Five years ago, I was in a co-working space in Los Angeles with my Mentora faculty colleagues. I stood up and white-boarded a vision for a tool that would guide executives to the right behavior, in the right moment, to achieve the right goal.
We knew we had the right building blocks for this tool, with our model of activating the 5 core energies using a leadership alphabet of 25+ actions to take on any leadership challenge one faced. And yet, it was a vision quite ahead of its time, because we had no clue at the time how we’d solve the technical challenge of delivering personalized recommendations to users based on their unique circumstances.
Performance Labs – The First Major Breakthrough
Our first breakthrough came when we built a “Performance Lab” that executive participants would join after one of our training programs. Executives were invited to interact with a spreadsheet where they would articulate a goal for a key meeting that was coming up, then select which 3-5 Mentora actions they would use at this event, and practice these actions with a sparring partner.
I still remember the moment when the participants, who had been in virtual breakout rooms, came back to the plenary room and told us whether and how the exercise had been useful to them. I was thrilled by their reaction — they were gushing with gratitude for how valuable it was for them to pause and prepare in this way before going out to perform.
I remember sharing this comment with my Mentora colleague Dr. Josh Davis at that moment: “Josh, I think we’re on the verge of a major breakthrough in our work.”
Meeting Mentor – A 4-Step Approach to Boosting Performance
Next, we built an app, “Meeting Mentor,” where we added small steps, like setting a positive intention and doing a visualization of the meeting coming up, and manually mapped, using our expert judgment, each conceivable business/leadership goal with 3-5 recommended Mentora actions.
We put Meeting Mentor in the hands of 70 executives, and again, I was blown away by their response.
“I am so surprised how warm and open the other party was once I…”
“I achieved my goal in just a few minutes once I switched from my instinctual response to what Meeting Mentor had guided me to do.”
The quantitative results mirrored these responses, with users achieving their goal for the meeting 80%+ of the time.
Three years from the day in Los Angeles where we were white-boarding our vision, we seemed now to be very, very close to materializing it. An app that would guide you, for any meeting on your calendar, on how to prepare yourself to go in and deliver your best and bring out the best in others.
When we added up the results people reported, it was clear that Meeting Mentor was accelerating people’s performance by getting them to activate leadership qualities — actions and energies — that they possessed at their core but weren’t using actively at work, especially in moments that were challenging, conflict-laden, or requiring creative solutions.
GenAI – The Wildcard
What I did not realize back then was the wildcard that the universe was just about to throw into our world — GenAI.
I had been tracking the course of AI for many years — tools to track your emotional state, to report how much or how little you spoke at a meeting, et al. At no stage did I see anything that passed my scrutiny. I wasn’t taking AI seriously because it was far from delivering the right human experience.
All of this changed in Fall 2022 as generative AI burst on the scene. I started to play with ChatGPT and was captivated by the huge advancements AI had made in offering empathy, nuance, and a human touch. I remember moments of utter awe — me coaxing ChatGPT with the right prompts to show me its power, and it never disappointing. For instance, I made it take on the hardest role-play challenges we give to executives in our workshops, and it performed better than 95% of them.
So I gathered together two of my Mentora colleagues, and we became like little children going to school to learn everything they can about this magical new world —- the magical world of GenAI.
LiFT – A GenAI-Powered Coach to Accelerate Performance
After 18 months of ideating and innovating, having “tireless striving [stretch] its arms toward perfection”, we have now arrived at LiFT — our first GenAI-powered performance coaching tool. We’ve piloted it with 100+ early adopter executives, and we’re delighted with how astutely it guides users’ behaviors in the flow of work and helps them create performance breakthroughs.
The reaction we received most commonly from users with Meeting Mentor, the non-AI precursor to LiFT, was “I am pleasantly surprised”. The reaction we now receive most commonly with LiFT is, “I am amazed”.
Years ago, Einstein rang out an alarm bell for the world by observing that we had reached a point where our “technology has exceeded our humanity.” Perhaps now we have an opportunity to use AI-technology to advance our humanity.
Take LiFT for a test-drive and tell us what you think. Or even better, tell us how you feel.