If you were to look into the background of any company that is successful, the one thing that you are most likely to find is a team leader who has adopted a growth mindset. Letting go of a fixed mindset can be one of the best ways in which you can improve your chances of leadership success.
What is growth mindset?
Growth mindset is a belief and attitude that individuals have the potential to develop their abilities, talents, intelligence and emotional intelligence. This means that they believe that success comes from the desire to work through challenges. This is rather than avoiding them. A leader who has a growth mindset is someone who tends to focus on the process more than simply focusing on the outcome.
This is of course in contrast to a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset sees things like talent and intelligence as things that cannot be developed or changed and are fully fixed. Leaders in this category are fully results orientated. To them, challenges are failures.
How can a growth mindset help you team develop?
When you adopt a growth mindset you can improve the potential of your team dramatically. Plus, you can provide a healthy culture where accountability helps to drive growth in your business.
Even during times of crisis, if you prescribe to a growth mindset you will envisage opportunities for your team. You don’t believe in giving up or looking for someone or something to blame when things do not go well. In fact, quite the opposite. A team leader in a growth mindset will look for ways to increase the growth of the team and overcome any challenges that come their way.
How can you create and nurture a growth mindset?
If you are looking to adopt a growth mindset there are a number of practices that you can use. These will help to create the right mindset for you and your team.
- Embrace change – the world is a rapidly changing digital space. It is one that we need to embrace rather than fear.
- Be self-aware – in order to grow and change we need to understand where we are staring from. When you are self-aware you have the tools to make better decisions. Plus, you can explore the opportunities that will help grow your business.
- Disrupt yourself – with self-awareness comes the ability to disrupt yourself. This is something you should do before someone else does it for you. This allows you to become the one who is driving innovation.
- Understand and reward the value of learning from failure – failure happens. It is important to learn from your mistakes and use them to help you make better decisions in the future. Make failure one of the learning tools that you use within your organisation.
- Process should be part of an ongoing project – a key factor of the growth mindset if focusing on the process and not simply the result. You cant do everything perfectly, 100% of the time and this is why the process is just as important.
- Practise perseverance – Results do not happen overnight it is important to be patient and persevere in order to get the results that you are looking for. This is what will allow you to lead your team forward to a point where you will have more impactful goals.
