Vijayanti Margassery
Twenty-five years in people and culture; a doctoral researcher of leadership; a coach for the inward turn.
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The practice is grounded in doctoral research on unanointed leadership — the informal authority that emerges in post-bureaucratic organisations before, and often without, formal appointment. People arrive from very different hours of a working life, mid-transition, early-career, or carrying decades of leadership, each holding a different inflection of the same question.
A doctoral candidate at IIM Kozhikode, supervised by Prof. Roopak Kumar Gupta, researching unanointed leadership through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, attention to the lived experience of leading, rather than a framework imposed on it from outside.
The coursework and qualifying examination were cleared in 2026. The research and the coaching practice run alongside each other deliberately, each one keeping the other honest.
Before this practice, twenty-five years in senior people-and-culture roles across Whirlpool, Infosys, HP Asia-Pacific, Samsung Research India, Hindustan Coca-Cola, Teva, Biocon, Ola Electric, and TrusTrace, a career spanning consumer goods, technology, pharmaceuticals, and electric mobility.
That range is not incidental to the coaching. Sitting inside that many kinds of organisations, at that many stages of their own growth, is its own long education in how authority actually forms, well before any title catches up to it.
- Doctoral researchOB & HRM · IIM Kozhikode · CQE cleared 2026
- Coaching credentialICF PCC candidate
- MethodInterpretative Phenomenological Analysis
- Twenty-five yearsWhirlpool · Infosys · HP · Samsung · Biocon · Ola · TrusTrace
- Based inBengaluru, India
“Vijayanti listened for what I was actually doing in my work, not what the org chart said I was, and asked questions that made me see it myself. By the end I had been given my own thinking back.”
— A. M., Head of Product, Bengaluru“The only coach I have worked with who treats the research seriously and the coaching seriously, in the same room, without either one apologising for the other.”
— S. N., CHRO, PuneThe surname is chosen, not inherited, it carries the tharavadu lineage of my mother’s family in Thrissur district, a Malayali Nair matrilineal house whose paradevata is Shoranur Kalari Bhagavathi. The sarpa kavu, the sacred serpent grove, sits within the tharavadu’s older claim on the world.
Manasa means of the mind, and it is the name of the still lake born of the mind itself. The practice is named for what it does: it makes the water still enough that what is already within can finally be seen.