Shubbrato Dutta lost his parents when he was quite young. There were monetary issues and to make his ends meet, he started doing odd jobs like managing a kitchen canteen and being a pick-up and delivery boy with a courier company in Kolkata. While he was with the courier company, the sales from his beat/territory started increasing many folds. His manager found out that it was because of Shubbrato’s interpersonal skills with the clients, the sales grew. Shubbrato always interacted with the clients at a personal level and made efforts to understand his client’s requirements and suggest appropriate solutions. He did not treat his work as a 9-5 job and just to meet targets. Soon he was promoted as the Territory Manager and this were Shubbrato’s first step in the corporate world. His career moved upwards and soon he joined a FMCG major and was posted in Bombay as their Regional Sales Manager.

While he was in Bombay, it so happened that there were some pending work in Kolkata and he had to be in the city for a few months to address those issues. He resigned from the Bank and was in Kolkata when through a friend he came to know of retail major that were looking for someone to train their employees. As his money situation was dwindling, on a whim, Shubbrato took up the assignment and there was no looking back since then. He started travelling all over the country and abroad conducting trainings. Starting from product trainings to enhancing skill sets of employees he has come a long way coaching, mentoring and becoming a motivational speaker.

Shubbrato started gathering his personal experiences from his failures, failed relationships, hardships and interactions with his other people, situations and locations. He started noting down behaviours of people and how they faced adverse situations. Having lost his parents early it was his sister and friends who stood by him and became a mirror in showing Shubbrato where he was doing great and where he was lacking.  Often he has found real life incidents giving him his learning’s which he continues to share his knowledge and has trained over 2.5 lakh professionals across all industries.

Being a motivational speaker is not easy and goes beyond class rooms. It is a 24 x 7 responsibility. There are quick coffee sessions where employees who discuss relationships, personal issues, and job related issues. No matter how many turbulences Shubbrato maybe having within himself, he is expected to put a smile on his face and respond to every query, request, advice, brick bat that comes his way. It is so because people at all levels look up to him and he cannot disappoint them. And he hasn’t disappointed them.

There was this time when he was working with a retail major and there was employee turbulence. A person in the senior management had apparently slapped a store worker and the workers went on a strike demanding an apology. So on a weekday the mall where the store was located was gheraoed by workers and the store could not be opened before the issue was resolved. The workers were angry and on the verge of being violent. The store manager requested the HR head and the concerned senior manager to come to the store and address the situation. It was here that the HR head pulled Shubbrato out of his training session and took him along to the store. The situation would have snowballed into a major controversy at a national level and with the media but on seeing Shubbrato, the crowd mellowed down because most of the crowd was trained by him and they respected him deeply. To see Shubbrato come and address became a matter of pride and respect for the aggrieved employees. Shubbrato heard them patiently and began counseling the leader with, how one mistake cannot be made right by making another. Shubbrato continued with this reasoning that responding to a wrong doing with another could be termed as an act of revenge! And that revenge never serves as a solution. He emphasized that making things right needs someone to put a full stop to the otherwise beginning of a chain of mistakes.  Shubbrato gave example of how it is not possible to clean a glass of dirty water by adding more water in the same glass! Though shaken from within, Shubbrato maintained a calm exterior, friendly posture and acted as a mediator between the aggrieved group and the management successfully. Post the talks, he was able to get the workers to open the store and resume duty without any untoward situation.

Shubbrato has developed some unique training to challenge the notions of participants like walking on broken glass and walking on fire. Initially participants are scared of these activities but then they participate wholeheartedly, this being the underlining idea. To remove any preconceived notions that the human mind has. Shubbrato leads by example and has been a self driven, self motivated person who has always believed in being a mentor to his team mates by training them in the smallest possible way, making them explore their own boundaries and helping them take a step ahead in becoming successful entrepreneurs. Besides being inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda and Netaji Shubhas Chandra Bose, he has been a keen follower of Dalai Lama and his teachings.

This story appeared in the Chicken Soup for the Indian Entrepreneurs Soul