Have you ever thought about trailblazing your team to steer growth in your company? Change is inevitable and especially vital in an organization seeking improvement and growth.
Employees’ attitudes and beliefs highly impact the company’s success and it is every leader’s responsibility to ensure that they are encouraging an organizational culture that propels the company forward.
For the most part, long-term goals are often held back when a company focuses on short-term success. This makes it necessary to encourage and nurture a growth mindset in the job environment in order to impact gradual progress and advancement.
A growth mindset dispels the assumption that failure is a barrier to success. Instead, it embraces challenges and seeks to use failures as a springboard to success. An individual is able to work hard and be guided by others to better their talents and skills.
With this belief, people can achieve more compared to those who believe that their abilities are set in stone. And if members embrace a growth mindset the company starts recording benefits from that.
Let’s look at how a growth mindset affects teams!
The Impact of a Growth Mindset on Teams
The beliefs in the workplace have an impact on your influence and behavior toward the other teammates you interact with. This has also demonstrated a considerable effect on someone’s success subsequently.
That’s the biggest advantage of the growth mindset. Leaders are optimistic about their employee’s abilities to achieve company goals and are able to mentor them to hone their skills over time.
Due to the fact that individuals can openly communicate with their peers and even seniors, this improves the relationships in the office. There is no fear of judgment so people are able to share their challenges, solve issues together and even learn together.
A growth mindset brings a positive impact allowing leaders to focus on establishing strategies that will help build a successful team.
Recognizing and Overcoming Fixed Mindset Barriers
For you to promote a growth mindset within the team, there is a need to recognize the fixed mindset attitude and implement ways to overcome it. The fixed mindset follows that human abilities are permanent and cannot be altered.
This can be limiting for the realization of the company’s goals and objectives.
Organizational leaders with a fixed mindset might have the perception that their juniors could outperform them. Worst of all, they might feel threatened by more competent employees who recognize mistakes and opportunities they might have missed on the way. It conditions managers to believe that they are above all, hence should know all and lead from an egoistic point of view.
Members on the other hand may be insecure about their abilities to achieve their goals. As such, they may be inclined to perform tasks that they are confident with and avoid pushing beyond their limits.
A fixed mindset could result in a focus on achievements only. Individuals are not confident enough to accept their failures because they don’t trust in their ability to learn from their mistakes to become better and improve.
By realizing the negative impact on the organization’s trajectory to success, managers can gradually initiate strategies to cultivate a growth mindset. By positioning the business to adapt to change, managers play the role of developing a positive-minded team that is keen on the company’s success.
Strategies for Infusing a Growth Mindset into Your Team
There are a couple of ways to foster a growth mindset within your team members. Let’s look at a few that you could consider;
Lead by Example
If you want to foster a growth mindset within your team then you need to understand that the change should start from the top. Employers and managers need to lead by example if they want to normalize an office environment that champions growth.
When leaders set the tone in the office, then it’s easier for their juniors to emulate them. They need to instill company cultures that reinforce the same while setting the desired direction. Leadership highly impacts organizational behavior and as such, guidance and motivation are vital when you need to drive your team toward success.
Demonstrating a growth mindset to your employees imprints a blueprint to help them rewire themselves for the same.
Promote a Culture of Feedback and Learning
There are many ways to encourage a culture of feedback and learning in a work environment. As a leader, you need to start giving constructive feedback. Use this as a tool to help your team members to learn from their mistakes and experiences. When the feedback is constructive, it is directed toward the issue rather than the person.
Not only that, it should be timely to ensure that the party receives it fresh and not later when the matter is somewhat forgotten. It also needs to be direct and specifically address the mistake and the right course of action to correct it.
This means actionable feedback would point the recipient in the right direction hence a positive outcome.
Feedback should not only come from the leader, peer feedback is also a propeller towards growth and goal achievement. This offers different perspectives from what you might have as a leader. What’s more, it translates to other positive aspects such as mutual support amongst members, accountability, and collaboration.
This can only be achieved if all team players are assured of a safe space where they can confidently share their experiences and air their opinions.
Encourage Risk Taking
Risk-taking is a great way for team members to take on new challenges and learn while at it. It is not a guarantee that the company will succeed, but rather it will inspire resilience and self-confidence.
Employees are able to push beyond their boundaries to achieve exceptional results for different projects. This also presents new opportunities.
However, it’s not just about taking all risks carelessly but instead taking calculated risks. So seniors need to encourage their teams to prepare before embracing any risks.
Leverage Communication
Simple communication is a tool enough to shift members’ fixed mindset into a growth one. The path to success is full of hurdles, which means it can be very discouraging for anyone. However, establishing a positive language approach would help rethink negative circumstances.
For instance, replacing failure with opportunity or mistake with challenge impacts the recipient’s perception of what is being communicated to them. As a result, instead of feeling discouraged or afraid of an outcome, they are always prepared to face different situations head-on.
Celebrate The Journey, Not Just The Destination
Achievements are great and worth celebrating for each individual, but so is recognizing the effort made along the way. This is a great way to boost motivation and confidence while encouraging members to act accordingly to achieve the desired result.
Celebrate small milestones by praising them or awarding them bonuses, certificates, badges, or even offering chances for them to advance their careers. Additionally, emphasize the importance of efforts and perseverance regardless of the setbacks faced.
Sustaining the Growth Mindset
While success in infusing a growth mindset into your team is a significant milestone, you need to establish ways to sustain it in the long run. Otherwise, all the work put into achieving it would be in vain if members start backsliding into the fixed mindset.
Additionally, a nurtured work environment moved by individuals with a growth mindset would make it easier to onboard new members in the future. Above all, consistent effort would be instrumental in maintaining it so it would be important to constantly reinforce that within the team.
While people might easily reset to what feels normal to them, continuous effort coupled with increased resilience throughout the process is essential to help them stay on track.
Regularly checking in with other members will boost open dialogue. It is also a way of ensuring that the growth mindset remains a precedent for each member. In addition, sharing success stories for members who have embraced the growth mindset increases the drive for the other team members to continue embracing that mindset as well.
Most importantly, including the growth mindset in performance reviews would inspire members to persist with it. As a result, the members start recognizing it as an indispensable part of their contribution toward the company’s success story.
By adapting to change, members can easily accept their failures and use them to learn, accept new challenges and take risks that open up more opportunities, be more comfortable to take positive criticism and make adjustments accordingly, and finally promote an organizational culture that encourages a growth attitude.
To Sum It Up…
The complete mindset turnaround with your team will result in a significant paradigm shift in the efforts you make to grow your business. But on the downside, forging a new growth mindset with your team might not be easy.
It might require establishing different strategies that would collectively result in the desired progressive environment. Constantly motivate your team and urge shared commitment as well as a sense of community in the company to ensure unified progress.
