The Skill That Pays Millions

Who gets paid more: the world's best footballer, the world's highest-paid musician, or the world's highest-paid CEO?

In 2025, Cristiano Ronaldo earned an estimated $275 million. The Weeknd, the year's highest-paid musician, earned an estimated $298 million.

Now look at the boardroom. Figma's Dylan Field was awarded a pay package valued at $864 million. India-born Shankh Mitra of Welltower received one valued at $821 million, roughly ₹7,000 crore. And Elon Musk's 2025 Tesla compensation was valued at somewhere between $132 billion and $158 billion, depending on who's counting. Yes, billion.

Most of that is performance-linked stock, not cash sitting in his bank account. But that's exactly the point: boards are willing to put enormous economic value on one person's ability to lead.

Leadership may be the most richly rewarded skill in the world.

That raises two uncomfortable questions. Can it be developed? And if it can, are you practising it?

“Leadership? You learn that on the job.”

Nobody watches Ronaldo and says, “Twenty years of football. What's left to learn?” He still trains every single day.

Yet ask most leaders—junior, mid-level or senior—when they last deliberately practised leading. You'll likely get a blank look, or some version of: “Leadership? You learn that on the job.”

Leadership is the second-hardest job in the world. The first is keeping your partner happy—and leaders usually fail at that too, because they're always in meetings.

The job description goes something like this. Hire the diamonds. Fire the lemons. Give feedback without making anyone cry, including yourself. Resolve conflicts without becoming the conflict. Make big calls with half the information you'd like and twice the opinions you didn't ask for. Build a culture that's more than a poster in the pantry. Communicate a vision that survives the first Monday morning. And somehow get hundreds of people to do better work because you're in the room, not in spite of it.

That isn't one skill. It's ten. Most of us were never taught any of them.

“I'll learn it with experience,” we say.

Here's the problem with experience: it only teaches you if someone holds up a mirror. Without one, you can repeat the same bad habit for twenty years and simply become very experienced at it.

Twenty years of experience can easily be one year of experience, repeated twenty times.

The gap a coach fills

That's the gap a good coach fills. A coach doesn't hand you another textbook. They watch you. They ask the questions you'd rather not answer. They challenge your assumptions, point out patterns you can't see, help you experiment with new behaviours, and hold you accountable for actually changing.

When Eric Schmidt became CEO of Google, he was advised to get a coach. His coach was Bill Campbell, who also worked with Steve Jobs. Schmidt later explained why it mattered. Every famous athlete and every famous performer has a coach, he said, because people are never very good at seeing themselves as others see them.

The world's top leaders have caught on. In 2013, a Stanford study found that nearly two-thirds of CEOs received no outside coaching or leadership advice. By 2025, a Stanford survey found that 58% had worked with a paid professional coach.

So the real question isn't whether great leaders use coaches. It's whether you do.

Do your managers have one?

Do you have a leadership coach? And if you run a company, here's the harder question: do your managers have one?

You'll spend crores on technology, infrastructure, marketing and sales. But if the people leading your organisation aren't getting better, all of it eventually hits a ceiling. Perhaps the best investment you make this year isn't another campaign or another strategy consultant (and I say this as a former one). Perhaps it's the people who lead your people.

The world's best athletes practise obsessively. So do the world's best musicians. Leadership pays better than both, and it shapes far more lives.

If you're going to be responsible for hundreds of people, “I'll figure it out with experience” isn't a training plan. It's a hope.