John Kotter’s thought leader programs launched for the first time in SL

By Divya Thotawatte 

Surmount Ventures collaborating with Arohan Talent Solutions recently launched a series of workshops based on business guru John P. Kotter’s thought leader programs for the first time in Sri Lanka. 

Kotter International Founder John Kotter is an author, researcher and guru on business, management, leadership and change. He has written several business bestsellers including ‘Leading Change,’ ‘Our Iceberg is Melting’ and ‘Accelerate’ to help the business community all over the world. 

Kotter International, his business consultancy firm, applies his research on leadership, strategy execution, transformation, and any form of large-scale change. The workshops based on Kotter’s ideas and books is expected to create innovation in the business sector of Sri Lanka.

Arohan Talent Solutions Co-Founder and Director Aditi Malik stated, “We are exclusive partners for John Kotter’s work around change leadership which helps organisations to prepare well ahead of the changes that are to take place. Today’s reality is that everything is changing in this breakneck speed. The workshops that we plan to conduct will cover areas like how leaders could be pre-empted instead of being reactive towards it and how organisations can be in a constant state of future-ready.”

“The ‘8-Step Process for Leading Change’ is a program based On Kotter’s works, ‘Leading Change’ and ‘Accelerate’. This workshop helps identify, initiate and a bring change. It also helps you explore and practice how to get and keep people on board and support change and you learn the definition of true urgency and how to build and maintain it in your own context,” Malik said speaking on the programs that are to be initiated.

‘Seizing Leadership Opportunities’ is another workshop that include content areas like building awareness, motivating change and initiating leadership opportunities. The workshop will help apply improved leadership and competencies in creating vision, develop or improve leadership skills introduced in the program and identify and evaluate leadership opportunities. 

‘Buy-In’ workshop is to help businesses in applying tactics to increase buy-in and active support for their initiatives, creating a step-by-step plan for advancing initiatives and evaluating how much buy-in has already been achieved. 

‘Leading Wins’ helps in creating a concrete plan for fostering a winning environment and crafting and utilising strategies for overcoming potential barriers to fostering a winning environment. 

‘Power of Influence’ is to guide businesses on identifying the key lateral relationships required to execute a business’ goals, how to manage those relationships top advance the business and determining how each subordinate can be engaged to succeed and contribute more fully.

Surmount Ventures Managing Partner Dinal Edirisinghe said that they hoped that this venture would create change in the corporate sector of the country. “We wanted to selectively bring in the HR and talent management heads of top corporates in Sri Lanka and present this training suite to them,” he noted.

Surmount Ventures operates in two key areas, marketing and strategy consulting and training and works with top corporates of the country.

Arohan Talent Solutions, a learning and development firm specialising in executive coaching, was established in 2013 by Aditi Malik who has since used her extensive experience and knowledge of the corporate world to provide bespoke solutions to clients. 

Pix by Shehan Gunasekara