Yogesh Agiwal
Founder & CEO
Perfectly understanding the strategic role of leadership training program to build leaders who can help bring sustainable growth in business is Hyderabad based Crossover Leadership Journeys. The company has built a robust holistic framework of journey based leadership development with four facets of self, team, operational and organizational leadership to effectively prepare the leaders of tomorrow.
Moreover, it helps to apply the learning on the job with the support provided from the Crossover Mentoring Team through contextual articles, videos, action learning plans, leadership engagement, and periodic reviews and coaching. Also, they do assessments before the inception of the journey and create the journey customized to the requirements of the clients.
Covering every facets of leadership, the company found that training through the lens of the 4 facets of leadership helps the organization bring in sustained performance while keeping the customer at the center at all times. Often, organizations pay attention to self and team leadership, leaving operational leadership to central functions. Thus, resulting in low operational efficiency or high customer dissatisfaction. Besides the four facets this leadership program focuses on nine skills to help individuals to learn and up-skill themselves into great influencers and leaders – from emotional in telligence, communication skills, operational excellence, strategic thinking, digital skill, execution excellence, to change management, collaboration and customer centricity.
An astonishing personality, Yogesh Agiwal, CEO and Founder, Crossover Leadership Journeys, who is engaged in devising leadership development programming in the best possible manners. At CEO Insights magazine, we are glad to converse exclusively with Yogesh Agiwal, to know the details of his amazing journey.
Kindly tell us about the key points about Crossover Leadership
Journeys that you want us to highlight in this profile?
We deliver programs for leadership development at all levels with world-class content contextualized to clients’ environment respectively. We have a journey-based approach in delivering learning which covers mentoring to action learning with industry experienced facilitators. The company has a cross leadership development framework which focuses on journey-based approach and offers continued weekly learning, leadership engagement quarterly, learning review quarterly, to optional coaching among others.
How has your rich IT experience of two decades coupled with the exposure of working with Fortune 500 companies shaped you as a successful leader?
As IT experience was solving business problems using technology, I realized that human behavior is equally important in the success of any transformation. Hence, this understanding has been helping us to calculate the success from both sides from business’ and humans’ perspective. Fortune 500 companies are built over years and they become mature in their processes over a period of time. So, we have been bringing that experience to small and mid-size companies who we ideally love to serve.
A leader might not be the best performer in a team, but a leader is one who brings out the best out of a team - Apart from this what according to you are all the crucial skills/ aspects one needs to have to be a successful leader?
Crossover Leadership Journeys has always been about how to make a valuable leader by aiding him/her in managing his emotions well and emotions of others, communication with humble inquiry. Also, constantly providing autonomy and creating a purpose for the team. Developing people by delegating tasks and making himself or herself redundant on current tasks to take on new initiatives. Lastly, building leaders who can influence at peer and industry level.
Brief us on some of the Corporate and educational leadership programs Crossover Leadership Journeys is undertaking.
We have got 114 clients in last 4 years and one of the popular programs that most of our customers have loved is the Emerging Leaders Program which is a six months journey covering one topic of leadership every month with mentoring and application of learning between each month. On the education side, our faculty leadership program has been appreciated across many institutions because most institutions have always been focusing on technical or domain skills of faculties but not on the leadership skills of the faculties.
Furthermore, I have supported various initiatives of HYSEA and CII. I’m also a Hub Lead for International Association of Facilitators.
We deliver programs for leadership development at all levels with world-class content contextualized to clients’ environment respectively. We have a journey-based approach in delivering learning which covers mentoring to action learning with industry experienced facilitators. The company has a cross leadership development framework which focuses on journey-based approach and offers continued weekly learning, leadership engagement quarterly, learning review quarterly, to optional coaching among others.
In just about 24 months of company’s establishment, endorsement from 24 customers was a great testimony of our work
How has your rich IT experience of two decades coupled with the exposure of working with Fortune 500 companies shaped you as a successful leader?
As IT experience was solving business problems using technology, I realized that human behavior is equally important in the success of any transformation. Hence, this understanding has been helping us to calculate the success from both sides from business’ and humans’ perspective. Fortune 500 companies are built over years and they become mature in their processes over a period of time. So, we have been bringing that experience to small and mid-size companies who we ideally love to serve.
A leader might not be the best performer in a team, but a leader is one who brings out the best out of a team - Apart from this what according to you are all the crucial skills/ aspects one needs to have to be a successful leader?
Crossover Leadership Journeys has always been about how to make a valuable leader by aiding him/her in managing his emotions well and emotions of others, communication with humble inquiry. Also, constantly providing autonomy and creating a purpose for the team. Developing people by delegating tasks and making himself or herself redundant on current tasks to take on new initiatives. Lastly, building leaders who can influence at peer and industry level.
Brief us on some of the Corporate and educational leadership programs Crossover Leadership Journeys is undertaking.
