Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa

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?

Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa will tap 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 by approaching this not as a trait to be acquired but as a state to be activated, and by shifting their focus from learning on the sidelines to leading in the flow of work. This work is the subject of Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa’s article, Leading in the Flow of Work, published as the cover story in Harvard Business Review in Feb. 2024.

Rapid and radical changes in business and society are requiring that today’s leaders advance not just their organization’s performance, but also their purpose and people. To succeed in this environment, leaders need to practice a very different — and demanding — skill set, where they can adapt their behavior moment by moment as conditions change, transcending the limitations of past habits and personality.

In this talk, Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa draws on fifteen years of his research and teaching that blends the science of human nature with historical study of great leaders to offer a fresh model for leadership that is simple, inspiring and accessible to all. He describes how leaders can attain great heights of effectiveness by activating their five core energies and translating them into simple actions that bring out the best in themselves and others in every situation. By operating from their inner core, leaders can develop their own personalized pathway to success, choosing the right actions in every situation, instead of following rigid frameworks and checklists.

The pandemic. Geo-political tensions. Social movements. Digital disruption. Leaders and institutions falling from grace. The old world-order is getting dismantled, and no one knows, as of now, what the new order is going to be. It’s being shaped, every day, by the small choices each of us makes. There will emerge, over time, some people who will play a bigger role in reforming their profession, advancing their community, rebuilding their institution and remaking their nation. These are the Changemakers.

What does it take to be a Changemaker in today’s times? How do we guide people toward a better future? How do we harmonize our values and core beliefs with societal and institutional expectations? In a talk that is peppered with inspiring stories of changemaking, Hitendra will draw on his research on transformative leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela to introduce you to 5 principles that show you how to become an agent of positive change.