Growth mindset Embracing challenges to build organizational strength and resilience
In today’s competitive and complex marketplace, organizations that succeed have developed a culture that is willing to experiment with new ideas, commit to continuous improvement and support risk-taking even if it means failure the first time. A workforce that is open-minded and agile will meet the needs of customers, outperform competitors and deliver sustainable growth.
One of the biggest challenges a leader can face is creating a culture of innovative thinking that will lead to new and fresh business-building ideas. For many organizations, this means promoting a culture free from fear and negativity. Fear, negativity and distrust can fill employees with an unproductive and unhealthy internal focus on self-protection instead of thinking outward, seeking new ideas and serving the customer. These types of behaviors can stifle business success, and are likely caused by having a “fixed” instead of a “growth” mindset.
Success begins with the individual mindset
The notion of success being a product of individual mindset came to prominence with Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s groundbreaking book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006). Her research defined two distinct mindsets among people:
The FIXED mindset
is one that believes abilities, skills and intelligence are pre-set, and others with more talent will rise to the top. Behaviors of people with fixed mindsets include:
Avoiding challenges
Disliking learning situations because they are afraid of not knowing the answers
Concern with protecting their ego and inability to accept risk of a failure
Seeing little point in making effort toward a goal, and giving up easily
The GROWTH mindset
is one that believes abilities, skills and intelligence can be developed through determination, hard work, motivation and guidance from others. Success is determined by personal development. Behaviors of people with mindsets include:
Embracing challenges as an exciting way to learn
Believing that failures are opportunities to learn
Seeking opportunities for improvement and being open to feedback
Being persistent and creative in achieving goals
Leaders who want to bring new energy and ideas to their organization focus on how to develop a growth mindset among each employee. A growth-minded organization is one where employees are encouraged to accept challenges, be confident in developing new ideas and accept feedback as a means to personal improvement that will benefit the entire team.
Neuroscience support for a growth mindset
In the last half of the 20th century, the burgeoning field of neuroscience and its study of the complex workings of the brain revealed that we are innately wired for growth. Neuroscientists call this “neuroplasticity,” and it refers to the brain’s ability to change continuously throughout life when provided the right stimulus.
Growth mindset in action
Satya Nadella faced a Herculean task when he was appointed CEO of Microsoft in 2014. The company had seemingly lost its relevance in the hypercompetitive world of technology, and was losing out to Amazon, Apple and Google on every product front. Nadella moved quickly to develop new strategies, and also recognized that Microsoft’s culture needed a reboot. The culture had become rigid and hierarchical, suppressing the much-needed innovation to bring compelling new ideas to market and serve customers in more relevant ways. Employee evaluation systems were notoriously brutal and sowed fear among employees for being punished for mistakes or failures. Creativity and risk-taking were almost nonexistent.
Nadella credits adopting a growth mindset as the fuel that transformed Microsoft and led to its turnaround in both stock price and customer satisfaction. His growth-minded leadership as CEO included asking employees to become “learn-it-alls,” instead of “know-it-alls.” The internal competitive culture evolved into one focused on cooperation, collaboration, listening, learning and harnessing individual passions and talents.
Employees are now evaluated partly on how well they’ve acted as a collaborative team member. The infamous “stack ranking” developed by longtime General Electric CEO Jack Welch and adopted by Microsoft was eliminated. This system required managers to equally distribute rankings among employees between one and five, meaning twenty percent of employees had to receive the lowest rating of a five. Today, Microsoft employees are evaluated on three dimensions: individual impact, contribution to others and how other team members’ work is leveraged.
Developing a growth mindset for a resilient culture
The concept of the growth mindset has been used to improve individual and team performance in sports, education and business. At every level in an organization, the highest achievers have a hunger to learn and are motivated to improve. Leaders can develop a growth mindset by modeling and coaching on specific behaviors and practices:
Encourage smart risk-taking
In a fixed mindset culture, team members are fearful of being criticized for bringing new ideas forward and disrupting the status quo. Make sure your employees know that all ideas are welcome and accepted without judgment. Encourage solutions that may have some risk to implement, but great potential for reward.
One way to give employees an easy way to share new ideas is to create suggestion boxes, either through an email or physical location. Present the ideas from the suggestion box anonymously at team meetings for discussion. This method can help build confidence with employees once they see management and the team accept the new ideas. Over time, employees will become more comfortable bringing up new ideas in public.
Accelerate customer feedback loops
Customer feedback is essential to developing new products and services that are both relevant and compelling. Customer insights lay the foundation for new ideas. It’s important that your team doesn’t view customer feedback as criticism, but as opportunities to improve. A growth-minded organization accelerates its customer feedback loop to continuously learn and experiment with new ideas.
Embrace failure and its learnings
Thomas Edison has thousands of patents to his name. He also had thousands of other ideas that never saw the light of day. His attitude was, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Everyone fails, and failure is not the definition of one’s self-worth or success in life. Teams and individuals with a fixed mindset are afraid to think big because they want to avoid failure. They view failure as a personal shortcoming, not a learning opportunity.
To learn from experiments that didn’t go right, have your team analyze where the problems existed in the idea and what the options might be for improving upon the idea to make it successful. Creative problem-solvers are comfortable with trial and error. Reward them for that type of behavior.
Be open with your own challenges
Leaders with fixed mindsets feel compelled to appear right all the time, and they don’t see their own struggles as problems to be solved. Being open and vulnerable with your own hurdles is a way of modeling a growth mindset for your team. Best of all, share the strategies and techniques of how you overcame these trials.
Growth mindset teams share their challenges with each other and ask their peers to contribute solutions. This shared problem-solving is a way to build collaboration with team members instead of competition. A leader with a growth mindset accepts suggestions from every level or title and experience. Nothing is more refreshing than hearing a great idea come from an employee who is new to the organization.
Recognize individual accomplishments
Growth-minded leaders share credit with the entire team for successes. Individual accomplishments and contributions within the group should also be recognized and even rewarded if possible. Individual recognition around new ideas and solutions validates the growth mindset for other employees and encourages them to step out of their comfort zones to champion new ideas and take smart risks as well.
Send a clear message to your team by rewarding a growth mindset. You’ll be amazed at how this can supercharge the number of fresh solutions to meet customer needs.
Promote mindset, not skills
Talented employees with a growth mindset want new challenges and opportunities. Retaining these high-potential team members often means promoting them to positions in a new department or function outside their current skill set. If an employee has proven to operate with a growth mindset, assuming a new role with different responsibilities won’t be a problem, and it will model to other employees that it’s not just what you know, but how you learn and grow that matters.
Catch backslides in mindset
All of us have periods when the fixed mindset can creep back in. Maybe it’s caused from the pressure of a competitor suddenly encroaching on customers, or bumps in the overall economy that elevates fear around customer retention. Whatever the reason, address the fixed mindset behaviors with your team. Acknowledge the environment that might be causing the slide into “coasting,” and brainstorm actions the team can take to overcome it.
Hire for a growth mindset
One of the best ways to ensure employees have a growth mindset is to hire for it. To do so, develop specific questions around how a candidate deals with change, what motivates them, comfort with team collaboration and examples of creative problem-solving and idea generation.
