What is a growth mindset?

A growth mindset is all employees believing they can continue learning and developing. It applies to everyone, from front-line employees to a CEO’s direct reports and beyond.

What are the 5 characteristics of a growth mindset?

Features of a growth mindset include:

• Passionate. It’s good to want to improve. This stems from the working environment.
• Cooperative. This means recognizing the value of peers and learning from them.
• Persevering. No matter what, a growth mindset propels you to continue working toward your goals.
• Resistance. A growth mindset acknowledges the criticism and the employee learns from it to do a better job next time.
• Forward Thinking. Cultivating a positive attitude about future skills and the human allies who can help you to acquire them aids growth mindset.

4 tips on how to develop a growth mindset at work

If you want to establish these standards and provide your employees with a growth mindset challenge, there are things you can do.

1. Encourage creativity

Specify the inputs and desired outputs of each person’s role and responsibility, but leave it to them what exactly the process should look like to get there. While creativity inevitably involves failure, success might reveal to the company a better way of getting things done.

2. Support cross-disciplinary learning and coaching

Let employees experiment with different roles inside the organisation and assess where their skills might be cultivated by shadowing teams in different units, or even moving into the shadow of a more senior employee.

3. Be patient in the learning process

Know that growth is slow, and a growth mindset will not bring immediate results: the more your employees practise these skills and new ways of working, the more they grow over the long-term and deliver results for you as a business.

4. Promote participation

By valuing your employees’ ideas, not just their output, your organisation can help them grow. You don’t have to take every idea to its conclusion, but forming a belief that your people will share their ideas with you and listen openly to the ideas shared by others will help key team members feel more invested in your overall decision-making process.

Overcoming Obstacles and Setbacks with a Growth Mindset

These are some steps that can help you navigate challenges with a growth mindset:

• Change your perspective: Think of a block in your path as a stepping stone.
• Think about solutions: Once you’ve identified the problem, rather than fretting about it, shift your focus to working on solutions.
• Make an action plan: Set out what you can do to solve your problem. Devise some steps to tackle the problem and employ some achievable goals to handle the challenge in small chunks.
• Visualise the victory. Imagine how it would feel and look. Evidence suggests that this can increase confidence and motivation.9.
• Persevere: Be a stick-to-it-ive-ness. Change is a process. Be patient with it.
• Adapt. Readjust: Recognise the need to adapt what you are doing as you learn.
• Celebrate small wins: Celebrate little victories along the way. If we want to grow, we have to be happy about our growth stages along the way.
• Reflect and learn: Examine your past. See what worked and what didn’t, then move forward.

Mistakes are not the end of the world: Even if things don’t work out, don’t be upset over them and continue learning and adapting to what you’ve learned.