{"id":59110,"date":"2026-08-31T12:02:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T06:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/2026\/08\/31\/the-work-beneath-the-work-inside-tutul-consultings-approach-to-organizational-transformation\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T12:02:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T06:32:03","slug":"the-work-beneath-the-work-inside-tutul-consultings-approach-to-organizational-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/2026\/08\/31\/the-work-beneath-the-work-inside-tutul-consultings-approach-to-organizational-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Work Beneath the Work: Inside Tutul Consulting\u2019s Approach to Organizational Transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"Tutul\"<\/p>\n

Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], August 31:<\/strong> The hardest\u00a0problems in organizations are rarely the ones on the agenda. A company may say it needs to professionalize, when the deeper challenge is that authority is still concentrated in a few individuals. A leadership team may ask for alignment, when the real issue\u00a0is a lack of trust. A culture initiative may be launched to keep pace with growth, when what\u2019s actually required is a shift in how leaders think and behave. A merger may be framed as integration, when the harder task is building a new collective identity.<\/p>\n

The visible problem is often only the entry point. Beneath it lie harder questions: How does power really work here? Which ways of working served the organization well earlier but have now become constraints? What does the organization need to become for its next chapter to be possible? As Sujata Deshmukh puts it,\u00a0\u201cWe look at leadership conviction and behavior to gauge what the ethos is, not what the Vision\/Values posters on the wall say.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the territory the founder of\u00a0Tutul Consulting<\/u><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>has spent almost three decades learning to navigate.<\/p>\n

Tutul is a boutique Organizational Development firm based out of Mumbai and Bengaluru, founded by Sujata Deshmukh after\u00a0almost two decades in consulting. Over nearly three decades, she has worked with more than 500 organizations across 12 countries and virtually every major sector. Tutul itself is seven years old and has worked alongside more than 100 organizations. But the\u00a0numbers tell only part of the story. What distinguishes the practice is the depth of its relationships, the complexity of the situations it\u2019s invited into, and its willingness to stay with an organization long enough to understand what\u2019s really happening.<\/p>\n

The Organization Behind the Organization<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every organization has a formal architecture: strategy, structure, processes, roles, governance. Alongside it exists another organization, less visible and often more powerful \u2013 made of relationships, history, identity, informal power, leadership behaviour, assumptions and unwritten rules. It determines who can challenge whom, how decisions really get made, and what becomes accepted as \u201cthe way things are done.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Tutul<\/u><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>works in this space between the formal organization and the one people actually experience. The starting point isn\u2019t\u00a0a prescribed intervention but an attempt to understand the system itself: What\u2019s happening beneath the surface? What\u2019s keeping the organization from moving forward? What needs to change in the organization itself for the desired future to become possible?<\/p>\n

At\u00a0the heart of this philosophy is a simple idea: the consciousness of an organization cannot be higher than the consciousness of its leaders. If leadership behaviour doesn\u2019t evolve, culture rarely does. If culture doesn\u2019t evolve, transformation rarely does.<\/p>\n

From Business to Organization to Institution<\/strong><\/p>\n

Much of Tutul\u2019s work can be understood through the journey from business to\u00a0organization to institution. Building a successful business is one achievement; building an organization capable of sustaining that success is another; building an institution that can endure beyond its current leaders and strategy is more profound still.<\/p>\n

This matters most at moments of transition \u2013 a family business outgrowing founder-led ways of working, a fast-growing company where informal culture starts creating friction, or a post-merger organization discovering that combining structures doesn\u2019t automatically create one organization.<\/p>\n

Tutul\u2019s work spans three interconnected dimensions: institution building (ambition, guiding principles, governance, capacity to evolve), culture building (behaviours and patterns that enable or constrain evolution), and leadership building (assessment, succession, coaching, helping leaders rise to the scale of the organization they\u2019re asked to lead). These rarely operate independently \u2013 which is why Tutul calls its work Organizational Development rather than a collection of separate services. The organization is treated as a living system, where change in one part affects the others.<\/p>\n

