Be it the battlefield or the corporate world, the imperative role played by a leader cannot be repudiated. A resilient leader must possess various virtues and also keep reinventing himself. As John Kennedy once said, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to one another”. Facilitating corporate leaders to develop sound leadership skills through workshops, coaching and consulting by understanding the strategic and development imperatives is Inroads Leadership Development.

Founded in 2014,the organization’s foundations have been laid on the strong credentials of its three founding members with a cumulative experience of 70+ years in Indian and multinational companies. Already, Inroads has worked with names such as Adobe, Dell, ITC Infotech, Marlabs, Novozymes, TSYS and Wells Fargo. “At Inroads, we believe that content is only half the story. The person delivering the message, whether it be training, coaching or consulting needs to create a deep emotional connect with the participant(s)to create real impact and be a catalyst for change,” says Suman Ghose, Co-Founder, Inroads.

Creating Holistic Solutions
Today’s highly competitive nature of the corporate world can adversely affect an employee’s mental well being. An unhappy and dissatisfied person cannot be an asset to any organization regardless of

how efficient he might seem to be. “We believe for any individual, work and life are not two separate things, but each a subset of overall existence,”says Abhay Nigam, Co-Founder, Inroads. Inroads approach is based on the principle of letting people make inroads within themselves, creating self-awareness, challenging and supporting them to reach meaningful growth. For that, the Inroads team designs interventions based on close interactions with various stakeholders and understanding their specific challenges.

Inroads designs immersive workshops that provide practical tips and techniques which are easy to remember and apply in real scenario

Empowering to Lead
“We believe that in today’s world, tangible cognitive skills are necessary but not sufficient for effective leadership development. They need to be well supported by intangibles and other powerful non-cognitive skills as well. We also enable leaders to adopt more coach-like behaviours and integrate coaching into their leadership style which in turn helps them to develop their teams and peers.” explains Veena Ramagopalan, Co-Founder, Inroads.

A Leader must be a role model in leading self by being calm, happy, healthy and energized. At an organizational level, it translates to a culture of mindfulness and high organizational energy. This constitutes the Inner Self. At the next level, emotionally and behaviourally, a leader must work with others on non-cognitive aspects such as mind-set, attitude, values and trust. Additionally, leadership also involves cognitive aspects

such as decision-making, problem-solving, innovation, delegation and other cognitive aspects driven by functional needs. Inroads offers programmes and solutions centred around these three areas - Inner -Self, Non-Cognitive and Cognitive.

Suman Ghose, Director

Changing Lives
The company designs immersive workshops that provide practical tips and techniques which are easy to remember and apply in real scenario. “We believe learning and retention happens by doing. Our workshops provide experiential learning though effective use of storytelling, sharing our real-life experience, games, role plays, videos, and learn while having fun,” adds Suman. Through coaching, they inspire individuals and teams to move towards whatever makes the biggest difference to accelerate their development choices. Coaching also helps to reinforce the learning gained in workshops by leveraging coaching conversations.

So far, the company has successfully affected change in the lives of more than 7000 people across various organizations. The company is now working on more innovative solutions by introducing music and art into its programs and designing byte-sized learning modules. Inroads strategy is to continue walking on the path of enabling more and more people achieve their full potential while feeling fulfilled rather than feeling exhausted, which in turn, the founders believe, will drive meaningful growth in organizations.