Expert Sessions | Leadership Development with Roshan Paul

Earlier this year, we hosted a series of expert learning sessions to help shape a long-term strategy for Work on Climate—one that’s grounded in the realities of an ever-evolving political, social, and economic landscape. These sessions brought together practitioners who have driven real impact by building climate-focused ecosystems, communities, and workforces across a range of sectors and scales.

Our next expert, Roshan Paul, is a leader in social entrepreneurship who has guided over 10,000 people from 65 countries through his work with the Amani Institute and Surge Climate Talent. This interview with Roshan will focus on the social entrepreneurship and leadership that led to his success. 

Can you tell us about the inception of the Amani Institute? How did you go from identifying a problem to knowing what shape an institute needs to take?

I’m from India originally, and I went to college in the U.S. Coming out of college, I was looking at working at investment banks and management consulting firms. My senior year coincided with 9/11, the U.S. starting to bomb Afghanistan, and a lot of terrorist attacks in India. It didn’t make sense to me, so I turned down an opportunity to work with McKinsey and moved back to India. I started working in social entrepreneurship there. I did go to grad school in my early career, and a series of things happened that led me to realize I learned more while working than I ever did in grad school, even though I went to one of the most renowned schools in the world. Then, as a leader, I would often get invited to guest lecture at universities and noticed that students from the best universities in the world didn’t seem all that employable. Other employers had said similar things. I saw more and more people who wanted to work in social impact, and since I’d built my career in that space, I felt I could help others do it as well. 

The people who thought I was crazy for turning down McKinsey 10 years ago were now asking me, “Hey, how do I get a job working globally in social impact?” All of that led me to want to create a better kind of grad school program – something less academic with more real-world focus. People were interested. They said, “Where was this five years ago when I needed it?” That’s how I knew this is something that needs to exist and people really want to do it. 

The institute has grown larger and has a wide reach. How did this growth inform the design choices you made in how you run the institute or how it changed over time? 

There were a lot of changes over time. We started with this master’s-equivalent program that was a six-month intensive certificate that we wanted to be an option in lieu of traditional master’s degrees. We wanted to show universities a better model than grad school. That is what guided my co-founder and our staff from the education space. But other staff that we hired came from the private sector and they couldn’t have cared less about reforming education. They cared about helping each individual lead a more meaningful life and career. They started to move the ethos and goal from improving higher education to helping individuals build “careers of meaning and impact.” That became our new slogan. 

We had big organizations, including NGOs, foundations, and universities, come to us and ask us to train their staff, focusing on consulting for  in-house capacity building. That consulting work really started to grow. It became bigger than our education programming. We also started working with small businesses in Africa and India on leadership development for managers. Leadership development became our bread and butter as well. 

The consultancies and leadership development are now bigger than our certificate program. Post-COVID, we shut down the certificate. Now, we’re a consultancy capacity building model. 

The most important set of skills are soft skills, human skills.

When working with different sectors and countries, the skills you need to teach people may also be different. How did you choose the common skills that everybody needs, or how did you create a program that can teach them what they need for their specific context?

The most important set of skills are soft skills, human skills – not academic or technical skills. Those skills are necessary across the board, no matter where you’re working, and those are skills you don’t get in grad school. Those are skills you use every day at your job. There’s an expression in HR: people get hired for hard skills and fired for soft skills. We wanted to make sure that people didn’t get fired for soft skills. Soft skills make the difference between advancing or getting stuck. We surveyed employers and found they were most interested in these areas: leadership, innovation, management, and communications.  

What were some design choices you made that allowed you to be effective at teaching these skills?

Firstly, we focused on adult pedagogy. Adults learn by doing. It’s not about reading and writing papers, it’s about getting your hands dirty, trying out stuff, failing, getting feedback, trying it again. Everything we did was designed for real world application. 

Secondly, we learned from experts who use the tools they teach, not academics who researched it and don’t actually have to use the tools or manage teams. 

Thirdly, we wanted to be in the places where the problems are. The cutting edge of social problem solving is happening in Nairobi, Sao Paulo, and Bangalore, not London, New York, and San Francisco. Everything we do is global. Most people come from emerging markets to study in the U.S. or U.K., but we said, “Let’s reverse that flow.” Let’s bring people from around the world to emerging markets and study there. In our office, we had an upside down map of the world to try and show where we should actually be learning. 

Let’s talk about outcomes. After 15 years of seeing this in action, what do you think you’ve learned about what types of systemic change this type of leadership development can create? Is there a time when one needs a different approach?

We started out wanting to change higher ed, because higher ed is so broken. Most master’s degrees are utterly useless and overly expensive, in my opinion. But it’s a resilient system – the university concept has been around for 400 years. So I should be kinder to them as well. Universities were never set up to prepare people for their careers, they were set up to be centers of learning for learning’s sake. It’s only in the last 50 years that we’ve been asking universities to help people get a job, and that’s not what they’re meant to do. 

It’s very hard to break the status quo. We didn’t succeed at changing higher ed, but we did succeed in having several universities copy aspects of our program. Schools like the London School of Economics and the University of San Diego started programs in social innovation, where none existed when Amani Institute was founded. 

In some ways, this is like the energy transition. It’s so entrenched, right? Fossil fuels are in every single thing all around us, every aspect of our lives. Breaking down that dependency will be very, very difficult. We have to throw everything at it. 

Now you’re working on Surge Climate Talent. Can you say a few words about it? How did your experience with Amani Institute influence the design choices?

At Surge Climate Talent, we’re trying to solve for bottlenecks in the climate change sector to bring in needed talent in places where it doesn’t exist. Nonprofits haven’t been able to scale up because of a lack of people and talent. Philanthropy hasn’t invested in talent and people that power organizations to grow. Unlike with Amani Institute, we have some funding. With Amani Institute, we never really had funding, and we built a business from scratch, which allowed us to innovate with our business model by working extensively in the Global South. I can innovate around business models and costs easier than others. 

I know that people want to change their careers to do more meaningful work. I’ve seen it, so that helps us to design programs that can really make that happen. 

What have been the strongest arguments in favor of people and talent?

There’s an arc in the climate field’s development. The focus was, at first, making the case that the climate is changing in ways that are going to be harmful. It seems like that case is pretty clear, so now we’re moving into an era of implementation and actually making it happen. To do that, we need a different set of skills. There’s not an easy on-ramp for many people into climate, but the organizations that philanthropists are funding are not growing fast enough. So our argument is that we need a broader base of talent. 

I find design thinking to be really powerful.

You mentioned designing programs that help people do meaningful work. How do you learn what people need and turn it into a program that they’ll actually use and be successful with?

I find design thinking to be really powerful. You start with a problem, go deeper into it, understand why it exists more deeply than what’s on the surface, and design for that underlying thing. Design for what people aspire to.