Becoming a great leader means you need to be ready to address your weaknesses and overcome them. Effective leaders work towards goals by using their workers effectively every day, regardless of the circumstances, and using innovative concepts successfully with a team. Carol Dweck, a professor from Stanford, has spent years studying how people view leadership and learning, looking at how people think about a passionate pursuit. Dweck’s studies also apply to the corporate world and demonstrate how effective leaders create a culture within their team that helps foster innovation and success.
Two Mindsets for Learning and Leadership
Dweck has discovered two paths that people use when considering learning and leadership, which involves either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Individuals that employ a fixed mindset think that they biologically receive a particular set of intellectual skills, and that amount will not likely evolve as time progresses. These people assume that they already have natural talent, and thus they do not need to utilize much effort. When these individuals fail, they often question themselves, meaning those with a fixed mindset do not handle setbacks well and often fail to learn from them.
On the other hand, people that utilize a growth mindset believe that their intelligence and skills can evolve as time passes. As a result, these people enjoy challenges and try to seek out adventures that involve risk-taking. People with a growth mindset are not afraid of mistakes and seek to self-reflect whenever they fail.
The Growth Mindset in Business
When leading a business, using a growth mindset helps foster an effective culture and offers many corporate advantages, as Dweck has already established. Dweck discovered that businesses that use a growth mindset have leaders who work with their employees better, foster innovation, and help the company and its employees learn and grow.
Leaders who employ a growth mindset see their workers as having the potential to move up compared to leaders who utilize a fixed-mindset approach. Also, people who work for companies that utilize a growth mindset have a better view of their business and these workers and are not afraid of making mistakes.
Using the growth mindset may help make your company more successful and even set you apart from your competition. By employing a growth mindset as a leader, you can also set an example.
There are four leadership strategies you can use to start emphasizing a growth mindset in business.
Emphasize the Importance of Learning
Unfortunately, when a business struggles with its budget, it often gets rid of its employees’ education programs. However, this would never happen within a company that uses a growth-mindset culture. Instead, businesses with a growth mindset see employee training as the most significant thing to improve the corporation. So, when your business struggles with funding, you need to continue fostering employee growth to achieve success.
Also, when a company demonstrates its willingness to invest in its employees to discover new skills, they become intellectually driven to make themselves more effective team members. Leaders that use a growth mindset feel that employee growth also helps boost employee productivity and loyalty.
Be Honest about Failures and Use them to Improve
Leaders with a growth mindset see failure as a necessary concept when one is trying to achieve success because people can learn from their mistakes. Instead of ignoring the failure and not acting introspectively, these leaders grab onto their mistakes, admit to them, and try to revise strategies. If you want to employ a growth mindset, be transparent, and tell your employees what works well and what needs to be changed. Also, ask your employees for honest feedback about you and themselves. Engage their feedback to figure out if they need more support sources or training when utilizing improvement plans.
You’ll also need to reward efforts and positive achievements to engage in a growth mindset. This step is critical when you want your employees to be open and use risk-taking behaviors. By utilizing this strategy, you’ll get a huge advantage because your workers will act more ethically when you emphasize that learning from achievement is as essential as learning from a mistake.
Encourage All of Your Employees
When workers are stuck in a corporate structure limited by a fixed-mindset, they usually feel that promotions and achievements are only given to a few essential workers at the company. However, in a growth-mindset culture, this is not the case. Leaders that strive to cultivate everybody on their team instead of only a handful of individuals create strength and loyalty throughout the corporation. So, leaders who realize all of their employees can contribute to their company’s success will exploit their talent pool, cultivate it, and try to discover solutions.
Use Employee Feedback
It can be challenging for leaders to ask for employee feedback and utilize it effectively, but it’s an important step to creating a growth mindset. Once you can accept that all employees, and not just leaders, can create excellent ideas for the corporation, you’ll need to set the example as a leader. So, ask for your employees to give you feedback and insist on honesty. You’ll want to know what your employees think is working and where they feel there are areas for improvement.
By employing a growth mindset, your employees will utilize this cultural transparency to give you ideas and ask you questions. Also, by providing the example of wanting to employ feedback, your employees will be open to your assessments.
A growth mindset offers significant benefits for your corporation, and it all starts with you as the leader. It isn’t easy to build a successful company culture without emphasizing a growth mindset.
Stephen Odzer went to Yeshiva of Flatbush High School and then to the Brooklyn College Scholars Program. Stephen Odzer started his first company at the age of 18 out of his parents’ basement. Stephen was named the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2000 in the area of distribution and logistics.