Inner Mastery, Outer Impact
Our work is based on our founder Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s Inner Mastery|Outer Impact model of leadership developed at Columbia Business School. It is informed by Mentora Research’s findings on human potential drawn from multiple scientific disciplines, studies of great leaders and movements through history, and behavioral experiments run by Mentora Labs.
Inner Mastery| Outer Impact starts with redefining leadership. Instead of viewing it in terms of your power and position, we invite you to see leadership as the discipline of bringing out the best in yourself and the best in others in all situations, in the pursuit of a common positive purpose.
What is your “best”?
At the heart of Inner Mastery | Outer Impact lies a simple yet powerful idea: that you are at your best when you operate from your Inner Core. Your Inner Core is the space of highest potential within you. When you are at your Core, you are beyond ego, attachments and insecurities. You are committed to a noble cause, connected to the people you work with and serve, curious and open to new learning, calm and receptive to truth in whichever form it comes to you, and centered in your tranquil and joyful spirit within.
You are sometimes at your Core, and sometimes you drift away from it. Like us all.
So a great leader first focuses on activating their own Core, and then strives to activate other people’s Core within their team and organization.
What lies at our Core?
Everything we do requires energy – our thoughts, our emotions, our speech, our behavior, all are fueled by energy we draw from within. When we draw the right energy in the right amount, from ourselves and others, we will get the right behavior. When you learn to activate and direct your energies, you can use these to bring out the right behavior in yourself. Mentora’s research reveals that there are 5 Energies we all possess at our Core – Purpose, Wisdom, Growth, Love and Self-Realization.
So a great leader first focuses on activating their own Core, and then strives to activate other people’s Core within their team and organization.
- Purpose aligns your intentions, actions and goals with a set of bedrock values and an uplifting purpose.
- Wisdom uncovers the truth in all matters, and channels your thoughts and emotions in service of your Purpose.
- Growth makes you take small steps every day to get closer to your Core and to express it in all you do.
- Love takes joy in others’ joy, and finds success in others’ success, fostering caring and connection with those you engage with and serve.
- Self-realization recognizes the presence within you of a tranquil and joyful spirit.
From energies to actions
We can activate these Core Energies in ourselves and others by taking small, simple actions. At Mentora, we analyzed over one thousand conversations, speeches, and interactions across a range of great leaders and movements and identified a library of of 4-10 actions that can be used to activate each Core Energy. We teach these actions in our leadership development programs, and help our clients embed these actions in their culture.
What about behaviors and competencies?
Any behavior (or competency) is ultimately a set of actions. So instead of teaching behaviors in separate modules, we teach participants a set of simple actions and how to combine these on their own, as needed, to form the behavior they need in a given situation. Think of the actions as Lego blocks. We teach people how to use these Lego blocks (the actions), so that they are then free to build a farm, or a fire station, or a school, or a home (the behaviors) as needed. Or think of them as the 26 letters of the alphabet. Rather than teaching you five hundred different words, we teach you the 26 letters (the actions) and how to combine them to form the right words (the behaviors), empowering you then to find the right words (behaviors) for every occasion, based on these letters (actions).
Moving from Behaviors to Actions brings five key benefits.
Behaviour based training
- The list of behaviors a learner needs to be good at to be successful keeps growing as conditions keep changing.
- Learning a new behavior is complicated. It requires us to remember and practice a number of skills, all simultaneously, to fully execute the new behavior.
- Each behavior has its own toolkits, checklists and experts. So a learner has to learn a lot of disparate content.
- Training on behaviors can come across as imposed, and the learner may feel inauthentic in enacting a fixed behavior.
- Having to enact a certain behavior – to follow a scripted set of steps for that behavior – leads learners to be inflexible.
Actions-based training
- A learner only needs to learn the 5 Core Energies and around 3-10 actions per energy. This will allow them to build whatever behavior is needed in a given situation. As conditions change, the learner doesn’t have to learn new actions – they just need to recombine them in different ways to form different behaviors.
- Learning a new action is easy. Each action typically takes 5-10 seconds to execute. So it is simple to learn and simple to execute.
- Different behaviors are all built from the same underlying library of actions. A learner starts to see a consistency in how they show up and behave, across all situations they find themselves in.
- In all moments, learners are invited to choose for themselves which action to use next. No predefined sequence is imposed on the learner. And learners are taught how to initiate the action first on the inside, by shifting their intentions, thoughts and emotions, before executing the action on the outside. This makes them feel whole and authentic in acting out the action-path (behavior).
- Learners can switch from one action to another, moment by moment, as conditions change – making them agile.
How can we use these actions to have real impact at work?
The traditional model of learning is to teach people a lot of concepts and tools, then expect them to internalize these and practice them on their own. The trouble is, most learners forget most of what they’ve learned after a few weeks or months, and they don’t invest the effort or time required to practice and apply their learnings in the high-pressure high-stakes situations at work. This leads to the learning-doing gap.
At Mentora, we’ve tapped the science of learning to help learners take big leaps in performance, through small steps. Each learner is invited to create their own personalized learning path by selecting a goal they have for how they want to step their game up in the next few days. Based on their goal, they are recommended a small set of 2-3 actions to start using immediately.
Our digital learning platform guides them in planning, preparing and executing these actions. The goal is not to move them instantly to optimal performance – this would be an unrealistic expectation! – but to make them experience tangible, small gains – a 10 or 20% improvement – that then motivates them to learn and execute more actions. With every small step they take – every simple action they learn and practice – they become increasingly versatile, being able to combine these actions into a wide range of behaviors that apply to more and more situations.
This “small steps, big leaps” approach leads to much better learning outcomes and impact because learners are asked to only:
- Learn and practice 2-3 simple actions at a time.
- Learn actions that apply to their immediate, high-priority goals at work.
- Go into their meetings prepared to execute a few new actions rather than an elaborate new behavior.
- Expect incremental-but-meaningful gains that show them how they have benefit from their small investment in learning.