Startup Consultant & Leadership Course Creator

321 Education Foundation

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Ashoka

Ashoka Fellow

Echoing Green

Echoing Green Fellow

Teach For India

Fellow

Accenture

Software Engineer

Gaurav Singh is the founder & ex-CEO of 321 Education. 
Over a decade, he scaled 321’s programs to 300,000+ Students, 20,000+ Educators & 2000+ Schools. A 2019 independent evaluation found that in just 1 year, 321 was increasing student learning 3-4 times compared to the control group. 
As CEO, he raised ₹ 30+ Crores & grew the team to 75+, making 321 one of the biggest education non profits in India. 
For his work with 321, Gaurav was awarded the prestigious Ashoka & Echoing Green fellowships. Gaurav has conducted leadership talks & trainings at TEDx, ISB, Teach For India, Teach For All, Acumen, Ashoka, Echoing Green & Central Square Foundation.
Gaurav stepped down as CEO of 321 Education in 2021 and is now supporting other young CEOs & leaders become more successful & less stressed

The dumbest thing that companies do: 
”Give 2% raises to current team & 20% hikes to new hires”
I just don’t get it. Can someone explain why?

This is the fastest way to empty your team of good people & their experience.
And to fill it with people who will leave you in 1 year for another 20% hike somewhere else. 

Why would companies reward this behaviour and not reward the employees who are showing loyalty and adding value?
To speak nothing of the cost it takes to hire and train a new person. 

I am sure companies are not dumb so there’s clearly something that I am not seeing. 

Why do you think companies do this?

Gaurav Singh

Around a,
→ Bad leader, you feel: “Shit! I am dumb.”
→ Good leader, you feel: “Wow! They are smart.”
→ Great leader, you feel: “Yes! I am smart” 
This leads to some counterintuitive insights…

A great leader will help you achieve way more than you thought possible. 
This will get you opportunities that will take you away from that leader. 
My suggestion would be to resist these opportunities & stay with this great leader as long as you can. 

They will do more for your confidence & growth than almost anything else in your career. 
Also unfortunately you will have very few of them in your career, so maximise your time with the ones you do find. 

On the other hand, If you are an aspiring leader, then the lesson here is clear: 
”Leadership is about your people, not you.”

I have seen many good leaders who had the potential to become great leaders but never did. 

A big reason is that they didn’t understand the counter intuitive truth of leadership → 
If you want to become successful don’t focus on your success. Focus on helping your people & team become successful and you will automatically become successful.

That’s why great leaders are so rare and so sought after. 

But this brings us to the inherent tension in leadership: 
→ If your focus is on having impact & leverage, then in most cases, you will have more of them as a leader than as a solo contributor.
→ But, this constant focus on others is also what makes leadership draining.

It’s hard to have 1 without the other.
Choose wisely. 

#Leadership #Career #Manager

———————————————

Any tips for someone currently under a great leader or looking to become one?

I wanted to become an expert in ‘Behaviour Change’
But I struggled till an incident showed me what I was missing
The story & the 2 Behavior Change principles every leader must know…

It’s May and the Indian summer is at full strength.
I am taking a session for school teachers but they don’t want to be here.
They don’t want to attend another training that will be boring, disrespectful & useless. 

But our research had revealed these issues so I have some tricks up my sleeve.

Our content is bite-sized, actionable & solves their top problems. 
Our trainings are full of games & movie themes.
Most importantly we treat teachers with genuine respect.

It works & the trainings go incredibly well. Teachers tell their friends & next day the attendance doubles.

At the end, I ask:
“Will you apply all this ?”
“Yes” they answer.

Then I follow up: “Do you think they will work ?”
”No” they reply.

I am taken aback: “So why will you apply them ?”

”Because you were kind to us & you really believe they will work. We will try them for you.”

This was unexpected. 
I wanted to convince teachers with our rigorous research & testing. But the trust was established by how we had treated them & our passionate belief in the content.

Then I remembered Everett Rogers. Most know his innovation model: 
Innovators → Early adopters → Early majority…

Few know his core insight behind the model: 
“Change is a social process. People change because of other people.”

This explained what was happening here.

Then teachers went back to their classes, tried our stuff & blew up our messages:
”OMG!! This works. Why were we not taught this before ?”
”This child who had never answered, answered today. I now believe every child can learn.”

We had assumed these mindset shifts would take a long time. But many teachers were making them a lot faster.

Guskey’s model provided the explanation: 
People do mindset trainings for teachers but that rarely works. 
What works better is to make it easy for teachers to try new behaviours. Once they experience success, they change their own mindsets.

So
❌ Mindset Change → Action Change → Success
✅ Action Change → Success → Mindset Change

—————————

Generalising these 2 principles for any leader trying to change behavior: 
1️⃣ MESSENGERS MATTER
→ Make sure they are kind, fun, inspiring & respectful
→ It all starts with people liking & trusting them 

2️⃣ FOCUS ON MAKING PEOPLE EXPERIENCE SUCCESS QUICKLY
→ People can disagree with you. They can’t disagree with their own success
→ Focus on them experiencing success quickly with the new behavior & adoption will skyrocket.

