LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND TEAM COACHING

For organisations who want stated values lived, not laminated.

The world needs leaders who have not forgotten how to feel.

Twenty-plus years of leadership development inside Fortune 200 organisations and as a consultant to them. ICF ACTC certified team coach. We design and deliver leadership development, values-to-behaviours programmes, culture transformation, and team coaching for senior leadership teams across healthcare, technology, social enterprise, and the arts.

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The track record

We have built leadership inside the rooms where leadership is actually made

Sharmi Roy spent fifteen years inside Cognizant, a Fortune 200 organisation, holding progressively senior roles in Talent Transformation and Leadership Development. She culminated her corporate career as a Leadership Development Consultant and Coach in Global Leadership Development, Cognizant's flagship development institution for senior leaders.
Before Cognizant, ten years across Healthcare, IT Product, and Education sectors, designing and delivering leadership and learning programmes that translated organisational ambition into individual capability.
She left full-time corporate practice in 2019 to bring twenty-five years of accumulated experience to organisations that need it.

25

years in leadership development

15

years inside Fortune 200 organisations

200+

leaders developed across Europe, Asia, Americas

Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Award (multiple). Founder, Cognizant Coaching Centre of Excellence. Head of Leadership Development for Cognizant Europe Academy. Built and mentored internal coaching capability at Cognizant years before stepping into coaching full-time.

THE PHILOSOPHY

Art does not decorate life. It reveals what matters.

For too long, leadership development has been a purely cognitive exercise. Frameworks, competencies, models. We have trained the mind and neglected the soul.

Art To Lead emerges from a different conviction. Artists have always known what leaders are only now being asked to learn. How to hold uncertainty. How to listen deeply. How to create meaning together. Before strategy, before vision, before any act of leading, there must be the willingness to truly hear. Art teaches this. Coaching deepens it. Together, they make leaders who do not just direct. They transform.

The three pillars

Pillar 01

Presence

Art teaches us to slow down, witness, and truly see. The foundation of every great leader.

Pillar 02

Creativity

Solutions emerge from a mind that can imagine what does not yet exist.

Pillar 03

Connection

Culture and shared creative experience build the trust no exercise alone can create.

What we offer

Leadership Development Consulting

Designed and delivered global leadership development programmes for Fortune 200 organisations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. We work with senior leaders, middle management, and emerging leaders. Custom curriculum, integrated with applied neuroscience and ICF coaching presence.

Values-to-behaviours programmes

Organisation-wide interventions that align stated values with lived behaviour at every level. Our signature engagement at Cachar Cancer Hospital touched 400+ employees and culminated in the hospital writing its own pro-poor patient-care anthem. The values that organisations laminate become the behaviours their people actually live.

Team Coaching for senior leadership teams

ICF ACTC certified team coaching for organisations who recognise that the team, not just the individuals on it, is the unit of leadership. We work with executive teams, board teams, founder teams, and cross-functional teams whose collective performance determines organisational outcomes.

Culture transformation

Multi-month engagements with senior leadership and middle management to shift how an organisation actually behaves. Built around applied neuroscience, systemic team coaching methodology, and the embodied capacities that art teaches.

TEAM COACHING

Transform teams. Transform organisations.

Most leadership development invests in individuals and hopes the team will improve as a result. Team coaching inverts that logic. We work with the team as the unit of change, because the team is where leadership is actually exercised, and where organisations are actually shifted.

Sharmi Roy, ICF ACTC Certified Team Coach

Credentials and credibility

Sharmi Roy holds the ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC), the highest international credential in team coaching practice. Coachezzy, our coach training school, is AATC accredited by ICF, meaning we are approved to train and assess other team coaches toward ACTC certification. Few practices in eastern India hold both. Fewer practise team coaching at the standard those credentials demand.

Who we work with

Executive teams navigating transformation, transition, or scaling.
Founder teams whose original alignment has been tested by growth.
Board teams whose collective decision-making determines organisational direction.
Cross-functional leadership teams who carry shared accountability across silos.
Healthcare leadership teams in mission-driven institutions.
Social-sector leadership teams holding outsized responsibility on under-resourced budgets.

What changes when a team is coached well

Decisions get made and held. The same conversation does not return four meetings later.
Conflict surfaces earlier and resolves faster. The energy that was leaking into politics returns to the work.
The team holds itself to its stated values, not because someone is enforcing them, but because the team has internalised them.
Individual leaders develop faster, because the team itself is now a developmental environment.
The organisation feels the team change before it can name what changed.

How we work with teams

Every team coaching engagement begins with diagnostic conversations and observation of the team in its actual work. We do not arrive with a model and apply it. We arrive with questions, listen to what the team is actually wrestling with, and design the engagement around that.
Engagements typically run six to twelve months. Long enough for new patterns to embed. Short enough to maintain momentum.
Our methodology integrates ICF Team Coaching Competencies, systemic team coaching frameworks, applied neuroscience, and the embodied practices that surface what teams cannot say in conventional meetings.
Where appropriate, team coaching engagements include 1:1 executive coaching for individual team members, run by separate coaches from the Art To Lead practice to preserve confidentiality and independence. We have done this for ICF Kolkata Ignite at Cachar Cancer Hospital and for client teams elsewhere.
The unit of leadership in modern organisations is the team. The unit of organisational change is the team. We coach teams toward both.

