Professional Certificate in
Self, People & Business Leadership (SPBL)
You're already a top performer. This is your next step — becoming a leader others want to follow
A six month leadership programme for managers transitioning into larger leadership roles, ready to shift from hands on execution to driving results through others at scale.
A blended learning experience combining self paced modules, live sessions with IIM Bangalore faculty, and an immersive on campus experience at IIM Bangalore culminating in a capstone project focused on addressing a real world business or leadership challenge.
Every HR leader in the room agreed: the manager who only controls the work has already been outgrown. The job now is to multiply what a team can do.
Three themes.
Self. People. Business. More than a slogan, these are the three core themes of the curriculum reflecting a deliberate learning journey that moves from understanding yourself, to leading people, to creating business impact.
- Personal Effectiveness
- Emotional Intelligence
- Enhancing your Resilience
- Communication for ROI
- Business Finance
- Customer Centricity
- Campus Immersion
- Managing Teams
- Stakeholder Management
- Performance Management
- Feedback and Coaching
- AI for Professionals
- Leadership & Inspiration
- Campus Immersion
- Strategic Management
- Macro Economics
- Decision Making
- Data Driven Decision Making
- Changing Paradigms & New Age Context
- Campus Immersion
Curriculum objectives & outcomes
Explore the specific learning objectives and practical capabilities built within each theme of the programme.
Self : Discover
Before you lead others, learn how you operate.
New managers are promoted for what they did alone. This theme builds the self awareness, discipline and business grounding every manager needs before leading a team.
You will learn to:
- Manage attention, energy and priorities deliberately
- Communicate with clarity and impact
- Recover from setbacks without losing momentum
- Read financial numbers and customer impact into everyday decisions
You will walk away with:
- Sharper self awareness in high pressure moments
- A personal system for sustained performance
- Working fluency in business finance and customer thinking
- A stronger foundation for the themes ahead
People : Inspire Team
The work is no longer yours. It belongs to your team.
This theme moves from managing yourself to leading others building teams, holding standards, developing people, and leading through the shift AI is bringing to every workplace.
You will learn to:
- Build a team that performs as a unit, not a group of individuals
- Set expectations and hold difficult conversations early
- Coach and mentor people beyond their current role
- Influence peers and seniors without formal authority
- Lead a team whose work is being reshaped by AI
You will walk away with:
- The confidence to have the conversation you'd otherwise postpone
- A practical toolkit for developing your people
- Stronger influence across the organisation, not just your team
- A clear view of what AI changes for your team and what it doesn't
Business : Lead the Game
Zoom out. The organisation is the unit now.
This theme widens the lens from team to organisation strategy, economics, and decision making under real world uncertainty, closing with a capstone on a real business problem.
You will learn to:
- Apply strategic frameworks to real trade offs
- Read macroeconomic trends and their impact on your business
- Make sound decisions with incomplete information
- Build and defend a recommendation using data
- Respond to shifts in work, technology and organisation design
You will walk away with:
- A structured way to decide under pressure
- A real recommendation, built and defended, for a real problem from your own organisation
- Readiness for broader managerial responsibility
Three things this does differently
Most management programmes teach you to manage the business. This programme prepares you to lead the people, teams, and decisions that make business performance possible.
People leadership, taught properly
Managing Teams, Stakeholder Management, Performance Management, Feedback and Coaching, Leadership & Inspiration, and Leading Self & Others. Six courses on the human job, anchored by IIMB's Organizational Behavior & Human Resources Management faculty, rather than a single people module bolted onto a finance curriculum.
Built in, not bolted on
New managers absorb pressure from above and below at the same time, and most burn quietly before anyone notices. Personal Effectiveness, Emotional Intelligence and Enhancing Your Resilience run early in the programme, because a manager who cannot regulate themselves cannot steady a team.
Navigating what keeps changing
An entire theme on the changing paradigms of work, organisations and people, set against strategy, macroeconomics and customer shifts. Managers stop reacting to each change as a surprise and start explaining it to the people who report to them.
Eight capabilities, one leader
HR leaders at the IIMBx World Cafe tables the people who hire, develop and retain this talent ranked the capabilities that decide whether a new manager succeeds. These eight came up most often, and the curriculum is built against them.
Learning agility
Unlearn and relearn quickly. Move at speed without losing rigour when the situation is still ambiguous.
Emotional intelligence
Navigate generational gaps, hybrid realities and diverse employee needs without flattening them.
Change leadership
Own the transition. Role model the behaviour. Manage the very real fear of becoming invisible.
Digital fluency and AI
Use the tools yourself. Translate customer complexity into something the team can actually build.
Purpose clarity
Connect personal purpose to the organisational north star, and turn it into observable behaviour.
Delegation and Empowerment
Simplify approvals. Remove redundant layers. Give people real authority, not just responsibility.
Critical thinking
Double click on issues. Run bold experiments inside safe pods. Decide with evidence.
Coaching leadership
Mentor. Give feedback regularly. Build a hi touch and hi tech culture that does not wait for the annual review.
Co-created with HR leaders. Not lifted from a textbook
'Business is professional... but culture is personal.'
The IIMBx World Cafe HR conclaves in Bengaluru and Mumbai brought together HR leaders from startups, owner driven firms and traditional organisations. They were not asked to review a curriculum. They were asked what actually breaks when a strong individual contributor is handed a team, and what they wish someone had taught that person first. This programme is the answer they gave.
- HR leaders from startups, owner driven firms, and traditional organisations met across two cities.
- Two intensive sessions. One clear consensus on what the role has become.
- Eight capabilities ranked by how often they came up across every table.
- Learning designed as a system: reflection journals, micro learning slots and peer forums, named by HR leaders as the highest leverage practice.
- Curriculum mapped to those capabilities and taught by IIM Bangalore faculty.
Who is this programme for?
Designed for organisations seeking to develop their managerial and leadership talent, the programme welcomes nominated managers, current leaders, and high potential professionals. Individual applicants may also join the programme, with the opportunity to apply their learning to a relevant real world business challenge through the capstone.
Who qualifies:
- Managers who have just taken a team or are about to. The programme suits startups, owner driven firms and traditional companies alike.
- Future leaders identified for succession, or spotted during talent reviews as next in line for cross functional or team lead roles.
- Established leaders rebuilding how they lead as their teams, structures and technology change around them.
- Self nominated candidates who bring a real organisational problem to anchor their capstone.
- Cohorts, not individuals. Organisations nominating a group get company specific calibration and a dedicated SPOC.
What's included:
- Six month blended learning programme with on campus immersion sessions at IIM Bangalore.
- Live online sessions by IIMB Faculty and Subject Matter Experts.
- Industry expert skills workshops, psychometric tools, reflection journals and micro learning slots.
- Capstone project guidance and support, anchored in your business.
- IIMBx Certificate of Completion on successful programme exit.
Faculty. IIM Bangalore
Programme Fees
Build the leader your next role demands in 2026
The shift from doing to leading requires more than experience it requires new capabilities. Build the confidence, judgement, and leadership skills to lead people, navigate complexity, and create impact at scale. Join the 2026 cohort and take the next step in your leadership journey.