For more than 10 years, we’ve helped organizations around the world achieve performance breakthroughs that are both measurable – and sustainable.

Many performance-improvement solutions in the market today offer personalized, micro-learning content. While they are a huge step forward in putting learning in the flow of work, they have some critical limitations:

1. The profusion of content employees are offered — videos, blogs, articles, tips, nudges — is leading to information overload, and a steep decline in learner engagement.
2. Employees are nudged to do one thing, then another, then a third — without an integrative thread. There is no unifying framework or philosophy behind the performance advice being offered. This limits employees’ ability to transfer learnings from one situation to the next, since each situation seemingly requires its own treatment.
3. Employees are pushed to perform, and then separately, are given resources to minimize stress and boost their mental health. The assumption is that work, inherently, is stressful. Mentora’s research shows that exemplary leaders create a climate where employees experience joy and fulfillment at work, even when they are working hard, rather than stress and burnout.
4. Performance improvement is seen as separate from minimizing stress and boosting mental health — though performance and stress/mental health are all related.

What’s a performance breakthrough? At Mentora, we define this as follows:

Mentora can help you drive performance breakthroughs along any aspect of your business by using the following distinctive steps:

1. Give employees an understanding of where high performance comes from — the inner core and the 5 core energies.
2. Translate their performance challenges into a guided set of goals and the actions they can take to achieve these goals.
3. Focus each employee on their high-stakes events — where they have the greatest motivation to make behavior and mindset change.
4. Make them focus on one goal, and on a few actions. Aim for 20% improvement at any one event.
5. Train them on core actions that will help them not just advance their performance in the current situation, but also in future situations.
6. Allow them to personalize their path to performance improvement. No one-size-fits-all.
7. Focus not simply on what they should do — but on what energy they should bring to the room. Help them self-soothe and shift into a positive intention state.
8. Don’t hardwire the path they should follow — give them the tools through which they can sense and adapt.
9. Quantify, track, and make tangible their growth and impact.

1. Many organizations today use the traditional approach of designing a competency model and then training executives on these competencies. But this model is never complete (new behaviors are added all the time) and ever complex (it’s near-impossible to get leaders to pursue mastery in all the competencies).
2. Traditional leadership practices were built for a more stable, predictable world. In the complex and ever-changing conditions today, a more sense-and-adapt, fluid, open approach is needed.
3. Many executives are skeptic — they don’t buy into the behaviors prescribed as the recipe for career success. They want to operate with behaviors authentic to them.
4. Learning is often not transferred into practice. Even when an executive is bought in to a set of behavior prescriptions, in their day-to-day rush of work, they revert to their habitual behaviors — their comfort zone.
5. It’s hard to measure the impact of learning interventions.

At Mentora, we frame leadership in a simple, mathematical way that applies to all roles, all moments — and all levels of an organization.

This makes leadership an inner choice, moment by moment, rather than an outer dispensation.

The seven principles below are at the core of Mentora’s intuitive, simple, and personalized approach to developing exemplary leaders:

1. Focus not on cultivating new traits but on activating a high-performance state — the inner core — in yourself and others.
2. Engage 5 core energies — Purpose, Wisdom, Growth, Love, and Self-realization. This is the DNA of great leadership. These energies create an inner shift in our thoughts, feelings, values, mindsets, and intentions, which then leads to an outer shift in behavior and performance.
3. Use simple Actions to activate the 5 core energies in ourselves and others. These actions make leadership authentic, agile, and attainable.
4. Just 25 core actions (and 25 advanced actions) can allow you to practice a diversity of leadership behaviors and styles — to be “everything, and the complete opposite” — based on what the situation demands from you.
5. Many of these actions aren’t new to us. And yet, we don’t tend to use them in our leadership moments because we (a) are stressed, (b) are not centered, (c) are unable to see possibilities in turning around a situation, (d) focus on the technical/ functional — and not the human-dimension in our interactions, and (e) don’t walk into key moments adequately prepared for the people dynamics that will unfold there. This ends up limiting our performance and impact.
6. People should be given simple, minimal guidance on outer behavior, and instead should be invited to pay attention to and shift their inner state to evoke the right outer behavior. They will do the right thing on the outside once they activate the right state on the inside (thoughts, feelings, mindsets, intentions).
7. Leadership development should happen in the flow of work, by engaging in regular, short-burst preparations to center you and prepare you to bring out the best in yourself and others. This yields immediate performance improvements and, over time, atomic habits.

At Mentora, we define an Inspired Organization to be a collective of people who come together joyfully to do their life’s best work in the service of a noble cause.

An Inspired Organization actively nurtures the 5 core energies. Everyone, from senior leaders to frontline staff, strive to be:

• Committed to a noble cause
• Calm and receptive to truth
• Curious and open to growth
• Connected with each other and those they serve, and
• Centered in their joyful spirit within

Mentora’s approach to supporting our clients in driving organizational transformation is based on the following 10 steps and principles. The focus of our work is on the mindsets, values, shared sentiments, trust-building, interpersonal dynamics, conflict resolution, and behaviors that drive culture and performance.

• Define a clear, inspiring vision of the end-state. You need this vision to pull people forward, because change is never easy. This is the starting point of all communication relating to the transformation.
• Establish a clear, objective view of the current-state. Establish the gap that needs to be closed.
• Start the transformation journey with the top team. To change an organization, the top team needs to be fully invested and committed to the change, speak in a unified voice, and model the change for employees.
• Cascade the change to other levels of the organization in stages, starting with the direct reports of the top team and their teams. Identify and recruit champions, but also actively engage with those critics who may be resisting change and yet have the best interest of the organization at heart.
• Identify the 5-6 key shifts in core beliefs, mental models, and mindsets that are needed across the organization, and focus on engineering these shifts. Guide managers on how to be coaches, around helping their teams make these shifts.
• Use a range of change levers — training, communication, performance management, org rituals, recognition, storytelling, and more. Identify the bright spots, where the right mindset and culture is starting to come together, and put a spotlight on these.
• Do not invalidate past practices or people just because it’s not working today. Honor the past, and embrace the future.
• Anticipate and proactively tackle potential roadblocks and risks that you’ll face along the change journey.
• Do fast low-cost experiments, track, learn, modify, and experiment again. Lots of new experiences and challenges come up in the transformation journey, so experimentation is key to learning and evolving your way to success.
• Guide people with the right pivotal behaviors — simple behaviors that strike at the heart of the change you are seeking — and with the right “what-if” guidelines that help them know how to respond in new, improved ways in different situations.