Pattabiraman M P, Founder & CEO, Pat4leaders

The greatest leader is not the one who does great things, but the one who gets people to do those great things’. This quote by former US president Ronald Reagen perfectly exemplifies the evolution of a leader’s role in recent times. Given the dynamic and hypercompetitive market conditions that currently persists across all industries, business leaders are now forced to go back to the drawing boards and revamp their entire organizational strategies, be it finance, HR, sales & marketing or any other, to maintain an edge in the market. While subject matter expertise does indeed come in handy, it is also imperative for them to develop niche skillsets such as effective communication, leadership and managerial abilities to steer their organizations towards success.

Emerging as the lifesavers in this regard are eminent leadership coaches such as Pattabiraman M P (Founder & CEO, PAT4LEADERS), who through their vast training expertise and knowledge of diverse organizational functions, are handholding business owners, corporate leaders along with their teams and moulding them into successful leaders of today. Holding an MBA in HR Management, Pattabiraman is a seasoned HR professional with over 22 years of experience across IT, ITeS, finance, banking, credit research and consulting. As a Former HR Head, alongside being a certified Gallup Strengths Coach and Herrmann Whole Brain Thinking practitioner, he is strongly positioned as one of the most sought-after leadership coaches in India today.

Along with numerous neuroscience techniques and training models, Pattabiraman continuously refreshes his training and coaching content to stay updated with industry dynamics

Laying the Foundation Stone

Driven by the plentiful insights garnered during his prior stints as an HR Head with McKinsey Global Services alongside other HR roles with Savant Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, Standard Chartered Bank and CRISIL, Pattabiraman realized early on in his career that a HR’s role cannot have boundaries. Further, interacting with numerous employees, managers and leaders on a daily basis instilled confidence to his inner desire to become a leadership coach.

His journey as a Leadership Coach gradually started with numerous people and mentoring activities as part of his HR role at Standard Chartered Bank where he garnered a lot of appreciations from his coworkers and was even nominated by his manager for a Gallup Strengths Coach workshop. He successfully completed the Gallup Strength Finder Coach certification, and thus began his stint with coaching in 2008.

“One of the activities that I was to participate in as part of the Gallup workshop was to conduct a live coaching session for my fellow participants who had come from different geographies. A team of Gallup-certified coaches facilitated this session and keenly oversaw each of our coaching sessions. Being recognized as the second best coach in the group in such a prestigious workshop motivated me immensely to pursue my passion Laying the Foundation Stone”, says Pattabiraman.

Key Areas of Practice

Having served as the Head of Human Resources for close to nine years at McKinsey Global Business Services, Pattabiraman garnered great impetus to understand the problem at its root-cause, yet work towards simple solutions with clarity, while taking people along. This critical aspect coupled with his past experience at coaching and mentoring, along with the vast business knowledge that he had accumulated during his HR tenure, Pattabiraman established his own Coaching and Training firm named PAT4LEADERS in Chennai in 2021. He offers six different kinds of skill development that include 1-1 Coaching, Functional HR Training, Leadership Skills Development, Strategy workshops, Team Bonding Workshops and Leadership Offsites, across organizations and individuals globally.

Contextualizing & customizing to individual, team and organizational level, Pattabiraman formulates each of his programs as per the participant’s requirement. Specifically on Leadership Development for instance, he anchors his Coaching & Training intervention to enable both business & deep personal impact. Going a step further, he also gathers feedback from the coachees’  managers, team members and other personnel within the organization with prior permission from them to ensure the effectiveness of his coaching & training programs. 

“One of the major factors that make our coaching highly effective is the ability to first help coachees, be it individuals or at an organizational level, identify why they need coaching or what they want to achieve via coaching and have a strong personal connect with that end goal. This gives them a lot of incentive to understand the concepts better, show intent to go through the entire coaching journey, and most importantly, go and implement the lessons in real world scenarios”, adds Pattabiraman.

Focus on Results-driven Coaching Programs

To ensure that his clients get the best possible outcomes, Pattabiraman uses numerous neuroscience techniques and training models such as the SCARF training model that speaks about the five critical aspects to ensure in any conversation. Using this model extensively in his coaching programs has not only helped him get people’s attention and instill confidence within them, but also showcased a 100 percent success rate among his coachees.

Additionally, well-aware that thinking influences behavior and behavior influences action, Pattabiraman also uses Hermann Whole Brain Thinking to influence holistic thinking for better outcomes, while making coachees leverage their brain’s potential. Pattabiraman is a strong advocate of leveraging one’s strengths at both work and personal life to exhibit work and personal excellence. He uses Gallup Strengths Finder Psychometric tool towards enabling this and helping hundreds of his clients to exhibit passion at what they do.  

When it comes to coaching, coaching clients many a times requires support to help identify their coaching goals. Pattabiraman has learnt it over the years that the  best way to enable this is by starting small by not having multiple coaching goals, rather anchor on the most critical goal to start with (WIG - Wildly Important Goal), which makes the coaching journey start with a lot of comfort for the coachee.

He makes sure to understand their narrative and not bring his own, go along with them through the entire coaching journey, probing, prompting and making them think all along. Due to this, clients not only recognize what the actual end results that they must be looking at through the coaching program, but also get the best value for their money.  

Pattabiraman’s training programs have broughtin a host of benefits to the coachees. While individuals who took-up his coaching program witnessed a 3x improvement across both their quality of life as well as workplace engagement, at the team level, there was an 8-18 percent increase in performance, 50 percent decrease in attrition and 66 percent improvement in team’s overall effectiveness. Further, organizations that have been part of Pattabiraman’s coaching sessions have been witnessing a 10-19 percent increase in their sales and 18-21 percent increase in their final profit margins.  

Reminiscing a memorable case study, Pattabiraman elucidates, “During a casual conversation with a senior banking professional who possessed 25+ years of experience, he expressed that despite his successful career, he always felt something amiss in his professional life. While probing deeper after 2-3 rounds of discussion, he mentioned about his passion towards chess and him being a district champion in his school days.

Although he had stopped playing due to busy schedules, the way his face lit-up in excitement during further discussions made it clear that staying away from his passion for chess was problem. He then starting taking time each day playing chess, and my role in helping him get back to his passion touched my heart and has been one of the most satisfying moments of my coaching journey”.

Star-studded Coaching Journey

Having delivered over 400+ hours of public speeches, 2500+ hours of Live/Virtual training & 300+ Coaching sessions so far, Pattabiraman has successfully supported 60+ organizations and more than 10,000 individuals till date. Some of the prominent companies that he has catered to include Tata International, Accenture, L&T, SAIL, AstraZeneca, HDFC Bank, Reliance Retail and Western Digital, to name a few. Given such exceptional track record and industry benchmark practices, he was conferred the ‘Top 100 Coaches in India’ award last year and is also listed in Gallup’s global directory of coaches as well.

Expressing his gratitude on such an illustrious journey, Pattabiraman says, “Numerous people have shaped me and groomed me selflessly at various stages of my career. Even today when I’m clueless about what to do, I seek help of my clients who have also been an integral part of my journey. It’s not just me, but rather an ecosystem comprising of family, well-wishers and other people that has been enabling me till date, whom I’m very grateful towards”.