We overhauled our model based on these 2 counter-intuitive principles. 
This helped us scale our model to 1000s of teachers & become one of the top training organizations in India.

I now use these principles with 100s of entrepreneurs & leaders I support.
They work just as well.

#Change #Leadership #Management

Any behaviour change insight you have stumbled onto ?

A huge leadership mistake: DEMOCRATIC decision making 
For companies, it’s one of the worst decision making styles
Why is that & what to do instead…

Most people believe that for a country, democracy is the best form of governance.
So they assume it should be great for a company also.

But companies are not countries. 

Companies are not geographically bound entities that people are born into. 
Companies don’t have guns & authority to imprison people (at-least most don’t). 
Scale, complexity & power dynamics of countries make democracy the safest option for citizens. 
But democratic decision making is rarely the best for teams and companies. 

In fact it’s one of 3 ineffective decision making styles that teams use: 

Democratic: 
→ What: an option is proposed, everyone votes, majority wins
→ Why bad: it’s slow, muddles responsibility, rarely leads to innovative ideas, alienates minority & ensures people spend more time lobbying than working  
→ Where I might use it: for non-core decisions like where should we go for lunch

Consensus: 
→ What: everyone involved has to agree. Even 1 veto, derails the proposal 
→ Why bad: it discourages risk taking, leads to group-think & encourages quid-pro-quo (if you don’t veto my idea, I won’t veto yours)
→ Where I might use it: Rarest of cases when I need everyone to officially agree. Eg: a decision with legal consequences

Authoritative:
→ What: One person will unilaterally make the decision & everyone has to comply
→ Why bad: Repeated use crushes motivation, robs autonomy & leads to bad decisions
→ Where I might use it: an emergency where there will be terrible consequences for delay. Think, fire in the building.

What’s the alternative ?
Participative decision making

What: 
→ 1 person owns the decision & will do everything to make it happen. 
→ Others participate via defined & critical roles: Sharing expert input, reviewing recommendations, taking final decision

Why I like it:
It has single-point accountability AND encourages collaboration. 

This: 
→ makes the hidden decision making process explicit
→ distributes power & speeds things up (clear roles for everyone)
→ leads to better ideas (heavy weightage to inputs of people with expertise & context) 

Research shows that a Participative decision making style leads to significantly faster & higher quality decisions with increased team satisfaction.

I find this Nassim Taleb quote insightful:
“I am, at the federal level, Libertarian;
at the state level, Republican; 
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.“

Most people are so burned by bad experiences with Authoritative leaders that they gravitate towards a democratic style.
But 1 style can’t work for every kind of entity.

Fast moving & high performing teams need an agile decision making model.
Participative model is the best for that.
————————————————

What’s your preferred decision making approach for teams & companies? 

Good founders take risks. Great founders kill risks. 
To kill risks, you need a good Margin of Safety
Morgan Housel once explained this with a story about cats…

In 1988 two NYC veterinarians asked: 
What happens to cats that fell out of the city’s high-rise windows ? 

Curiously the injury-height graph was an inverted U.

Short falls obviously caused the least injury. 
But the most injuries came from a Medium fall and not from a Long fall (> 90 feet). 

Why? 

When cats fall their instinct is to lock their limbs. 
In a short fall this helps them land on their feet. 

But in a medium fall locked limbs cause broken bones.

On the other hand, in long falls, they reach ‘free fall’ state. 
This helps them relax, go beyond instincts , unlock their limbs & spread their limbs horizontally. 
This helps them avoids injury. 

So how does this applies to founders?

If you want to innovate and take risks:
→ Either do it as a series of small experiments, so even if they fail, the consequences are not severe (Short falls for Cats)
→ Or, if you want to take one big bet, then give yourself enough time & resources, so you can adjust if things don’t work out as planned (Long falls for Cats)

Don’t get stuck in the middle where you take one big bet but don’t give yourself enough time & resources to adjust. 
In this you have only 1 attempt it to make it work & if you don’t succeed then consequences are severe.
These might make for glamorous stories but for 1 success there are countless failures (& broken bones like the Medium fall for Cats).

Great leaders don’t just blindly take risks.
They take risks with a good margin of safety. 
So they have time & attempts to kill the risk & reach the successful outcome beyond the risk. 

That’s why some founders like cats, seem to have 9 lives. 

#Leadership #Founders #Risks
——————————————
What’s worked well for you to handle crises and risks ?

New Manager Academy was an experiment
Its success surprised us. A big reason: 
These 3 insights I learnt in the initial cohorts…

1️⃣ OPT IN > MANDATE 

We created New Manager Academy for:
→ 1st time Managers in fast growing companies
→ 1st time founders leading teams for the first time 
→ Experienced leaders who had never learnt Leadership & Management in a structured manner

So when companies started signing up all their managers in one go, we celebrated.
We thought we had cracked Product Market Fit.

But soon a trend emerged:
Participants who had the highest engagement & application came from companies that had an Opt-In system.
They came because they wanted to & not because they were mandated. 

