5

I was lucky to have Gaurav as my manager in the early days of my career. In addition to being an excellent role model, he had an uncanny ability to break down any concept to simple, distilled and easy to replicate steps. What I learned from him helped me manage a range of situations - from being responsible for results through indirect management to directly managing large teams. Gaurav is insightful, full of stories and there's an added bonus of humour. He's helped me learn many of the fundamentals that have informed my approach to managing people and projects to drive results. I would highly recommend this course and the opportunity to learn from a knowledgeable and fun teacher!

Gaurav Singh is one of my favorite sources for learning about learning. . . and about leadership . . . and about management . . . and about strategic clarity.  I’ve been a manager and senior leader at large national and international organizations and networks for over twenty years, and I still call on Gaurav to help me grow and develop.  Not only does he keep up with the frontiers of management and leadership research he manages to apply them to his work. Even more remarkable (and rare) is his ability to make them accessible and actionable for others.  The best management and leadership advice I can give is that if you have a chance to learn from and with Gaurav Singh, take it.

I was a successful profesional in the US before I moved to India to work with Gaurav. I learnt more from him in 2 years than I learnt in any other 2 year period of my life. After coming back I have started a successful company & a big reason is I just applied everything I learnt from Gaurav. Gaurav showed me a leadership style that I had seen quoted but never demonstrated. He showed me how to build teams that strived relentlessly for excellence, how to use data for decision making, how to align different teams to a common mission & clear goals & how to innovate when your back is to the wall. I also learnt from him the 2 things which are extremely hard for any leader: how to let people go quickly but respectfully & how to get teams to debate passionately but constructively. He is also one hell of a coach who will show you the best in you & then motivate you to deliver on your potential. I was lucky to work with & learn from him.

I have worked closely with Gaurav for the last few years and took over as CEO of 321 Education Foundation from him. I saw first hand the amazing team & culture he had built at 321. Out of many things he did well, one in particular was how groomed 321’s new managers. His unique gift is that he is able to extract insights from all his readings & experiences & then present them in a simple & relatable manner. I have seen young managers in 321 lap up his sessions and then go on to apply the learnings with aplomb. Now if Gaurav is starting a course in management, I would say just go for it. I wish I had this opportunity when I started out as a manager.

In over a decade of working, Gaurav has been by far the most influential manager I have ever had. He was the first person to help my realise my potential as a manager & gave me that responsibility. He invested a lot in me, was very patient as I developed my managerial skills & gave me lots of support & space to grow. Some of the most critical things I learnt from him: how to give quality feedback, building systems that create high performing teams, setting thoughtful goals and how to manage up & sideways. Remarkably he gave this kind of support to not just me but many other young managers like me. I'm able to do what I do today, becuase of all the learnings from our time together. In the 7 years that Gaurav managed me, he gave me learnings that I will apply for the rest of my life.

Gaurav is an outstanding leader. He is incredibly good at analysing situations, thinking strategically, creating powerful solutions, aligning people & ensuring implementation. As his manager, I admired the strong learning loops he built for himself which allowed him to get good very quickly. What’s been amazing is to see that he has managed to build teams that do the same. His teams learn from local & global contexts, are reflective, error correct rapidly & produce amazing results. I think a big reason for this is Gaurav’s ability to break down his own practice & teach it to his team. He has the rare combo of being a great leader & a great teacher.

I have seen 4 kinds of leaders in my life: those who can tell you what good leadership is but can’t do it themselves, those who can do it but can’t explain it, those can do it & explain but not all the time & the rare category who can consistently demonstrate great leadership through their actions but also help new leaders understand & do it. Gaurav belongs in the 4th category. I worked with him for nearly a decade & saw him show great leadership every single day and also teach dozens of new managers how to become capable leaders themselves. I personally never saw myself as a leader. But Gaurav was able to see the potential in me that I couldn’t see myself. He gave me the responsibility to lead a team & then supported me intensely to become the best leader I could. He taught me which weaknesses to fix & which to ignore, how to prioritise when everything seems urgent, how to handle the messiness of people management & how to always keep improving. At 321, I led large scale programs & now in the UK I lead programs which impact people across the entire country. None of this would have happened even I had not been managed & groomed by Gaurav. If there is 1 person I owe most of my professional success to, it is him.

