be valuable for a small number of senior leaders. We're not arguing against it. What we're arguing is that it was never the right model for the layer below it, and the companies that are building VP pipelines worth hiring into are the ones that have stopped trying to adapt a 1:1 coaching model into a 1:40 coverage problem.
What that alternative looks like in practice — scenario-based practice, dimension-level scoring, targeted micro-drills, development that fits into 20–30 minutes rather than 90 — is what we've spent two years designing and what the rest of this blog explores. The problem is real. The constraint is coverage and timing and specificity. The solution space is narrower than the vendor market suggests, but it does exist.