Lead Digital Transformation With A Growth Mindset

In her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck defines a growth mindset as the belief that “most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”
 
Traditionally applied to education, harnessing this mindset as a business leader can mean the difference between subsisting and thriving in today’s tough economic climate.

Encourage Innovation by Tolerating Failure and Risk

Entrepreneurs with a growth mindset thrive on challenge and view failure as an opportunity to stretch and grow one’s existing abilities. Instead of getting hung up or derailed when things don’t turn out as planned, leaders with a growth mindset view failures as learning opportunities for both themselves and their employees.

Adopting this approach helps employees to see failure as a temporary setback, encourages resilience, and creates a culture of learning and improvement. It also allows team members to work outside their comfort zone, learn from their mistakes, and develop new skills, abilities, and approaches for tackling difficult tasks. Cultivating an environment where risk-taking is rewarded rather than shunned promotes innovation, encourages creative problem solving, and enables employees to reach their full potential.

Failure has a number of other benefits for individuals and organizations. In addition to building creativity, resilience, and character, it can actually make you smarter. Your brain grows when it experiences failure. By taking in new information and compiling takeaways from trial and error, the brain forms new neural pathways, resulting in more efficient synapses and improved ability to solve novel problems.

“The only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.— Mark Zuckerberg

Business Growth Requires Feedback

Growth mindset leaders are not only open to feedback, but they actively solicit it. Instead of being defensive when others share their concerns, leaders with a growth mindset readily embrace feedback as a means to improve themselves and their business. When teams are empowered to share their ideas without fear of judgement or reprisals, collaborative discussion and diversity thought are inevitable outcomes.

Additional feedback may be gained by hiring a professional business coach who can help to alert business leaders to blind spots, clarify business vision, and hold business owners accountable to their goals.

Someone with a fixed mindset views feedback as static and permanent—and will often take offence or become defensive when receiving feedback. Those with growth mindsets view feedback as an opportunity to understand others’ perspectives and use the information to inform and improve future behaviour.

Employee Engagement Requires Recognition

Ensure that you acknowledge and recognize employees who have a growth mindset. By rewarding effort, rather than just a successful outcome, you acknowledge the work that went into the process and encourage employees to continue to develop their skills. While prizing results is the traditional basis for most compensation schemes, acknowledging effort encourages autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and improves employee motivation and success in the long run.

Rewarding effort doesn’t necessarily have to mean paying out bonuses or hefty salaries. It can be as simple as genuine praise, acknowledgement at a staff meeting, a handwritten note, or a coffee gift card. Kind encouragement from business leaders does wonders for making employees feel valued and appreciated. It engenders employee loyalty and reinforces desired behaviour. Recall classical conditioning from psychology 101 — what gets rewarded gets repeated.

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy off all.” — Michael LeBoeuf

It’s important to be self-aware and recognize when fixed mindset thinking rears its ugly head—like avoiding trying new things for fear of failure, or assuming that the way it’s always been done is good enough. One must adopt the mentality that anything can be learned with consistent effort and a willingness to fail along the way. Implementing these three hacks in your business operations will ultimately result in better work relationships and higher performance levels.

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