Picture a procurement director, 20years in, walking out of a supplier negotiation with 9% off a THB 40 million contract. He is pleased. His CFO is pleased for about a week, until the "savings" fail to appear anywhere in the P&L, because the volume forecast the 9% was based on never materialised. Six months later, the supplier, who took the 9% out of his own margin, quietly drops the director's orders to the back of the queue whenever capacity is tight.
Nobody in that story did anything wrong by the standards they were trained on. The director did what buyers are rewarded for. The supplier did what suppliers do when squeezed. The CFO measured what CFO's measure, and the outcome was worse for everyone than the alternative that was sitting on the table.
I spent 30 years on the buying side before I started coaching people who sit at it. The outside game of procurement, the sourcing strategies, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models, the Kraljic matrices, is well covered. The inside game is not. That is where most of the damage happens.
What is the Inner Game?
Timothy Gallwey wrote "The inner game of tennis" in 1974 and reduced coaching to one line: performance equals potential minus interference. Interference is the running commentary in a person's head, the fear, the old scripts, the need to be seen a certain way. Reduce the interference and the capacity that was always there comes through.
PERFORMANCE = POTENTIAL - INTERFERENCE
Procurement leaders have plenty potential. Most of them also carry three specific interferences that the professional itself installed.
Interference 1: The Hero Buyer
Ask a procurement leader to describe their best day and they will describe a rescue. The supplier who failed at 4pm and the replacement they found by 9am. The price increase they refused. The contract they saved.
The rescue is real, and it built their reputation. It also built an identity that needs things to go wrong. a Hero buyer, without noticing, under-invest in the boring work that prevents crises, because a prevented crisis produces no story. They also struggle to delegate, because a rescue performed by someone else is not their rescue.
In coaching, the question that opens this up is simple: "what would your team say you are , if nothing broke this year?" The silence that follows is usually long.
Interference 2: The Savings Number
Procurement's standard scoreboard is savings. It's the number on the slide, the basis of the bonus, and the thing the function has been telling the business it is for since the 1990's.
The problem is that the number is not trusted by the people it is presented to. Finance distinguishes between hard savings that reduce spend in the ledger and cost avoidance, which is the difference between what was paid and what might have been paid. The CFO's stand behind the first and treat the second with suspicion, because it never appears in the financial statement. a Great deal of what procurement reports is the second.
Deloitte's 2025 Global CPO survey found that organisations leading on digital and talent met their cost savings targets 96% of the time; it also found that some leaders scored far higher on stakeholder satisfaction and supplier performance, which suggests the savings number was never the whole story even for the best.
The interference is not that the a CPO reports savings. It is that their sense of worth rides on a figure they know is soft, so they defend it instead of replacing it. When I watched capable leaders spend an afternoon arguing a CFO into accepting a cost-avoidance line rather than an hour building a measure the CFO would actually believe: working capital released, supplier failures avoided, margin protected on a price-increase audit.
Interference 3: The Adversarial Default
The third interference is the oldest. Buyers are trained to see the supplier as the opponent, and the anchor is the weapon. There is a good science behind the anchor; Galinsky and Mussweiler found that the extremity of first offers often explains more than half the variance in final outcomes. It works.
What the science does not measure is the second contract, or the moment of scarcity. a Supplier who has been anchored into their margin remembers it, and in a year when Thai SME bad loans are above 10% and capacity is being rationed, the buyer who won the last negotiation is not the buyer who gets the last pallet. I covered the mechanics in my negotiation series; the inner game is different. It's the buyers belief that a collaborative outcome means they where soft.
The coaching question is: "What taught you that a good deal has to feel like a win over someone?" Most people can name the person.
What the coach Does, and Does Not, Do
An ICF-Credentialed Coach does not tell the CPO to drop the savings target or stop anchoring. Both may be the right thing to do on a given Tuesday. The work is to make the interference visible, so that the leader can choose the behaviour rather than default to it.
The ICF competency of evoking awareness is the closest description: questions, silence and refusal to supply the answer, until the client can hear their own script and decide whether they still want to run it.
I have found that the procurement leaders who do this work do not become gentler negotiators. They become more accurate ones. They anchor when the situation is transactional and stop when it is strategic. They report the savings number and the working capital number. They let someone else perform the next rescue, and then ask why a rescue was needed.
a CPO who runs on the Hero story, the soft number and the win ends his career with a reputation of toughness and a supplier who serves them last, A CPO who has seen their own interference ends with a CFO who believes their figures and suppliers who pick up the phone on the first ring, and in this economy the second one is still the one buying.