ILSS People Practices Program

Fellow - Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School Harvard University

Dr. Stuti Shukla

Dr. Stuti Shukla is a Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a leadership educator and researcher, and her work focuses on helping leaders grow their personal capacity to exercise leadership on complex challenges and cultivate developmental cultures in their organizations. Stuti brings over a decade of experience teaching experiential leadership programs across diverse contexts. For the past few years, she has consulted on the design and delivery of two signature leadership courses at the Harvard Kennedy School on Inside-Out leadership and the issues of anti-black racism and sexism. Her research centers on leadership, identity, and adult development. She is presently working on a book on how leaders can leverage their complex, intersecting identities to exercise more effective leadership. Stuti previously spent a decade in the education sector in India with Pratham Education Foundation and Kaivalya Education Foundation. She received her Doctorate and Masters in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Co-Founder, Timshel

Gayatri Das Sharma

Gayatri’s professional experience over the last twenty-four years has been in the area of talent and leadership development. In her capacity as a consultant, coach and facilitator she has had the opportunity to live and work in India, China and the USA.

Gayatri has worked on several organizational and people change initiatives, which required her to influence and drive change both at a systemic and people level. Some of the key projects that she has led are a change management initiative with a large India conglomerate, this involved culture change, organization restructuring, HR system design and deployment and leadership assessment and development. She has played a key role in the design and implementation (across ten thousand employees) of an IT enabled performance and management system for one of India’s largest public-sector engineering companies.

Senior Consultant, Cerebrus

Jovita Xavier

Jovita is an MBA – HR with over 12 years of rich experience in the HR field across the IT, ITES, Pharmaceutical and cash logistics sector. She has worked with companies like, CMS Infosystems, Syntel, Tata Consultancy Services and Capita Mastek prior to joining Cerebrus. She has been with associated with Cerebrus since November 2007 and is currently a Senior Consultant.

In her experience at Cerebrus Jovita has worked largely in the areas of Performance Management, 360-degree feedback, HR Policy Review for organizations and creating new HR policies, practices, and employee handbook for new organizations, managing the HR function onsite as well remotely for clients, and facilitating of one day workshops in the areas of managerial effectiveness and personal effectiveness.

She has worked on review of the Performance Management system and subsequently been part of the team communicating the changes to the management and the appraisers and appraisees. She has conducted focus group discussions (FGD) and communication sessions across their client offices in India. She has also worked on assignments helping the client create a set of Key Result Areas for key roles in the organization. And worked on automating and enhancing the online tool used for capturing performance review.

She has been part of the team creating and implementing the 360-degree feedback tool for large as well as small groups, conducted 360 Degree Feedback – Communication to Subjects & Respondents, writing 360 Feedback reports and creating IDP’s. She has worked with the vendor team on enhancing the online reports and experience of the 360-degree feedback instrument and reports.

Jovita is an experienced facilitator with experience of facilitating full day workshops on Team Building, Business Communication and Personal Effectiveness for Middle & Junior level employees. She also has an experience of facilitating Performance Management workshops. She has trained over 500 + professionals in area of Business Communication, Collaborative working, Managerial Effectiveness, Performance Conversation, and Interviewing Skills for Junior and Mid-career employees.

In the Development Sector Jovita has been part of a large assignment for a Foundation, involved in review of the HR Maturity and Effectiveness for portfolio organizations for the Foundation. The review was based on the HR Maturity Framework developed by Cerebrus specifically for the Development Sector. The assignment included extensive review and recommendations on the HR Policies, process and systems in the portfolio organizations.

Principal Consultant, Cerebrus

Mangal Dhuri

Mangal has been with Cerebrus for over 16 years and is currently a Principal Consultant. Mangal is a Lead in the Leadership Development practice and leads teams on execution of several of the large engagements in the area of Leadership Capability assessment, building Talent and Succession Pipeline and Leadership Transformation through development interventions.

In Cerebrus, Mangal has worked on a wide range of assignments for clients across various sectors including several multinational, Indian and also Development Sector organizations. Her work includes assignments in the area of Organization Development, Organizational and HR Diagnostic Studies, Organization Structure Review, Job Evaluation and Banding, defining role accountabilities and Design and implementation of Performance Management Systems. Mangal has also led assignments in these areas for several organizations in the Development Sector.
In area of Leadership Development, Mangal has partnered with several clients on assignments to assess their talent potential at different levels and develop their leaders for the future. She leads Assessment Center design and Tool Design work for several of the Assessment and Development Centers undertaken by Cerebrus. She has also been an assessor for some of the centers that involved assessment of Junior and Middle Management employees. She has worked on the design and administration of the 360 Degree Feedback surveys as well as been a counsellor for Managers at Middle Management level. Mangal also works closely with individual Leaders to help them in their journeys of transformation by building awareness, providing feedback to individuals and facilitating development and training initiatives.

Mangal has led assignments supporting organizations in drafting their HR Policies and processes. These include organizations in the development sector, pharma, financial sector, etc. This has included support not only in review and redesign but also in setting up processes and the function in start-up stages.

Founder and CEO, TRUSTIN

Meghana Srinivas

Meghana is a legal tech entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of TrustIn, a startup that empowers companies to build safer cultures through a secure, sensitive SaaS system for end to end POSH [Prevention of Sexual Harassment] implementation. She also consults as a certified external member on the Internal Committees of multiple companies.

She’s passionate about harnessing the power of technology to scale impact and innovation, and about building capacity in individuals, teams, and organizations towards sustainable and positive impact.

TrustIn is an award winning enterprise software solutions company that builds secure, sensitive systems to manage the complete case reporting and redressal workflow. As an Elevate 2020 winner, TrustIn was awarded a grant by the
Government of Karnataka’s Startup Cell and recognised as one of the “Top 100 Technology Companies.” TrustIn was a semifinalist at the international Thomson Reuters’ Ignite 2019, at Tech Law Fest Singapore, and won first place at the Bangalore Blockchain Conference 2019. Meghana authored and presented the whitepaper ‘Technology Solutions for Workplace Safety and Equitable Access to Justice’ at the International Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology, Ohio, USA, in July 2020.

Chief Executive Officer, Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy

Noshir Dadrawala

Co-Founder, Timshel

Rakhi Singh

Rakhi is an experienced  HR consultant with over 19  years of experience. She has extensively worked in the areas of organizational transformation and change, Leadership  Development  and Performance Management

She has worked on several people and change initiatives both at the systemic level and  individual level. She has also designed and delivered  several leadership development journeys for clients across sectors .

In the last few years Rakhi has gained deep expertise of working in the social sector. Her work in the sector includes Performance Management System design, Vision and Value Articulation and Deployment, 360 Degree Assessment, Designing  Learning and Development Journeys  and Competency Design and Assessment.

Co-Founder, Timshel

Swati Gahlaut

With over twenty four years of experience Swati has done significant work in areas of Strategic HR Advisory, Leadership Assessment, Talent Development and Coaching. Swati has a deep appreciation of the linkage between people and business. Swati has worked extensively in areas of designing business aligned HR solutions including designing HR strategy, Corporate Academy, Performance Management Systems, HR processes, Competency Frameworks, Talent Development Interventions. She is a skilled facilitator who has worked with leadership teams across organisations.

She has facilitated many workshops with CXO level, Senior and Middle management in the organizations in areas on Managing self, Managing people, Interviewing and Feedback skills and Team Leadership. She has worked across industries like Manufacturing, FMCG, FMCD, BFSI, IT products and services, government and PSUs, Telecom and consulting Services.