We have got 114 clients in last 4 years and one of the popular programs that most of our customers have loved is the Emerging Leaders Program which is a six months journey covering one topic of leadership every month with mentoring and application of learning between each month. On the education side, our faculty leadership program has been appreciated across many institutions because most institutions have always been focusing on technical or domain skills of faculties but not on the leadership skills of the faculties.
Furthermore, I have supported various initiatives of HYSEA and CII. I’m also a Hub Lead for International Association of Facilitators.
Which are the milestones that bestowed you with utmost satisfaction - both as an individual and a CEO?
As an individual, getting the chairman’s award called ‘The Best People Manager” from Azim Premji twice gave me utmost satisfaction and that also paved the way for me to get into leadership development. And as a CEO, making the blueprint of journey based leadership programs and helping it with robust roadmap and bringing it to reality has been the key aspect which helped the company shine out from the rest of its peers. A big milestone, which I could put up, is the fact that in just about 24 months of company’s establishment, endorsement from 24 customers was a great testimony of our work.
Managing a company involves a lot of stress, skill, and time. How do you manage to balance between your personal & professional life?
I have been a practitioner of Sahajayoga School of meditation for last 25 years and I must say that this has helped me bring the balance between personal and professional life. Also, I have put a nice routine for myself on doing exercise regularly in the morning, going for plays or watching a movie over weekends, taking meditation session every Sunday. While speaking about my one hobby, it is reading and have been a voracious reader from my childhood and I love Italian cuisine the most and the favourite travel destination for me would be Goa.
What message would you like to impart across the young leaders in India?
The first message, which I would like share is one should find joy in whichever job that we do. If we are passionate about our profession then the journey would be exciting and glorious where you don’t feel any stress that are related to that particular job, as it would feel like taking an inspiring challenge or fulfilling task. When you take on more and more, the organization will offer various other opportunities and this can continue to expand in an everyday basis. Life then becomes a beautiful routine because for people who enjoy working there are ample opportunities all around. The second would be honoring one’s commitments and always completing the tasks as per promise. The third message is looking for what someone can offer rather than what someone cannot offer. Even a stopped clock is right two times in a day in the span of 24 hours. This attitude will help them never fall short of finding people in whatever they do.
• Date of Establishment: 28th March 2016
• Office Locations: Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore
• Key Management: Anshu Agiwal, Director - Finance and Operations
Awards and Recognitions:
• Two times Best People Manager Award from Azim Premji
• Speaker at Harvard Business School Publication Partners Conference
• Speaker at 100 Year of Dale Carnegie in Hawaii
• Speaker at Chief Learning Officers Summit
• 3 Times Jury for HYSEA Annual Awards
• Hub Lead for International Association of Facilitators
As an individual, getting the chairman’s award called ‘The Best People Manager” from Azim Premji twice gave me utmost satisfaction and that also paved the way for me to get into leadership development. And as a CEO, making the blueprint of journey based leadership programs and helping it with robust roadmap and bringing it to reality has been the key aspect which helped the company shine out from the rest of its peers. A big milestone, which I could put up, is the fact that in just about 24 months of company’s establishment, endorsement from 24 customers was a great testimony of our work.
Managing a company involves a lot of stress, skill, and time. How do you manage to balance between your personal & professional life?
I have been a practitioner of Sahajayoga School of meditation for last 25 years and I must say that this has helped me bring the balance between personal and professional life. Also, I have put a nice routine for myself on doing exercise regularly in the morning, going for plays or watching a movie over weekends, taking meditation session every Sunday. While speaking about my one hobby, it is reading and have been a voracious reader from my childhood and I love Italian cuisine the most and the favourite travel destination for me would be Goa.
What message would you like to impart across the young leaders in India?
The first message, which I would like share is one should find joy in whichever job that we do. If we are passionate about our profession then the journey would be exciting and glorious where you don’t feel any stress that are related to that particular job, as it would feel like taking an inspiring challenge or fulfilling task. When you take on more and more, the organization will offer various other opportunities and this can continue to expand in an everyday basis. Life then becomes a beautiful routine because for people who enjoy working there are ample opportunities all around. The second would be honoring one’s commitments and always completing the tasks as per promise. The third message is looking for what someone can offer rather than what someone cannot offer. Even a stopped clock is right two times in a day in the span of 24 hours. This attitude will help them never fall short of finding people in whatever they do.
• Date of Establishment: 28th March 2016
• Office Locations: Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore
• Key Management: Anshu Agiwal, Director - Finance and Operations
Awards and Recognitions:
• Two times Best People Manager Award from Azim Premji
• Speaker at Harvard Business School Publication Partners Conference
• Speaker at 100 Year of Dale Carnegie in Hawaii
• Speaker at Chief Learning Officers Summit
• 3 Times Jury for HYSEA Annual Awards
• Hub Lead for International Association of Facilitators