When the Obvious Answer Isn\u2019t the Real Answer<\/strong><\/p>\n

Leaders rarely call\u00a0<\/u><\/a>Tutul\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/u>because they have no answers. They call Tutul when they realize that the answers they have aren\u2019t quite solving the problem. The strategy may be sound, the structure redesigned, the team aligned \u2013 and yet something remains stubbornly unchanged.<\/p>\n

The obstacle may be trust rather than structure, power rather than process, identity rather than strategy. As Sujata Deshmukh describes it,\u00a0\u201cOur ability to plug into client realities and understand the narrative is top class. That allows us to do high context work.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s this that lets Tutul find where an intervention is most likely to create real movement \u2013 not a standard answer, but the real leverage particular to that organization.<\/p>\n

What This Has Looked Like in Practice<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tutul has been entrusted with very different organizational moments: a family enterprise transitioning to professional leadership, where the new top team first had to build trust before it could operate as one; a large diversified organization needing\u00a0culture to evolve alongside strategy amid rapid growth; a post-merger organization shifting from \u201cplaying not to lose\u201d to \u201cplaying to win\u201d; leaders stepping into bigger roles needing coaching to build confidence faster than experience alone allows; assessing and recommending hiring of the right person at CXO level, thus reducing Leadership Risk. Different assignments, same pattern: the visible challenge is only part of the story, and the deeper work is building the organization\u2019s capacity to sustain change.<\/p>\n

The Advantage of Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

A defining feature of Sujata\u2019s\u00a0practice is the longevity of her client relationships, some spanning decades. Time changes what a consultant can see \u2013 knowing an organization\u2019s history, what\u2019s been tried before, which changes have genuinely endured. It also changes trust: a long-term advisor can challenge a leadership team with greater credibility, moving the conversation from \u201cWhat do we need to fix?\u201d to \u201cWhat\u2019s the next level of possibility for this organization?\u201d In that sense, the relationship itself becomes part of the intervention.<\/p>\n

The Person Behind Tutul<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sujata Deshmukh\u2019s work sits at the intersection of organizational development, leadership, culture and institution building \u2013 particularly in situations with no neat answer, where the visible problem isn\u2019t the real one. Clients\u00a0ranging from a $3 billion EPC major to leading Consumer businesses, to an AI Product Company, to a cutting edge life science organization to an award-winning NGO point to her expertise, contextual understanding, and ability to bring reluctant people along.<\/p>\n

What the Name Stands For<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tutul<\/u><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>was Sujata\u2019s father\u2019s name; the firm was founded on what would have been his 75th birthday. His principles \u2013 doing the right thing, seeking the elegant\u00a0solution over the easy one, meeting commitments, and unconditional positive regard for people \u2013 shape the firm\u2019s approach: candour without judgement, challenge without diminishing people, rigour without unnecessary complexity. As Sujata Deshmukh puts it,\u00a0\u201cOur unconditional positive regard for clients means we respect a 25,000 crore organization the same way we respect a 100 crore start-up.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Different Kind of Advisory Relationship<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tutul\u2019s ambition isn\u2019t just expertise or frameworks, but trusted judgement \u2013 the kind of relationship where a leadership team can think aloud and confront uncomfortable realities. The goal isn\u2019t dependence on the advisor, but an organization more capable of navigating its own complexity.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Tutul is less interested in fixing organizations than helping them evolve. The deepest questions aren\u2019t about which intervention to run, instead it\u2019s about what an organization has become, what\u2019s holding it back, and what it needs to become for its next chapter to be possible.<\/p>\n

That is the work beneath the work \u2013 a journey of becoming, rarely measured in months, but in years and sometimes decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], August 31: The hardest\u00a0problems in organizations are rarely the ones on the agenda. A company may say it needs to professionalize, when the deeper challenge is that … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59111,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[448],"class_list":["post-59110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-business","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialtelegraph.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}