Leading in the Flow of Work
How to tap into the right intentions, words, and actions when you need them
This article was originally published in Harvard Business Review.
We are living in exceptional times. Organizations and leaders are getting buffeted by a host of challenges and shifts in the world.
The winners in today’s world will be those who continually tune in and respond to these shifts with agility by expanding both their own leadership capacity and that of their organizations.
The traditional approach to developing people isn’t geared for the speed and complexity of today’s conditions.
At Mentora Institute, and at Columbia Business School, we’ve researched and developed a practical and powerful new model — Leadership-in-Flow — for activating your people’s full potential.
If you’ve read “Leading in the Flow of Work,” our founder Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s latest article featured on the cover of Harvard Business Review’s Jan-Feb 2024 issue, then you’re aware that our approach invites you to take on 5 key shifts in how you do leadership development:
- Approach high-performance as a state, not a trait — by activating your inner core, the space within where you are beyond ego, attachment, and insecurity.
- Cultivate this high-performance state by activating the 5 core energies — Purpose, Wisdom, Growth, Love, and Self-Realization. Do your life’s most beautiful work by tapping these energies within, blending the material with the spiritual.
- Think of yourself not as one personality, but multiple personalities — depending on the situation you are in, the thoughts and feelings you’re having, and whom you are with.
- Don’t focus on cultivating new neural pathways, but on activating pathways that already exist within you, which you are not using actively at work. Do so by pausing and preparing before performing in high-stakes moments.
- Mix and match 25 simple actions across the 5 core energies to create almost any behavior you need, to adapt with agility and maximize your impact in the ever-shifting conditions around you.
Here are five pathways to bring Leadership-in-Flow into your organizations — and help your people attain high performance and exemplary leadership.
Keynotes
We typically think that ascending to high performance requires us to master new traits that we do not at present possess. But what if high performance isn’t a trait to be acquired — but a state to be activated?
This 60-minute keynote, Leadership-in-Flow – The Inner Game of Breakthrough Performance, conducted by Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa, aims at inspiring the audience to approach high performance as the discipline of activating their inner core and expressing their 5 core energies in all they do at work. They learn Leadership-in-Flow — a simple framework for how to respond with agility in an ever-changing environment by mixing and matching Mentora actions to engage in the right behavior at the right time. Here’s Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s speaker page.
Executive Retreats
We design and deliver immersive, experiential retreats — 3-5 days in duration — for your executive teams to guide them to make the five shifts we’ve laid out above. They will walk out feeling deeply connected with their 5 core energies, with training in the 25 actions to help them drive impact, and with a method for how to drive accelerated leadership performance in the flow of work. Here’s an example of a 3-day retreat.
Master Classes
We design and deliver 4-8 hour in-person and virtual Master Classes on a wide range of leadership competencies, all based on our Leadership-in-Flow approach, for participants across different levels of your organization. For each class, our learning design team will work with you to select the right Mentora energies and actions to fit your behavior-change objectives, and participants will walk away with a tangible method for practicing this new competency they’ve acquired in the flow of work.
AI-Powered Performance Coaching
LiFT is a new and path-breaking coaching tool that helps all professionals — from C-suite executives to emerging leaders to individual contributors — tap into their own natural faculties to create near-instant boosts in performance by shifting their intentions, mindsets, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, in real time and on demand. LiFT offers users precise and situation-specific guidance, and is powered by a generative-AI model that is trained in Mentora’s proprietary Leadership-in-Flow approach. It provides:
- Personalized, actionable guidance and actions steps, on demand and in real time
- Mindset coaching for all important events
- A safe space to practice and prepare for real-world crucial conversations
- Custom prep plans with meditations and affirmations to help users center
- Tangible performance and success metrics
- Access to our on-demand video library for self-paced learning — BBC-trained on-camera training by our Faculty on Mentora actions
Performance & Change
We work closely with clients to co-design Performance Acceleration and Organizational Change initiatives. We will help you diagnose and define the change needed, and then do design workshops with key stakeholders to create the right mix of culture-change interventions.
Insights
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