Gaurav is a treasure trove of insights and wisdom. He has an exceptional skill of pouring through tons of material and then presenting it in the simplest, most intuitive manner. He crystalizes complex ideas from theory, his own experience, other people's experience to share tips and insights that are very valuable. I've had innumerable conversations with him discussing leadership, culture, management and much more. Every conversation has left me feeling like I've learnt something new that has stayed with me, I felt truly heard and understood and I've had a lot of fun. Gaurav has built such strong management and leadership practices at his organisation 321 Education Foundation, that led to some of the strongest culture and performance that I've seen across different comparable organisations. It is a pleasure to learn from him!

I spent 8 years closely working with Gaurav as my manager & leader, yet I still wish I could get more from him. He played different roles at different times: my manager, my manager’s manager but was always a mentor & role model for me. The key thing he did brilliantly was to absorb the global best practices about management & leadership from the best books, leading experts & self reflection. He then helped all of us at 321 Foundation apply these best practices by putting them in simple systems, communicating them powerfully, constantly modelling them & supporting us all the way. He taught me how to make better decisions, manage complex projects, handle pressure situations & bring out the best in myself & others. Universe-full of gratitude falls short of what he’s given me!

In my two decades of professional journey I have seen the difference good leaders can make. They shape organisations and their people for the now & for the future. I have known Gaurav for a long time & he stands out for his commitment to lead and not just manage, even more demanding for a young social entrepreneur. It has been inspiring to see his commitment, both in word & action, towards people and institution building from the earliest days of 321. Gaurav has approached his own leadership with a keen & curious mind, and always made the time to perfect it in practise!

Gaurav is a teacher through and through. His ability to simplify complex concepts and make them relevant to a specific context is phenomenal. When I worked with him I experienced first hand what it was like to be led with a no one left behind attitude. He drew on his deep and varied knowledge to ensure each individual was walking with him and could see his vision clearly. Every interaction with him was inspiring and stretched my thinking. I’m so fortunate to have had him as a mentor.

I have known Gaurav for a long time & been able to observe his leadership closely. I admire 3 things I have seen him do better than most leaders. Firstly he is able to navigate the difficult decisions & tricky situations that leadership involves through the lens of the big picture mission. This allows him to respond & not react to the multitude of difficult challenges every leader faces. Secondly he things deeply & critically about issues before forming an opinion. So he & his team have deep conviction in their decisions & are comfortable in going against the norm. Thirdly, he has always been at the cutting edge of thinking about management & work. For example, he moved 321 to a remote work setup even before Covid began, he started using modern goal setting methods like OKR before any other non profit in India & has been far ahead of most organisations in making learning a continuous process which scales with their team. He has certainly inspired me to apply these things in my own roles over the last decade, ranging from Senior Leader to CEO.

My journey as a a manager began under Gaurav. He gave me access to himself & other leaders so I could learn from their expertise. He guided me to the right sources so I could learn by reading & watching. He gave me space to make my mistakes & then helped me fix them & learn from them. Most importantly he believed in me when I struggled, supported me through my lows & was the role model I emulated through my early years. Recently a managee left me a note telling me how my belief & support of her had helped her be the best she could be. My mind instantly went back to the time when I had left a similar note for Gaurav. He showed me the life changing impact a great manager can have. I now try to thank him by paying it forward.

For me Gaurav embodies thoughtful, inspiring leadership. He goes to great lengths to understand the secrets of amazing organisations & what he did at 321 Foundation is proof of this. I am amazed by his ability to learn across disciplines, apply those learnings & then teach others to implement them. I value his guidance and I know he has been a wise and engaged companion to many a leader.

Gaurav has a track record of building exceptional teams, driving exceptional outcomes and helping people find their greatest potential, all the while tackling some of the hardest problems facing society. Gaurav taught me how to manage myself so I could manage others, how to be nice while pursing ambitious goals, how to balance accountability & autonomy for my team & how to motivate others to work towards a common mission. The 4 years I spent at 321 working with Gaurav have been the greatest education I have had so far. I attribute a huge part of my subsequent success to Gaurav. Every one I know who has ever worked with him feels the same way.

Gaurav is one of the first people I reach out to when I face a challenge as a manager. Many of my core leadership principles emerged from discussions with him. He showed me the importance of simplifying things for my team: simple so they knew where to focus, simple so they could leverage their strengths, simple so they knew where their responsibilities ended, simple so they could succeed. He helped me realise that my team’s success was my success & this helped me transition from task management to people management. I have seen him help several others to become better leaders & build great teams.

