How to Cultivate a Growth Mindset
You might have heard the terms “growth mindset” or “fixed mindset” used before. What are they? How can they help your organization thrive? How do you model and instill a growth mindset for your employees? We’ll answer all these questions and more in today’s post.
Growth or fixed mindset refers to how a person perceives intelligence, learning, and failure. Those with a fixed mindset tend towards believing that a person’s intelligence and ability to learn and succeed are fixed and cannot be improved. They tend to see failure as the ultimate test of success. In contrast, someone with a growth mindset understands that intelligence can be improved by remaining open to learning new things, and that failure is only an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and improve for the future.
With a growth mindset, employees can more quickly and positively rebound from mistakes, are open to new ideas, and will more often be on the lookout for learning opportunities. But they can’t do it alone! Changing people from a fixed mindset to one oriented in growth and learning is difficult; people tend to be very set in their ways of looking at failure and success, but it IS possible to evolve their attitude over time. You, as a leader, have to be the one to model the behavior you want to see, and engage your employees in ways that are growth oriented. How do you do this? Here are a few strategies to consider.
Don’t Punish Failure
Failing at something is awful for everyone involved. Whether it’s a big project, a lucrative deal, or just a communication error, it’s hard to be the one that made the mistake, and most employees feel some amount of guilt over being involved with the poor outcome. But it’s important to remember that failure is an essential part of the learning process. It’s impossible to do everything right the first time, and why would you want to? Failure teaches us how to improve and do better next time. Failure, and the learning that comes from it, can take you from mediocre to expert.
A manager that is trying to instill a growth mindset in their employees shouldn’t punish or demonize failure. Instead, ask what the employee learned throughout the process and what they would do differently next time, to get them in the pattern of growing from their mistakes. This is often called a “postmortem”, but we prefer the term “after action review” (AAR). In fact, the AAR should be done after both failures and successes to help keep a growth mindset at the forefront. There can always be improvement, even if success was already the outcome.
Encourage Innovation
A key part of innovating is going through iteration after iteration, meaning that most ideas and solutions you come up with as part of this process simply won’t work. Some ideas seem like a sure bet, only to be trialed and found otherwise. You could view these attempts as failures, or you could celebrate that innovation is happening right in front of you. Every time your innovative ideas don’t go as planned, you are one step closer to meeting your goals.
Change is a prerequisite of innovation. Part of cultivating a growth mindset is being okay with change, both positive and negative, because it’s an integral part of growth. If you or your team are terrified of change, you won’t be able to innovate, advance, or learn from your mistakes as well as if you accept and embrace it.
Be sure to model a positive attitude towards change, even if it seems like it might not be a positive change. Your employees need your support and encouragement, and you never know what positive results might come from a seemingly disappointing situation.
Provide Training & Development
Help your employees keep up with the industry by providing them ample opportunities for formal training and development. Courses, certifications, or in-house training are all great ways to keep an open mind and prioritize learning and growing.
People with a growth mindset are always seeking to grow their knowledge base. Curiosity and a tendency to experiment and see what happens are often a key sign that someone has a more growth-oriented mindset than fixed. Encourage it!
Shift Leadership Often
MIT is a prestigious school known for creating leaders, but leadership isn’t actually something most MIT students aspire to. In fact, they tend to rebel against the idea. So how do they achieve such amazing success solving enormous problems without a formal emphasis on leadership? They take turns.
“Solving problems wins them prestige and brings them satisfaction. They recognize the value of being generally knowledgeable and well educated, but they pride themselves most on their deep expertise in particular areas. They don’t want to delegate their most creative, in-depth, specialized work, so they take on the burden of generalist leadership reluctantly and cede it readily. Leadership becomes an intermittent activity. People with enthusiasm and expertise step up as needed, and readily step out when, considering the needs of the project, another team member’s strengths become more central.” (Strategy-business.com)
Allow your employees to lead where they have the most experience, then pass leadership on to the next expert. This way the entire team gets a chance at leadership and outcome responsibility, without hoarding the “leader” role and edging others out.
It’s not easy to change how someone sees something as fundamental as intelligence and learning capacity seemingly are, but with good management and modeling of a growth mindset, it can certainly be done. The key is to prioritize growth over perfection, encourage innovation and experimentation, and accept mistakes positively and use them as a vault to success. It seems like a lot, but with a little practice, it’ll just be how your team operates by default. At that point, you’ll see teamwork and cooperation accelerate, innovation emerge, and positivity thrive!
By Jessica Palmer