Ankna Kaul has spent two decades working across leadership, service excellence, organisational culture and people excellence. Her career has taken her from luxury hospitality to consulting, leadership development, academia and one of India's leading business conglomerates, providing her with the opportunity to work with leaders, teams and future talent across diverse industries and organisational contexts.
She began her career with The Indian Hotels Company Limited (Taj Hotels) and later Hyatt Hotels, where she learnt that service excellence is not created through processes alone. It is shaped by leadership, culture and the everyday experiences people have at work. Those early years laid the foundation for her interest in understanding how organisations create environments where both people and performance can thrive.
As her career evolved, Ankna's work expanded from consulting into enterprise-wide talent and leadership initiatives at the Tata Group. Through consulting, she partnered with organisations on leadership development, organisational culture and people-focused initiatives across industries. At the Tata Group, she managed flagship learning and talent programmes, working closely with business leaders, academic institutions and partner organisations to create meaningful development experiences for emerging talent and future leaders. Alongside her corporate career, she has taught and spoken at universities and professional institutions, contributing to conversations on leadership, service excellence and the future of work.
Working across these different environments gave Ankna a broad perspective on how organisations approach leadership. While industries, cultures and business priorities differed, many of the leadership challenges remained remarkably similar. Organisations were investing in leadership development, employee experience, wellbeing, culture and performance, yet these conversations often existed independently of one another, even though employees experienced them as part of the same organisation.
These observations led to the development of PEARL™, a leadership architecture that brings together the different elements influencing how leadership is experienced across an organisation. They also became the foundation of her first book, Creating [Better] Leaders: A Shift Every Organisation Needs with P.E.A.R.L.
Today, Ankna continues to write, speak and contribute to conversations that help organisations create workplaces where leadership, service excellence and people experience reinforce one another to produce meaningful and sustainable outcomes.
