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How to create a growth mindset organisation for success

More and more of the organisations that PCG works with realise that a growth mindset is essential for developing an innovative, resilient and successful business. Increasingly, companies are also focusing their attention on mindset at recruitment stage, recognising that people who are enthusiastic, willing to fail and open to learning and improving through such failures make great employees. In Part 1 of our series on creating growth mindset organisations, we look at why so many companies are turning their attention towards becoming a growth mindset organisation.

The power of beliefs

Managers with a fixed mindset are less likely to believe that people can develop their abilities and improve performance. Your belief in the ability of others to change has a direct impact on how and whether you choose to motivate others and encourage them to experiment with new learning strategies, persevere and learn from successes and failures.

Don’t let a fixed mindset lower team performance

How can a fixed mindset dampen enthusiasm and performance? Studies reveal that being managed by a fixed mindset boss leaves employees feeling demoralized, resentful and disengaged. Being managed by a fixed mindset boss leads to absenteeism and high turnover.

Referring to his research into the impact that fixed mindset managers have on their direct reports, mindset expert Professor Heslin of the Australian School of Business, advises:

“Employees resent feeling unsupported and underestimated. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be managed by someone who did not believe in your potential to improve your performance or advance in your career?”

5 tips and tricks to create a growth mindset organisation

  1. Focus on team and individual effort to foster a growth mindset culture. People with a growth mindset are passionate about learning new things and developing themselves. Seek out opportunities to help people objectively assess their performance and work with them to identify opportunities for further development.
  2. Celebrate progress alongside success. Make time to acknowledge and celebrate team and organisational progress. Recognise the hard work, strategies and processes that have enabled your team to learn new skills or excel at a new project. Encourage the team to think about how they tackled previous challenges.
  3. Use previous challenges to build resilience and motivation. When you and your team embark on a challenging new learning curve, remember previous achievements that involved challenge and learning how to work in new ways. Remind yourself and others that having a growth mindset helped you to achieve success and ask your teams to think about how previous challenges can help them with future projects.
  4. Encourage collaboration across your growth mindset organisation. Inspire your team to work across the organisation, sharing their skills and expertise for organisational success. Encourage your team to promote the benefits of a growth mindset approach when working with others, when there are more workers enthusiastically applying a growth mindset to the organisation’s vision and goals it becomes harder for those with a fixed mindset approach towards their work to ignore the message.
  5. Include growth mindset goals in your assessment processes. If you really want to embed a growth mindset culture into the fabric of your organisation then it’s essential to include growth mindset goals in development reviews and other employee assessment processes. Your teams will realise the genuine culture change at a deeper level when performance measures include growth mindset targets such as working collaboratively across the organisation, mentoring others, taking on new challenges and learning new skills rather than just the more rigid success or failure culture of assessment. Efforts should be concrete in word, deed and policies.

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