Core — Mentora Institute

Mentora just attended ATD ‘25

Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa delivered a session on The Inner Game of Breakthrough Performance and the Mentora team provided demos of the new leadership gym & performance coach, LiFT.

Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s ATD Keynote

The Inner Game of Breakthrough Performance

The behavioral skills needed to create high performance at work are hard to teach, and hard to master. But what if we’ve been searching for the answer in all the wrong places?

What if high-performance and exemplary leadership are less about “fixing” people by having them develop new skills and neural pathways, and more about “sparking” something within them by guiding them to tap into underutilized skills and neural pathways they already possess?

In his keynote, Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa shared his research, teaching and experiments at Columbia Business School and the Mentora Institute which reveal very positive new findings on how professionals can accelerate their path to high performance.

Five areas Hitendra explored in his talk where Mentora is helping our clients make the shift…

  1. From traits to a state
  2. From behaviors to (5) energies
  3. From competencies to (25) actions
  4. From learning to performing
  5. From broad-brush to moments-of-truth metrics

“Dr. Wadhwa’s stage presence, passion and energy is inspirational. The call to make leadership an inner choice and to shift the emphasis from learning on the sidelines to leading in the moment greatly resonated with our GMs in attendance and inspired them for a breakthrough performance. I deeply appreciate Dr. Wadhwa’s commitment to making our GM program a meaningful experience.”

George Cleveland, Senior Vice President, Learning & Development, AT&T

“LiFT (Mentora’s gen-AI coach) helped me land a verbal sign-off in a tough client moment – it’s like magic. For anyone in a commercial role, it’s a game-changer.”

VP, Client Partnerships, Kantar

Leading in the Flow of Work

You can read more on Mentora’s methodology through the articles below, including Dr. Wadhwa’s article, “Leading in the Flow of Work” that was recently selected for HBR’s “Top 10 Must Reads” on High Performance.

Meet

Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa

Hitendra is the author of “Inner Mastery, Outer Impact.” He has been a lifelong student of the world’s mystic traditions, and his mission is to discover, codify, and teach the laws of success in life and leadership. His pioneering ideas have been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Financial Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Inc., and Psychology Today.

As Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and Founder of the Mentora Institute, he has coached dozens of Fortune 100 C-suite executives and taught more than ten thousand MBAs, executives, doctors, lawyers, social activists, and educators. His class on Personal Leadership & Success at Columbia has for many years been the most popular leadership elective, earning him the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the Executive-MBA Commitment to Excellence Award.

Previously, Hitendra worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Co. and was the founder and CEO of a Silicon Valley startup, Paramark. He received an MBA and PhD in Management Science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and BA (with Honors in Mathematics) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

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