What we do

Stillwater specializes in mindset-shift programs helping high potential managers to identify barriers preventing them from operating at their highest effectiveness. We work in two areas – “leadership effectiveness” and “executive coaching”.

Stillwater programs are unique as they are highly experiential and conversation-led rather than lecture-based programs.

We use a mix of asynchronous elements, that cover the theory and frameworks of leadership effectiveness, and synchronous elements, that are highly engaging exercises in live virtual sessions to create the highest impact and engagement.

We have done these programs with CEO and leadership teams, senior leaders as well as mid-level managers and management trainees of some of the best companies in India, Middle East, Africa and Australia.

We (Kanishka Sinha, Girish Manimaran and Avantika Sinha) started Stillwater Consulting in 2011 to address what we felt was a significant learning need for high potential executives and senior leaders – identifying distorting beliefs that hold them back and building new empowering beliefs that could serve them well in creating the life they want. In other words, helping leaders make a “mindset-shift”.

In our experience training and coaching CEOs, Senior Leaders and high potentials, we’ve realised that quite often individuals intellectually “know” what they need to do in order to be effective in producing the results and relationships they want, but don’t “do” what they know they need to do (to be effective), because of deeply held beliefs.

Sometimes they are aware of their limiting beliefs and are afraid to take risks/behave differently and in some situations, they might not even be aware of which beliefs are holding them back. Stillwater leadership programs and coaching conversations are an opportunity for participants to take a deep dive and identify the distorting beliefs that hold them back, chart a clear path to what they want to create in their life and build new skills and behaviours that can serve them well on that journey. Here is a LinkedIn post from Girish about why he does what he does – the essence of this post is something that all of us at Stillwater, connect with closely: https://tinyurl.com/3wa5vtf5

Our experience

• We’ve worked with CEOs, senior leaders and high potentials at many of India’s best-known companies, across industries such as Consumer Goods, e-commerce, Manufacturing/B2B, Banking and Financial services, Technology, Consulting, Education, Healthcare, NGOs and Media, since 2011.
• We’ve worked with high potential Associate Directors, Directors, MDs and Partners at three of the Big Four Professional Services firms – this has allowed us to understand the challenges that are unique to this area.
• We’ve worked with a number of e-commerce start-ups such as Swiggy, Urban Ladder, Licious, Nearbuy, Capital Float and BlueStone.
• We’ve taught at the Indian School of Business from 2014 to 2021 and have worked with more than 10 batches of management trainees at Hindustan Unilever Limited – we’ve learnt how to engage smart professionals who don’t want to be lectured.
• As a training firm, we focus on two areas – leadership development and executive coaching. This has allowed us to develop powerful theoretical frameworks and hone our program delivery mechanisms.
• We have academic and corporate experience and have worked with companies such as Hindustan Unilever Limited, Hewlett Packard, Tata Steel etc across functions such as sales, marketing, finance and law – our background helps us empathise with the challenges our participants face but also challenge them to step out of their comfort zone.