So we changed our pitch:
“Don’t sign up all your leaders. You will see the best ROI if you let people opt-in. We run a Cohort every quarter. Let them join when they are ready.”

This reduces our revenue in the short term but it’s the right approach for the long term.

2️⃣  EXAMPLES & STORIES > RESEARCH & HISTORY 

When I learn a new concept, I start with its history & main research.
But this didn’t work in the course.

Example: Situational Leadership
In early cohorts, I started with its 4 decade history & research.
I wanted to to generate buy-in, but mostly generated boredom.

Then I changed approach. I shared stories of: 
→ A managee who was ‘unwilling‘ to do the work 
→ One who was ‘willing but unable’
→ Another who was ‘willing, able & confident’

I then gave examples of how I used Situational Leadership to support each of these people.

The chat blew up.
People shared how they could relate to these examples & were now excited to try Situational Leadership.

So I overhauled the course.
I still point them to the research & history behind each concept.
But most time is spent in the world of stories & examples.

The resonance & application are way higher & I am also having more fun.

3️⃣ GOOD PRACTICES THAT DON‘T NEED PERMISSION > GREAT PRACTICES THAT NEED PERMISSION 

For the course, I explored my decade+ experience of running a firm & re-read all the classics.
I picked concepts that I would 100% implement in any firm I ran.

But data showed that participants overwhelmingly preferred concepts that didn’t need anyone‘s permission to apply.
For all else they said: “This is great but it’s not for me. I don’t want to convince everyone to try this”

I realised my mistake → Most participants weren’t running their own firms.
More than the ‘absolute’ best practices they wanted ‘good-enough’ ones they could apply today.
So I adjusted the scope.

For example, instead of sharing a Goal setting system that would need full organisational overhaul, I covered:
→ How to re-write existing goals to make them more inspiring
→ How to write great Performance Indicators
→ How to pick right metrics to track progress 

The resistance melted away & application shot up. 
————
Our next Cohort begins end of May. 
Register now for a 20% early bird discount 👇 

Easiest way to ruin a promising career: Become a Manager
Most perform poorly & eventually hate it
Are you the exception? Use the Management Track Test to check

Julie Zhuo shared 3 statements for who should consider management.
In my #oneglancecard I explain all 3 in detail.

If you have a: 
→ Strong Yes to all 3: Certainly consider management. You have a high chance of getting success & fulfilment from it
→ Strong No To any 1: Don’t go down the management track. It won’t give you what you are looking for 
→ Any other scenario: Proceed cautiously. Understand in more detail what management looks like at your company & then decide

Another use I have found for these: Using them as a gauge of who might have management potential in my team 

When we make the wrong person the manager we suffer in 2 ways: 
→ We decrease team performance 
→ We ruin a good person

Few decisions at work carry more risk than who should become a manager. 

This Management Track Test helps manage that risk. 

#Management #Manager #Leader
——————————————————————

If you took this Management Track Test, what would your answers be?

“Express gratitude to Shalini for X”.  “Praise Peter for Y”. 
People judged me for putting these tasks.
But here’s what they missed:

In the India I grew up in, it was not common for people to express praise & gratitude.
In fact parents & teachers believed that frequent praise spoils the child. 

So without role models & regular practice, I never learnt how to give praise & gratitude.
They were just not a part of my life.

Then I learnt how powerfully praise impacts performance & gratitude impacts peace of mind.
I understood that to become a better leader & a happier person, I had to improve on them.
But I found this very hard to do.

So I started by using recommended formats & scheduling them as tasks.
It felt a bit unnatural, but it ensured I was doing them regularly & learning to do them well.
Overtime, as I got better, I relied less on these supporting structures.

Now gratitude & praise are core parts of my work & life. 
Every year I do them more and they enrich my life in beautiful ways. 

I feel my childhood experiences are not an exception. 
Many of us grew up in environments where our elders just didn’t realise the importance of praise & gratitude. 

If that’s you & you want to make them a bigger part of your life, don’t feel shy of starting with the support structures you need.

It’s not your fault that you didn’t experience them early on in your life.
Don’t let the judgement of others stop you from making them a part of your life from now on. 

———————————
Has anything helped you bring more praise & gratitude in your life?

Should you take decisions quickly OR slowly?
Depends on which DOOR this decision is…

This is one of the hardest questions in Decision Making: 
”How much time to spend on a particular decsion”

People often think of this based on how important the decision is or what kind of thinking they need to do (big picture & strategic OR operational details)
These are useful considerations but ultimately in my opinion not the right lens.

The right lens is REVERSIBILITY as it captures the most importance cost in decision making: changing the decision.

I first heard this articulation from Jeff Bezos who analogised Decisions to Doors.
I explain it in detail in my #OneGlanceCard.

Decision Making Speed is a critical component of good decision making.
Decisions as doors is one of the best frameworks to figure your speed based on the decision.

#DecisionMaking #Management #Leadership #Team
————————————————

Do you have a favorite decision making framework?

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