Manager craft, taught in a room, by practising the hard part.

Most manager training in India fails for a boring reason: it teaches models to people whose problem is nerve. A team lead in Hinjewadi promoted eleven months ago does not need a fourth framework for feedback. He needs to have told a senior engineer, out loud, in front of somebody who will tell him how it landed, that the code review comments have become personal and it stops this week. Until he has done that with a witness, he will keep routing it to HR and calling it escalation.

So this engagement is built around rehearsal. Roughly seventy per cent of contact time is people talking to each other in pairs and threes while a facilitator interrupts. It is uncomfortable in session one and normal by session three.

The six sessions

01 — The one-on-one that is not a status update

Most one-on-ones in growing Pune companies are Jira reviews with a person attached. We take apart what a one-on-one is for, hand out a structure that fits thirty minutes, and then every manager runs one with a peer while the rest listen. Homework: hold four real ones before session two, and bring the one that went badly.

02 — Feedback that reaches the person and the record

Specific, timely, and written down somewhere that survives the quarter. We work on the two failure modes we see constantly: the sandwich, which nobody has ever been fooled by, and the year-end ambush, where a manager saves eight months of irritation for the appraisal form. Managers practise giving one real piece of held-back feedback in the room.

03 — The difficult conversation

Performance that has slipped. Behaviour that others have started routing around. A star who has become expensive to work with. Attendance after a promotion. We run these as live rehearsals with a facilitator playing the other side, and we do not let people stay in the abstract. This session runs in Hindi, Marathi or English depending on the cohort — for shopfloor and mid-management groups in Chakan or Talegaon it is rarely English, and translating the workbook is part of the work.

04 — Ratings, PIPs and the paper trail

What a performance improvement plan actually is: a document with a defined period, stated measures, a review date and a named skip-level. What it is not: a way to build a file before a termination, which is both dishonest and, when it reaches a labour commissioner, ineffective. We cover how to write the appraisal comment box so it is defensible in February calibration, and what a manager must never promise about a rating before moderation.

05 — Delegation and the hoarding reflex

Newly promoted managers in technical teams keep the interesting work and delegate the rest, which is how a strong individual contributor becomes a mediocre lead and a bottleneck by month nine. We map each manager's actual week against what only they can do, and cut.

06 — The manager as a route, not a wall

Skip-levels, cross-team disagreement, when to escalate and when escalation is just abdication, and what a manager does when a team member reports something that must go to the Internal Committee under the POSH Act — specifically, what they must not do, which is investigate it themselves or promise confidentiality they cannot deliver.

How it is run

• Half-days, in person, on your premises. Not evenings, not virtual, not a two-day offsite in Lonavala.
• Twelve to twenty per cohort. Below twelve the rehearsals get thin; above twenty nobody practises enough.
• Cohorts are mixed across functions on purpose. Engineering managers learning alongside plant supervisors and delivery leads is uncomfortable for one session and valuable for the other five.
• Two individual coaching calls per manager, between sessions, on a real situation they are carrying.
• Their managers — the layer above — attend a separate ninety-minute session, because a cohort that returns to a boss who does not hold one-on-ones will stop within a quarter.
• Facilitator guides, workbooks and slides are handed over editable, so your HR team can run the next cohort without us. Several clients now do.

We do not certify anybody. There is no badge, no level, no assessment score at the end. There is a manager who has run the conversation.

What we refuse to do here

No psychometric profiling as an entry ritual. Colour-type instruments make an entertaining first hour and give managers a vocabulary for excusing behaviour rather than changing it. No e-learning module to accompany the cohort. No half-day version — we have tried, and a half-day is a talk, not a capability change. And we will not run this for a group nominated as a reward; the people who need it are usually not the ones a leadership team puts forward.