From our first interaction Gaurav blew me away with his vast knowledge of, what seemed like, everything under the sun. In these interactions, I would pick up a lot of stuff explicitly & implicitly. He is a passionate & skilled leader & he taught me the principles & techniques in a wide range of topics: building strategy, planning projects, analysing data, inspiring behavior change. To this day, I try to emulate Gaurav's behaviour and thought process while I'm at work. Gaurav is a leader who not only knows the way but can show it to others. I've been lucky to have learnt with him and from him.

You won't find a greater expert than Gaurav Singh in leading change, managing people, designing processes, and achieving results. Crucially, he understands the principles, and knows how to put them into practice. And he shares his wisdom with empathy, humility and a hunger for greater learning. Across five years and two totally different jobs, his guidance has been invaluable, and has transformed how I approach my work. You won't regret signing up to learn more from him.

Gaurav is the best manager & leader I’ve worked with. He was able to scale the impact of our organization by 10X in 1 year without sacrificing quality & while maintaining the the unique high performance & caring culture we were known for. He’s a phenomenal teacher who has the ability to take best practices from research, his personal experiences and contextualize it in an engaging way to exactly what you need to progress on your journey as a leader. The principles, strategies and tactics that he has taught me has helped me be a high performing Team Lead in a dynamic, international work environment. By signing up for his course you’re getting the best in class strategies, applicable insights and coaching comparable to the best MBA schools in the world.

Gaurav is a compelling leader who is able to craft a vision as well as consider minute details needed for execution. His participative leadership style delegates ownership and empowers people in the organization to pursue audacious goals. He has built and sustained some of the best teams I have ever seen. He is an inspiring communicator & an excellent trainer. People love learning from him as he warm, charming, respectful & engaging.

As a new manager I was more comfortable with managing projects & creating products but less comfortable with leading people. Soon I got overwhelmed with various people issues. Gaurav had always created a safe space for all new managers so I reached out to him. I was not at a place to fully understand what was bothering me & what I was struggling with. But he was able to quickly guide to the crux of the problem & then support me in brainstorming solutions. He even helped me pull out meta learnings from this experience to help me independently handle some of these situations in the future & not repeat these mistakes. This is just 1 incident but this was he supported several of us new managers when we just started out. He taught us the principles of leadership, the practices of management & was a great role model for all of us to emulate. Over the years, we all became capable managers mainly because of the constant guidance & support he gave us.

I have known Gaurav for over 10 years and seen his evolution as a leader. When we first met, he was a guy with a plan, and I was privileged to have a front row seat to see him lead the execution of his plan into a 75-person organization. What I appreciated the most about his journey was the commitment to understanding ideas, sourced from a lot of different fields, and seeing how they could be used in service of improving education for all children. Gaurav is deeply curious, a master synthesizer of ideas with the ability to convey complex thoughts simply, and one of the best teachers/trainers I have met

I have never grown more under a manager than I grew when Gaurav was my manager. He is passionate about helping people achieve their potential & I learnt a ton from just watching him lead our team. He is also a gifted teacher who is able to balance explicit teaching with letting you discover the lessons on your own. When I became a manager I just applied everything I learnt from him & that massively accelerated my growth as a manager. Even now when I run into leadership challenges, I ask myself “What would Gaurav do ?” I would highly recommend any opportunity to learn from him

I have known Gaurav for over a decade. I was always amazed at the incredible team and culture he had built. His team was always very focussed on their mission, had clear plans to reach their goals, were very open to feedback, were constantly improving & kept challenging themselves further. This led them to achieve excellent results in their work and I think a lot of it comes back to Gaurav’s leadership. He is a democratic leader who deeply cares for & supports his team. As a result I have seen his team members grow as leaders themselves & go on to achieve great things. He is a very inspiring trainer who pushes everyone to learn to their highest potential while keeping the atmosphere positive, fun & respectful.

I have known Gaurav for more than 10 years and worked with him for 5+ years. I learnt many things from him but one that has been the most valuable for me is the constant emphasis on the idea of journey: process over outcome, and excellence over perfection. He helped me internalise the idea of consistent versioning. This has helped me continuously become a better version of myself & has helped me to keep improving in everything I do.