A Growth Mindset Culture
This quote taken from the Harvard Business Review piece says it best: "We’ve found that building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth."
So what is a culture of growth? A growth mindset culture is one that is prioritizes continuous learning, improvement, and innovation. It celebrates failures — as efforts — as well as wins.
Cultivating a culture of growth will reward you with plenty of perks. It can: create accountability, enable organizations to continuously improve, encourage innovation, enhance learning, and improve problem solving. The rewards culminate in high-performing teams and sustainable growth!
A culture of growth mindset focuses less on performance, while motivating and encouraging growth. When you enable high capacity for change, celebrate wins and fails equally, and balance alignment between KPIs and core values, you create accountability and enable your organization to continuously improve, while growing people, teams, culture, and business.
In my experience, I’ve learned that there are five major components to a growth mindset culture: Leadership, Cohesion, Accountability, Learning Organization, and Capacity to Change.
1. Leadership
To achieve a culture of growth mindset requires leadership that is trustworthy, embraces inclusiveness, and inspires greatness by leading with purpose and celebrating the wins and failures equally. To do that, you must do two things: Go all in and influence without authority.
By ‘go all in,’ what I mean is that you really have to make the investment in developing a culture of growth, and you have to walk the walk. We are all inspired by what we see in others, not by what we are told to get excited about.
As for influencing without authority, this is an acquired skill ― it takes practice and it takes trust, which you must earn. Try learning to listen to employees more, asking them open-ended questions about what they care about most.
2. Cohesion
Creating cohesion within the team involves making a seamless connection between core values and purpose. Aligning the organization’s mission with day-to-day operations can be achieved by building on those values together through bonding activities, for example. Two components to achieving cohesion include celebrating success and failures in equal measure as well as synergy.
Successful teams celebrate both wins and losses. Reframing losses as 'efforts' is key, as is realizing that any and all feedback provides value. While celebrating wins keeps team morale up (recognition being a huge reward), acknowledging losses helps identify what's not working, which inspires creativity, improvement, and innovation.
It all boils down to synergy. When you are able to unite your core values, purpose, and mission with day-to-day business, that cohesiveness will ultimately inspire synergy, which is a powerful drug for a team to have. Synergy happens when a team embraces open mindedness, thrives on teamwork, and develops a fruitful habit of creative cooperation.
3. Accountability
A culture of growth also requires accountability, achieved only when employees are given a clear definition of what success means in your organization. Accountability includes measuring success through performance management, feedback, and coaching.
Accountability empowers scalability. To do that, you must develop a company structure designed to enable accountability, meaning you must have the right people in place for sustainable growth. More on that here.
Accountability means giving the team what they need to succeed: tools, coaching, and structure that holds them accountable to high expectations beyond financial ones.
4. Learning Organization
Building a learning organization that thrives on continuous education is key to a growth mindset. Open to constant improvement, a learning organization is generative, adaptive, and experimental. It welcomes new ideas, diversity, and stewardship, which breeds innovation and intellectual stimulation. When we’re stimulated, emotional growth as well as physical and mental well-being are the result — and that’s when we tend stick around because these rewards are hard to match.
A collective learning organization can function without a hitch if it follows five disciplines outlined by Peter M. Senge's 1990 book The Fifth Discipline. In it, he concludes that a combination of shared vision, systems thinking, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery culminates in an effective learning organization.
Shared vision happens when personal and professional visions align, which can be a powerful motivator.
Systems thinking is appreciating that everything from individuals and policies to relationships and decisions are all interconnected and part of a larger context.
Mental models help us organize information. It's a thinking pattern often consisting of deeply ingrained assumptions, which can influence how you lead. Being aware of your own biases and assumptions can transform you and your leadership effectiveness.
Team learning means the collaboration and support of everyone in the organization — it's a fact that you learn more as a focused group than as an individual.
Personal mastery involves honest reflection, which can identify personal and organizational needs and lead to your own goals and professional development.
5. Capacity for Change
Lastly, a growth mindset is not achievable without the capacity for change. Growth equals change and vice versa. Without the open-mindedness to collaborate and be influenced, you cannot experience innovation and empowerment. More on capacity for change here.
Learning how to adapt to change involves change management, and change management begins with inspired leadership. Remember when we talked earlier about inspiring through purpose, being inclusive, walking the talk, and going all in? That's what's needed here: a leader who has earned the trust of the team, connected the company's core values with day-to-day actions, implemented an accountability structure, and built a learning organization that thrives on constant improvement and the desire to continuously adapt, innovate, and change.
Resistance to change stunts sustainable growth, so managing change effectively has to be a key organizational capability that exists at the very heart of your culture. Companies who cultivate a growth mindset, value continuous development, create opportunities for learning, and hold everyone accountable generate change capabilities across the organization.
When coupled with inclusive, trustworthy leadership that inspires teams through purpose, they develop and maintain a high capacity for change which enables all strategic objectives and strengthens competitive advantages. Plus, establishing this type of ecosystem allows companies to acquire, advance, and maintain the right people that will facilitate expansion.
Cultures of growth are key to high-performing teams and sustainable business growth. Get in touch today and let Future State guide you to an endlessly rewarding culture of growth mindset.