Ghulam Sumdany Don: Chief Inspirational Officer at Don Sumdany Facilitation

Ghulam Sumdany  Don  is the pioneer behind the soft skill training programs of Bangladesh, started his career with ADCOMM and Philip Morris International before starting his own venture- Don Sumdany Facilitation and Consultancy. He is the only triple certified trainer in Bangladesh, completing "Facilitation and Training Skills" with certified Master-trainer Sarah Krasker at the Master Trainer Institute (France) and "Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)" certification by American Board of NLP, trained by global NLP Master Coach, author and trainer from NLP Top Coach Asia (Thailand) Sebastian Leblond. He has over 100 clients right now. Don Sumdany Facilitation is the nation’s largest soft skill training facilitator based on audience reach.

The Start-

Ghulam Sumdany don is the founder and Chief Inspirational Officer of Sumdany Facilitation and Consultancy which is the biggest name of the country, training up 1200+ full-time employees of Grameenphone, Chevron, Perfetti, Holcim, Berger, financial institutions- EBL, Prime bank, Dhaka bank and big NGOs such as BRAC, Water Aid, Plan Bangladesh, CARE Bangladesh, Practical Action, JAAGO, Democracy International and many more . Don Sumdany Facilitation has an unparalleled reach among audience compared to any other training facilitator because of their active presence in Facebook and other social media, newspapers, publications, etc. Back in 2013 when he was in Phillip Morris International, he was shot and his car was robbed by a burglar, it was a trauma of life for him. After the incident, he used to be haunted by the incident and it negatively affected his performance. .The incident made him realise the value of life and he wanted to do something meaningful for people. Hence, Don Sumdany was born.  He used to take sessions in universities which he felt that an area to work on. So, he started the facilitation leaving job from PMI. Before starting it, he took some time to design the facilitation. He launched the business on his birthday so that his legacy continues even after his death throughout his facility.

He trained more than 2,500 people with his innovative training module and each month on average he trains more than 300 people from different corporates. He has a show on ABC radio called, look Who’s talking where politicians, corporate people, movie stars come and discuss different issues. He also writes for the Daily Star, Ice Today, etc. They have 180 videos on YouTube on different topics mostly on the feedbacks from corporates about the training programs offered by Don Sumdany Facilitation.

Initial Challenges

Tons of challenges were faced by Don when he pursued his career as freelance training facilitator:

Starting from the scratch: The beginning of Don Sumdany Facilitation was from his home and the only asset of the company was a laptop. Continuing the business from home for 6 months, he started getting popularity and after a while, he took a co-working space in Hub-Dhaka. The business started from zero and it earned and grew. The growth process was organic and the business was never in debt or never taken fund from any investor.

Too Young to be taken seriously: As he is young, many underestimated his capacity delaying the desired response at the beginning. People were not confident enough to offer jobs to Don, because they felt Don is young and lacks experience. 

Background: Another stumbling block for him was his educational background. He completed his study from ULAB, so people underestimated him because he was not from any reputed business school. He dealt with the negative perception of people during the initial days due to these issues.

Lack of consciousness on training: The largest blockade was the consciousness of training. Many of the large corporates never arranged a training program for the development of employee as they ignore the importance of training and development programs.  Some of these corporates are getting out of the box and are arranging different training programs now but it is not sufficient enough. But good thing is, after attaining programs and modules offered by the trainers they understood how important corporate training is. One mysterious thing is some companies communicate with the trainers for training but they don’t proceed further with the training for some reason.

Limited Understanding: People mix up between corporate trainer and motivational speaker. Mostly corporate training and motivation speech are treated as the same. But in reality, they are not the same thing. Corporate training focuses on self-development of an employee by improving the soft skill set required to perform the job. Motivation speaker shows career path and removes hesitation and depression by making speeches intended to motivate or inspire an audience. They need to understand the difference.

Need for training

Training is necessary for everyone, especially for people hailing from corporate sectors. Corporate leaders are understanding the necessity of training seeing foreign trainers in social media. Many of these leaders getting interested to arrange training programs. The organization is updating its process by integrating advanced technologies and using all the recognized methods for process efficiency. But all companies will be stuck in some places because there will be no room for additional improvement in infrastructure or process. So the only way to improve efficiency is to develop employee soft skills. The organization which understands the importance of soft skills training has already taken initiatives to develop their employees.

Employees of a financial institution need to deal with clients. So they need to be on top of his performance in case of delivery of service. But the employees of financial institutions do not have the highest level of skill set required to provide excellent service quality, as they don’t think out of the box, never challenge the status quo, lacks etiquette grooming. He trains these people from Financial Institution how to think out of the box, how to deal with the customer maintaining etiquette etc.

ROI of corporate training

Team Building is crucial for corporate because in corporate arena there can be no one man show. There is no exception for Financial Institution. Employees need to work on the team building to get the desired output for the organization. Don Sumdany Facilitation and Consultancy works on team building in the corporate sector. In the corporate sector, there is a gap between different departments. For example, there is a gap in the mindset of head office employees and field level employees.  Head office employees think that field people are not up to the standard and the field executives feel that they bring revenue for the company and head office people just sit and work. Team building sessions are designed to make people understand how important team building is and how to work with a team. The trainer encourages team building through arranging games and events in a teambuilding session.

Teambuilding in Financial Institution

Teambuilding is crucial for corporate because in corporate arena there can be no one man show. There is no exception for Financial Institution. Employees need to work on the team building to get the desired output for the organization. Don Sumdany Facilitation and Consultancy works on team building in the corporate sector. In the corporate sector, there is a gap between different departments. For example, there is a gap in the mindset of head office employees and field level employees. Head office employees think that field people are not up to the standard and the field executives feel that they bring revenue for the company and head office people just sit and work. Team building sessions are designed to make people understand how important team building is and how to work with a team. The trainer encourages teambuilding through arranging games and events in a teambuilding session.

Plans down the line

The vision is to be the country’s largest training facilitation company which includes planning of having a 360-degree product portfolio, keeping their footprint in all formats of media existing now and might evolve in future. He believes that there is no end of learning, learning is the only truth. And Don Sumdany Facilitation wants to be the learning platform for people. Don is working on an online learning platform. Though the market is not ready for online learning platform in Bangladesh he is hopeful that in a few years market will be ready for this platform.