XLRI Xavier School of Management (XLRI) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Dale Carnegie India to jointly develop and offer behavioural and leadership development programmes for management students, executive education participants and working professionals.
The partnership, announced on Monday, will be implemented through XLRI Leadership Education and Development (XLEAD), the institute’s executive education arm. The two organisations will jointly design and deliver programmes on business communication, executive presence, influencing and persuasion, business storytelling, executive coaching, presentation skills and public speaking.
The programmes will be offered in classroom, online and blended formats. The organisations said participants would receive industry-recognised certifications on completion of the courses.
The collaboration comes as management institutes are increasingly expanding their curricula beyond traditional classroom teaching to include workplace competencies such as communication, negotiation, leadership and team management. Employers have also placed greater emphasis on behavioural and interpersonal skills as professionals move into managerial roles and workplaces become more technology-driven.
In recent years, several higher education institutions have entered into partnerships with industry and training organisations to strengthen executive education offerings and improve graduates’ workplace readiness. Business schools have also been expanding short-duration executive programmes aimed at working professionals seeking to upgrade their leadership and managerial capabilities.
According to Dale Carnegie India, the partnership reflects the growing importance of behavioural and leadership skills as advances in technology and artificial intelligence automate more routine and analytical tasks. It said organisations are placing greater emphasis on capabilities such as judgement, communication, influence and collaboration, particularly as professionals move into managerial roles.
“As routine work and complex analysis are increasingly handled by technology, competitive advantage is migrating to a narrower set of human capabilities. The premium shifts to what machines cannot easily replicate: judgement, influence, trust, alignment, and the ability to inspire people toward a shared outcome. For years, these were treated as ‘soft skills’ — useful, but secondary to technical competence. That distinction is becoming obsolete inside organisations, particularly at the early and mid-career stages, when professionals begin to move from individual contribution to broader influence,” Dale Carnegie said in a press statement.
Dale Carnegie India, a division of Walchand PeopleFirst Ltd and the exclusive master franchisee of Dale Carnegie Training in India, said it has trained more than 700,000 professionals over the past two decades.
Founded in 1949, XLRI is among India’s oldest business schools. The institute offers postgraduate, doctoral and executive education programmes and has campuses in Jamshedpur and Delhi-NCR.
“The labour market our students step into rewards those who can think clearly, communicate with empathy and lead with integrity; the very human element no machine can imitate,” Fr Sebastian George, S J, director of XLRI, said.
Pallavi Jha, chairperson and managing director of Dale Carnegie India, said behavioural excellence and leadership capabilities would become increasingly important for professionals. “Our partnership is founded on the belief that behavioural excellence and leadership capability will be among the most important career accelerators for professionals in the years ahead,” she said.
