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3 reasons to be a smart growth mindset business

October 19, 2016 by Viv Thackray Leave a Comment

What’s so hot about a growth mindset culture?

A host of business trailblazers such as Microsoft, Spotify, Quest and Google are actively developing a growth mindset culture within their organisations. What makes a growth mindset such an important component of a successful business?

1. People who work in a growth mindset business create and innovate more readily than those in fixed mindset organisations

It may seem strange to think organisational mindset can dictate to creativity and innovation, creativity is an ability we can all develop right? But scratch beneath the surface of a fixed mindset organisation and you’ll discover a huge fear of failure threading through the entire hierarchy of the organisation. A fixed mindset has the same attributes for organisations as it does for individuals, the belief that you’re either good at a task or you’re not, talented or not, capable or not. Because there’s no such thing as regarding failures as part of the learning curve on the road to success (think James Dyson’s 5000+ prototypes of his revolutionary vacuum cleaner before he achieved success) people in fixed mindset organisations become fearful to experiment and try new ideas for fear of failure. This stifles creativity and innovation and has an obviously negative impact on the progress that a company is able to achieve.

2. People are more likely to trust each other in a growth mindset business

Research shows us that people who work in a growth mindset organisation are more likely to trust their colleagues. There are number of possible explanations for this, the first may be related to the fact that in a fixed mindset organisation employees are guarded about their expertise and knowledge, making them reluctant to share their smarts with others for fear of diluting their reputation as the person with superior, specialist ability. Secondly, current research also reveals that those working in a fixed mindset organisation are more likely to cut corners and keep secrets in their quest to promote their virtuosity in a company where talent rather than effort is paramount. Not a great recipe for trust.

3. A growth mindset business encourages and capitalises on failure

Leaders in truly growth mindset businesses recognise that their people’s approach to failure is the key to success. The growth mindset business encourages new ideas and growth by framing failure as the route to mastery. Growth mindset leaders ask crucial questions such as what can we learn from this situation? How can this help us with future projects? What do we need to change, tweak or strengthen here? By contrast, when failures occur in a fixed mindset organisation blame is attributed, individuals are measured and found wanting and a failure to learn from mistakes is a precious but missed opportunity.

Here at Positive Change Guru we love to talk about all things growth mindset. Check out our forthcoming events or get in touch to find out more about our suite of courses and discuss bespoke growth mindset training for your organisation.

PCG and IProvision team up for National Wellbeing Tour

August 23, 2016 by Viv Thackray Leave a Comment

National wellbeing tour

PCG is delighted to be working with IProvision to provide a national series of wellbeing workshops. The sessions will use techniques and tools from positive psychology to increase resilience and performance.

Sponsored by the CIPR benevolent fund iprovision, this is a national tour of a stimulating interactive workshop that was piloted in Russell Square earlier this year. The first stop of the tour will be Newcastle on 1st September.

The workshop

Aimed at helping employees and bosses manage stress in the workplace and achieve a better work-life balance, it will revolutionise the way you get to grips with stress, performance and resilience.
Iprovision has joined forces with business psychologists and trainers Viv and Gill Thackray, from the leading consultancy Positive Change Guru, to offer this two-hour fun, and potentially life-changing, session.

Positive Change Guru has worked with organisations as diverse as the BBC, the United Nations, the Football Association, the Financial Times and Deloitte.

About Iprovision

For the last 50 years, the benevolent fund has helped CIPR members who have fallen on hard times and have had their lives devastated through illness or unemployment.

But in a radical new departure, the charity is now looking to give CIPR members the tools to handle some of the stresses and strains of what for most of us is an exciting, fast-paced career.

As well as being suitable for individual employees, company bosses can learn how reducing stress levels for what is the key resource of their business makes for a happier, healthier and more productive office environment.

Helping colleagues to achieve a better work-life balance is also an essential part of leadership development for businesses and organisations and a key tool for the development of team roles.

Registration and continental breakfast is from 8.30am with the event starting at 9am. Any surplus made from ticket sales will be donated to iprovision.

How to Create a Growth Mindset Organisation Part 2

June 22, 2016 by Viv Thackray Leave a Comment

How to create a growth mindset organisation for success

More and more of the organisations that Positive Change Guru works with are realising that a growth mindset is an essential element of success. Leaders are seeking to create and develop an innovative, agile and resilient workforce. Many 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 2 of our series on creating growth mindset organisations, we look at why so many companies are turning their attention to organisational growth mindset.

Inspire and motivate with a growth mindset

Want to create a platform for competitive advantage in your team? Studies show that employees evaluated their growth mindset managers as being better at coaching and developing their skills than fixed mindset managers. Growth mindset managers were also more data driven, less likely to fixate on poor past performance and better at spotting performance improvement in the individuals they managed.

