When Your Coaching Client Knows Everything and Listens to Nobody

Your most capable executive coaching client is also your hardest case. They’re technically brilliant, commercially sharp, and emotionally defended. Standard executive coaching techniques barely scratch the surface. Rashmi Datt’s 2026 case study in the Journal of Psychodrama, Sociometry, and Group Psychotherapy shows there’s a better way in.

Executive Coaching and Emotion Regulation in High-Pressure Leaders

Datt worked with a single CXO client over six sessions across six months. Each session ran ninety minutes. The presenting problem was familiar: a senior leader whose controlling style was fracturing team relationships under organisational pressure. Datt used psychodrama-informed methods, specifically role reversal and role training, to surface the emotional patterns driving the behaviour.

The findings are striking. By session three, the client began spontaneously describing colleagues’ perspectives without prompting. By session five, 360-degree feedback from direct reports showed measurable improvement in perceived listening. The client’s own self-reported emotion regulation scores rose across all six sessions. Crucially, the shift wasn’t cognitive. The client didn’t just understand the problem differently. He experienced it differently, from the inside.

Role reversal is the technique at the heart of this. The client physically takes the position of another person, a direct report, a peer, a board member, and speaks from that perspective. It sounds theatrical. It works because the body and voice engage before the analytical mind can construct a defence.

Applying Psychodrama Methods in Your Coaching Practice

Most executive coaches won’t call this psychodrama. That’s fine. The underlying mechanism is what matters. You’re creating embodied perspective-taking, not just intellectual empathy.

Take the case of a CFO who consistently dominated budget meetings, dismissing finance business partners mid-sentence. A coach using role reversal asked her to sit in a different chair and respond to her own opening statement as if she were one of those partners. She stopped after thirty seconds. She said, quietly, that she hadn’t realised how little air she left in the room. That moment did more than six months of feedback reports.

Or consider a divisional MD at a logistics firm who knew his team feared him but couldn’t feel why. His coach used role training, rehearsing specific conversations in advance, with the coach playing the team member. The MD discovered his own body language was the problem. His arms crossed, his jaw tightened. He’d had no idea. Two months later, his team’s engagement pulse score moved from the 34th to the 61st percentile.

The practical implication for coaches is this. When a client is stuck in their head, move them out of it. Change the chair. Change the voice. Ask them to speak as the other person, not about the other person. The shift in pronoun from ‘he’ to ‘I’ is where the real data lives.

What This Case Study Cannot Tell Us

One client is one client. A single CXO in an unnamed organisation, coached by the same person who wrote the paper, cannot confirm that these methods work universally. The self-reported measures are also vulnerable to social desirability bias, especially with a high-status client who may want to appear to be improving.

Closing Reflection

I keep returning to something Datt’s paper implies but never quite states directly. The most defended leaders aren’t resisting change because they don’t care. They’re resisting because every feedback mechanism they’ve ever encountered has felt like a verdict. Psychodrama-informed coaching bypasses the verdict. It creates experience instead of judgment. That feels genuinely important to me, especially in organisations where psychological safety is preached loudly and practised poorly. The question I’d put to any senior coach reading this is simple: when did you last ask your client to sit in someone else’s chair?

Image: Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com M on Unsplash

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