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SIGNATURE ENGAGEMENTS

Signature Engagements

Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre

A four-year partnership with Padma Shree and Ramon Magsaysay awardee Dr. Ravi Kannan. .

Executive coaching expanded into a values-to-behaviours team coaching programme touching 400+ employees. The hospital wrote its own pro-poor patient-care anthem. A Managing Self programme for nursing supervisors during the pandemic. Developmental conversations supporting Dr. Kannan’s wider vision of community healing beyond the hospital itself.

“She brings rigour, warmth, and a rare ability to create lasting organisational change. Our people now genuinely live these values. They are not words on a wall.”

Dr. Ravi Kannan, Director, Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre.

Read the full case

ICF Kolkata Ignite at Cachar Cancer Hospital

When team coaching needed to be brought to the leadership team at Cachar Cancer Hospital, Sharmi did something most consultants would not. She stepped away from coaching the team herself, despite being Dr. Ravi Kannan’s coach for four years.

As Founding President of ICF Kolkata Chapter, she convened 19 credentialed ICF Kolkata coaches behind a single social mission: strengthening leadership at the hospital. She handed the team coaching work to other ICF Kolkata members so each coaching relationship could hold its own confidentiality and independence.

Mobilising 19 credentialed coaches behind a shared mission, and knowing when to step back, are both part of what ethical team coaching at scale looks like in practice.

Read the full case

OUR METHODOLOGY

The Art To Lead Approach

Twenty-five years of leadership development practice, integrated into a methodology we have refined across hundreds of engagements. Five stages, designed to be adapted to your organisation rather than imposed on it.

01

One. Listen and diagnose.

We do not arrive with a deck. We arrive with questions. Stakeholder interviews, observation in actual work contexts, and where appropriate organisational pulse data and 360-degree feedback. The output is a clear picture of what your leaders actually carry, what your culture actually rewards, and what behaviour change is genuinely needed. Most engagements take two to four weeks at this stage.

02

Two. Design with the client.

We do not deliver packaged programmes. We co-create the engagement design with your leadership team and your HR partners. The methodology integrates ICF Core Competencies, applied neuroscience (mBIT, social cognitive neuroscience), systemic team coaching frameworks, values-to-behaviours design, and the embodied capacities that art teaches. The combination is what we call Art To Lead. The design is yours.

03

Three. Deliver with rigour and adaptation.

Engagements typically run six to twelve months for executive and team coaching, three to nine months for values-to-behaviours and culture programmes. We adapt as we go. What we learn in month two changes how we deliver in month four. The work stays alive because it is built to.

04

Four. Measure behaviour change.

Every engagement includes measurement. We work with you to define what behaviour change looks like at three, six, and twelve months. We use 360-degree feedback, behavioural observation in actual work contexts, organisational pulse data where available, and structured client interviews. We report against the outcomes you set, not the outcomes the methodology assumes. The Cachar Cancer Hospital partnership is in its fourth year because the work has been measurably transformative; the measurement framework is what allows us to know that.

05

Five. Embed for sustained adoption.

The risk in leadership development is not that programmes fail to deliver. It is that they fade. We design embedding mechanisms from the start: peer coaching cohorts, internal champion development, communities of practice, and where appropriate the mentoring of internal coaches who can sustain the work after our engagement ends. Cachar wrote its own anthem because the values became theirs. That is what embedding looks like.

How we measure outcomes

Built into the design, not added at the end.

Most leadership development engagements measure activity (sessions delivered, participants attended). Few measure outcomes (behaviour change observed, business impact realised). We measure both.

Every Art To Lead engagement includes a measurement framework defined in the design phase, before delivery begins. The framework is co-created with you and aligned to your business outcomes.

Tools we draw on include 360-degree feedback at baseline and at six- and twelve-month intervals, structured behavioural observation in actual work contexts, organisational pulse data integrated where available, structured stakeholder interviews at engagement milestones, and individual development plans tracked across the engagement.

We report against the outcomes you set. The numbers and behaviours that matter to your CFO and your board are the numbers and behaviours we work toward.

WHO WE WORK WITH

Different buyers. Different questions. The same depth of attention.

For HR leaders and CHROs

You carry the responsibility of building leadership pipeline depth, sustaining culture across reorganisation, and measuring the return on every L&D investment. We build engagements around the questions you bring: succession depth at the top of the house, culture work that survives leadership transitions, leadership development that translates into measurable behaviour change. We give you what you need to defend the spend internally.

For founders and CEOs

You carry questions you cannot ask anyone inside the organisation. We hold those questions with the rigour and confidentiality of ICF-credentialed coaching. We also work with the team you have grown around you, because most founder questions are also team questions, and the work that scales your thinking starts with the team that surrounds you.

For boards and board chairs

Board-level team coaching is one of the most under-served engagements in the leadership development field. ICF ACTC certified team coaching at the board level, board-CEO alignment work, and the developmental questions that board chairs face are part of our practice. The same Core Competencies that serve any leadership team serve a board, with the additional ethical care that governance contexts require.

For social-sector and mission-driven leaders

Healthcare institutions, foundations, cultural organisations, and mission-driven enterprises lead under different constraints than commercial organisations. We have the depth, demonstrated through partnerships like Cachar Cancer Hospital and the Sunil Madhav Sen Foundation, to serve leaders carrying outsized responsibility on under-resourced ground.