Encourage innovation with growth mindset feedback

What impact do your words have on those around you? Do you adopt a growth mindset and encourage others to learn, develop and adapt? If not, you can improve the quality of your interactions by communicating a growth mindset when giving feedback.

Research shows that when people have their performance compared to that of others they are more likely to adopt a fixed mindset, assuming that the purpose of comparison was to show how good they were. When a person’s current performance was compared with their past performance they were more likely to adopt a growth mindset, believing that the purpose of the exercise was to help them improve. Studies show that not only did performance improve for these people but they were also better at finding the best solution to the project they were working on.

5 Tips and tricks to create a growth mindset in your organisation

Praise the process. Remember to praise the process of teamwork, taking on manageable risk and learning from failure. By analysing and understanding errors your team will be in a stronger position to adapt to future challenges and improve performance. Highlight progress and effort by comparing a person’s current and past performance rather than comparing them to others when providing feedback.
Promote reasonable risk. Carve out time and resources for improving individual and team performance. Encourage innovation and experimentation, adopting a growth mindset approach to the possibility of risk and failure.
Master the aspects of your business you avoid. Don’t avoid areas of your business that feel less than easy to master. Making a commitment to wholeheartedly engage with challenging tasks allows individuals and teams to develop new skills and abilities. Neurologist, Dr. Harry Chugani, describes the synaptic connections which occur in the brain during the learning process as being similar to roads. Chugani explains, “Roads with the most traffic get widened. The ones that are rarely used fall into disrepair” (Linley, 2007). Keep your neutrons firing to develop new skills. New or difficult tasks are an opportunity to develop new skills and build new synaptic connections, with practice both will strengthen and improve performance.
Share growth mindset success stories. Make time to acknowledge growth mindset team and organisational practices. Recognise the hard work,strategies and processes that have enabled your team to learn new skills or excel at a new project. Encourage your team to share growth mindset practices across the organisation.
Guard against fixed mindset triggers. Even when you work hard to develop a growth mindset business, it’s still possible to be tripped up by your own fixed mindset triggers. A fixed mindset trigger might be evident when we face criticism, are unfavourably compared with others or face a challenge, if we fall into defensiveness behaviour or insecurity then a growth mindset will be inhibited. Inevitably, some business environments can be full of such fixed mindset triggers.Guard against fixed mindset triggers in your business by focusing on being aware of when your fixed-mindset ‘persona’ shows up and then identifying what it takes to make you feel threatened and defensive. Develop a growth mindset approach by spotting your triggers, identifying the fixed-mindset persona for what it is and learn to talk back to the persona with a growth mindset voice, persuading it to work towards the new growth mindset effectively.

Learn more about mindset here:

We love to talk about all things growth mindset at Positive Change Guru. Check out our forthcoming events or get in touch to find out more about our suite of courses and discuss bespoke growth mindset training for your organisation.

The power of Storytelling

April 9, 2016 by Viv Thackray Leave a Comment

Storytelling, the go to for motivation

Think of the last time you had to motivate or move someone to action. How did you persuade them? Did you…Wow them with facts and figures? Entice them with the promise of reward? Plead and wail in desperation? Maybe you warned of consequences if they failed to deliver the goods? Or did you look at the overwhelming evidence for the power of storytelling, make sure they were sitting comfortably and tell them a story?

The power of storytelling

Storytelling is such a powerful tool that marketing professionals routinely monitor our emotional responses to their work, ensuring that their ads resonate emotionally with their audience to increase sales. Studies reveal that when an ad tells a story which creates a positive emotion in you, the customer, the brand’s sale increases. Ad companies are not just using guess work here, storytelling has attracted huge interest from the fields of psychology and neuroscience.

Storytelling activates the brain and engages our senses

Neuroscientists studying how our brains respond to storytelling have discovered that the areas of the brain that are engaged by a story go way beyond mere recognition of language. When a story includes the words ‘cinnamon’, ‘lavender’ and ‘soap’, the area of the brain that processes smells is activated along with the language centres of the brain. Similarly, when action words are used in a story, they activate the motor cortex, the area of the brain used for movement. The evidence is clear, if you want to inspire action and fuel the fire of enthusiasm in others, then storytelling is the way to go.

How to nail great storytelling

World renowned screenwriter, lecturer and all round doyenne of storytelling (his students have probably written some of your favourite films) Robert McKee, advises that the most powerful way to motivate and inspire others is by tying an idea to a story.

Uniting your idea to a story engages the emotions and energises your audience. At the same time, storytelling enables you to weave a huge amount of information into the narrative. If you want to make a significant change in your organisation, use storytelling to paint a vivid picture of the future you envision to engage others and motivate them to act.

You can use your story to set the scene of the situation, starting with the status quo, where a balance and predictability exists. We tend to expect that things will stay the same but then a new event occurs, what screenwriters like McKee call the ‘inciting incident’, something that throws us off balance. The new event could be a change of leader, a merger, the loss of a contract. The protagonist of the story’s job is to overcome challenge and deal with the reality of the situation compared to their expectations. The protagonist ultimately digs deep and finds a resilience to overcome all challenges and succeed.

