Dr. Shyam Giridharadas works with individuals to discover and achieve their authentic leadership path forward. Over the course of their coaching partnership, Shyam helps his clients tackle important building blocks to gain greater personal mastery and professional effectiveness.
Shyam’s coaching fosters greater awareness and comprehension of the attitudes, beliefs, emotional and intellectual competencies, values, fears, and externally manifested behaviors across a relevant spectrum of an individual’s life. He influences his clients to nurture and self-develop the courage, conviction and full range of competencies to achieve their full human potential and ideal self-image with great pride and integrity.
Shyam received his Bachelor of Technology in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1972) and a Diploma in Business from Xavier Institute (1974) where he received the ICI Best Student gold medal. He then worked for as a marketing executive at Tata Motors in their exports division before moving to the United States in 1977 to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Shyam spent 14 years with McKinsey & Company in their Cleveland and Paris offices and led Prism Consulting International for 8 years – a consulting firm he founded in 1994. Now, 25 years after leaving McKinsey, he continues to be affiliated with the firm as a member of their coach faculty for internal programs on Inspirational Leadership and Client Leadership.
In 2002 he joined Capital One as the Vice President for Human Resource Analytics and left in 2006 to pursue a doctorate at Case Western Reserve’s Weatherhead School of Management. In 2015 he received a certificate in Executive Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University, and has reoriented his career to focus on teaching business school students and executive coaching.
Currently, Shyam is an Adjunct Professor with appointments at The George Washington University School of Business and the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. At GW he pioneered offering a consulting skills class in the online MBA program in May 2015. His courses at both universities include Authentic Leadership, Developing Consulting Skills, Human Capital Management, Business Challenge, Managing the Enterprise and Principled Leadership for Business and Society. Shyam has received teaching excellence awards from students in both the MBA and Executive MBA programs.
Shyam was a badminton champion and played in inter-collegiate and state-level tournaments. Now he is content being an avid fan of tennis and, as a Life Master, playing in duplicate bridge tournaments.
Shyam and his wife, Nandini, who is a ceramics artist and high-school teacher, live in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
