Rajagopalan Sreekumar is one of the trainers at GMI’s Great Manager Certification Program. He started conducting training sessions in the year 2000 and has certifications from renowned organisations such as Gallup Certified Strengths Coach, NLP Masters and Enneagram Master Coach from the Makani Academy and has been awarded the Leadership in Holistic Transformation award by the International Coach and Trainers Association in 2019. He was also shortlisted for the Swami Vivekananda National Best Trainer Award by the ISTD in 2010. While working with us he has received excellent feedback from our clients, ranging from 4.6 – 5/5. He is grounded, curious, fatalistic, experimental and community oriented. His way of working is slightly unconventional but he enjoys learning new things and experimenting and blending different approaches. He uses the best of eastern, western, ancient and modern practices.

He has a bachelor’s degree in science and a first-class master’s degree in law from Delhi University and has completed an in-person specialist course in human rights from the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, England. His career is dynamic; the paths he took ranged from working for human rights, prison reform and restorative justice to working for the Chief Justice of India and the National Judicial Academy of India, financial services, entrepreneurial, university teaching, and helping with alcohol de-addiction and corporate training sectors.

His clients call him a story vault, as he continuously picks up and curates stories. His interest in movies sometimes leads to sessions like movies with moments of laughter, tears and moments of quiet profoundness. Creatively inclined since childhood, he enjoys making customised gifts and studying advertisements and branding. He’s an explorer, trekking, spending quiet time in nature and meditating regularly. He conducts a listening practice called ‘Listening Hearts’ and also practises a daily spiritual practice which is a blend of messages from Kabir, Rumi, a quote by Sam Keen and a Swedish proverb. He loves to find reasons to laugh and share a good laugh with others. He believes in spreading laughter as one of his life missions. He hopes to one day practise his version of medical clowning in the geriatric and paediatric wards of hospitals and hospices.

Rajagopalan Sreekumar has co-authored a book and wrote another book on prisons which got re-printed in Hindi and Telugu. The National Human Rights Commission ordered 50 copies of the book at the time of the first print run to include it as a takeaway gift for visiting delegations. He is in the process of writing his third book now.

Through his prison reform initiatives, he won the trust of the otherwise closed-off and cynical prison staff and was invited to conduct training sessions in prisons. The final highlight for him was when he got the corporate manager-participants to call their team members and appreciate them for at least one of the behaviours they had voluntarily demonstrated from a list of behaviours the managers wanted to see. That had a profound impact on the frayed relationship that many managers had with their team members.

Learning from GMI’s experience

We have great people managers around us; we just need to bring out their stories during the GMI workshops and connect the participants to the latent greatness in them, as well as connect them to the role model managers that are already around us and them. He also defines our framework as ‘The power of Connection before Correction and Inspiration.