Want to learn more about storytelling skills? Learn more from the master, Robert McKee here

We love to talk about all things motivational at Positive Change Guru. Check out our forthcoming events or get in touch to find out more about our suite of courses and discuss bespoke motivational training for your organisation.

Managing Change? Try Riding the elephant!

February 17, 2016 by Viv Thackray Leave a Comment

‘For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future’. John F. Kennedy

Want to achieve your Goals? Think emotion and reason

Within psychology it’s generally accepted that there are two elements of the brain that are engaged when we tackle any task. Firstly, there is the emotional side, which is instinctive and feels pleasure and pain. Secondly, there is the rational side, which considers options, rationalizes and balances consequences.

In his book ‘The Happiness Hypotheses’, Jonathan Haidt refers to the emotional side of the mind as an Elephant and the rational side as it’s Rider. For any successful change to take place, the Rider and the Elephant must work together. The Rider is unable to work against the Elephant for long as the effort is too exhausting. Leaders must speak to both the Rider and the Elephant for effective change to occur.

The Rider, The Elephant and The Path

Chip and Dan Heath (2011) adopt Haidt’s analogy for use as a model to guide individuals and organizations through change. They contend that for successful change to take place, three elements must be addressed in any situation:

Direct the Rider. It is essential for the Rider to have absolutely clear direction. What appears to be resistance to change can often be a response to lack of clarity. Providing a strong direction for the Rider by finding the bright spots of successful change elsewhere and using these successes as a model to engage others in similar situations convinces the Rider that they can implement similar change successfully.

Motivate the Elephant. What appears to be laziness can often be exhaustion. Studies show that the more often we exercise self-control the more depleted our resources of self-control become. Self-control is defined as a broader type of self supervision, rather than the narrow sense of willpower applied to giving up vices. Motivating the Elephant is essential for change to occur and involves appealing to emotions and deeply held values to inspire action towards change.

The Path. We need to change the path by tweaking the environment, when the situation changes, the behaviour changes, so changing the situation makes sense. We also need to build habits so the Rider doesn’t feel like new behaviours are a task or a drain on reserves. Behaviour is contagious, so look for ways that enable it to spread.

We love to talk about all things change at Positive Change Guru. Check out our forthcoming events or get in touch to find out more about our suite of courses and discuss bespoke growth mindset training for your organisation.

Living your values is essential to success

January 13, 2016 by Viv Thackray Leave a Comment

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” Roy Disney

Values give us meaning

At the start of the year many of us appraise our professional and personal lives and spend time thinking about what we’d like to achieve for the year ahead. Maybe you’ve resolved to carve out more time in your hectic schedule to spend with family and friends? Perhaps you’ve committed to find a new job or decided to live a more minimalist lifestyle? All of these decisions involve values.

Defining Values

Values are principles, they’re comprised of that which we hold to be important in life. Maybe you’ve never sat down to ask yourself which values you hold most dear but when someone challenges or offends an important value, you’re sure to respond, on an almost instinctive level.

Living your values

When we commit to change, how do we know that our decision is soundly based and likely to motivate us to success? One effective way of checking that your goals are a good fit is to ask yourself, ‘Does this goal align with my values?’ If you’ve never actively considered what your values are, why not spend some time considering the following questions:

What causes and issues do I feel most strongly about?
What do these causes and issues have in common? Maybe they all relate to fairness or justice? Perhaps each issue displays your strong love of education, creativity, perseverance or connecting with others?
Who do you most admire and why? Do you see a pattern in what you admire about others that relates to your core values?

Values and motivation

Check your goals against your values, do they sit well together or is conflict evident between them. Your motivation to stick with a goal is hugely influenced by how aligned your goal is with your core values. Maybe you’re goal is to go all out for a promotion at work but your values are more aligned with having less materially but being able to spend more time on creative pursuits? If your job isn’t tapping into your creative side then this could be a tough goal to follow. You may have a long list of rational reasons to pursue a goal but if there is no emotional, passionate connection with your values embedded in your goal, then when the going gets tough your goal could suffer.

3 reasons to live your values

We tend to be happier when our goals match our values. When you’re faced with a tough task, knowing that completing it reflects your core values can be the push you need to get you through. Your achievement is all the more satisfying, knowing that it reflects what is truly important to you.
If we’re happier when we live our values it stands to reason that many decisions will be easier as well easier to live with if your actions reflect your values.
When you live your values you are the master of your own destiny. Thinking about your core values and intentionally living by them can open up new possibilities and experiences.

We love to talk about all things change management related at Positive Change Guru. Check out our forthcoming events or get in touch to find out more about our suite of courses and discuss bespoke change management training for your organisation.