Growth Mindset

Creating a Growth Mindset and Learning Culture

The way we view the world – our mindset – can have a powerful influence on how we approach challenges as an individual and how we lead and develop our teams. When we approach things with a fixed mindset, we are more likely to stick with the status quo, and are far less likely to learn and evolve in the face of change. In contrast, when we approach things with a growth mindset, we embrace change, tackle challenges without fear of failure, learn from mistakes, and act as “learn it alls” rather than “know it alls”. By switching from a fixed to a growth mindset, we can materially improve individual, team and organisational performance.

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Approaching Feedback with a Growth Mindset

Most of us recognise that feedback can be useful to help us learn and improve. Our mindset however has a significant impact on how we interpret feedback and the extent to which we use it to adapt and change. When we adopt a growth mindset, feedback is viewed as a valuable tool to identify ways we can get better. When we adopt a fixed mindset, feedback can feel threatening and be viewed as a judgement on our competence and value, and can ultimately limit learning.

Understanding how and why we react to feedback in certain ways can help us to identify valuable insights, even if the feedback isn’t delivered in the most effective way. It can also help us to seek feedback more often and respond more productively.

Leaders are also in a position to provide feedback to others to help them improve and adapt. Providing feedback that is specific, actionable, frequent and focused on improvement can also spur growth in others.​

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Learning from Mistakes and Successes

Most of us are conditioned to avoid mistakes and failing at all costs, with failure presented as the polar opposite of success. In reality, making mistakes, getting things wrong as well as right, and more importantly learning from these experiences help pave the way to future success. When individuals, teams and organisations fear failure, they can be overly risk averse, give up at the first hurdle, and miss opportunities to improve in favour of sticking with the status quo. When they apply a growth mindset to failure, they seek to test and learn, experiment, and are able to maximise learning from both successes and failures. All of these aspects contribute to a high-performance culture that supports both incremental improvement as well as innovation.

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Humble Leadership

Leaders often believe that they need to have all the answers and can feel a lot of pressure to do so. People look to leaders for clear guidance, direction, and expertise especially in times of uncertainty and change. It is however impossible for any one individual to know everything in these and other complex situations. In these situations, we need to practice humble leadership. Humble leadership is about understanding where our own strengths and development areas lie, as well as understanding the strengths of others. This helps us know when to bring in others who may have more expertise or different expertise to us, who may help to flesh out a clearer and more complete solution or approach. Crucially, humble leaders also practise teachability – they are always looking to learn from others. This helps to boost both individual and team performance.

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Innovation as a Competitive Advantage

Innovation is a key driver of business success, but can seem like a daunting task for many leaders; it may be unclear how to increase it or foster it in teams. There is a widely held belief that innovation is the domain of “creative geniuses” or certain departments in an organisation. In reality, there are different types of innovation that include small incremental changes as well as big step changes. Furthermore, innovation can happen at all levels within an organisation. Individuals may generate ideas about how to improve services, and how to do things more efficiently or effectively. Managers can create a team environment where diverse ideas are shared openly and combined to create new ways of doing things. Similarly, leaders may create cultures where people are able to take calculated risks and where there is a focus on continuous learning and improvement.

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Sparking Curiosity

Curiosity is a critical and often undervalued skill for leaders, as it drives learning, acquisition of new knowledge and skills, and creativity. These are all aspects that enable individuals, teams and organisations to proactively anticipate change and be resilient to future disruption. Curiosity is the desire to seek new information and experiences, and to explore novel possibilities. Whilst people may vary in terms of their natural levels of curiosity, it is something that can be developed significantly with practise and through the use of targeted techniques. These approaches can help leaders and others to challenge the status quo, get people to think different, and spark exploration and innovation.

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Agile Leadership

Leaders and organisations are operating in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. This environment means that leaders and organisations are constantly faced with change and new challenges, and that the behaviours and ways of working we use today may not serve us well in the future. Leaders and organisations need to be agile in order to adapt, learn, and thrive. Some see agility as simply making decisions quickly and acting quickly. Some think of it as agile project management methodologies. And others view it as how quickly the organisation can adapt to changes and evolve. This points to the fact that agility looks different when looking through different lenses – agility as an individual, at a team level, and more broadly as an organisation. Agile leadership requires consideration of all three levels.

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After Action Review

Learning from experience is a fundamental component of growth mindset. All too often we move onto the next task, project or problem without taking the time to reflect and embed learning. This can increase the risk of repeating the same mistakes or the risk of missing out on opportunities to keep evolving and improving.

The After Action Review (AAR) technique is designed to draw on collective intelligence when reviewing an event, project or initiative. The method involves comparing expected and actual outcomes, avoiding blame, getting to root causes that drive both successes and mistakes, and getting very specific about when and how to apply these lessons.

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Marginal Gains Method

Innovative organisations typically deploy a range of innovation strategies and techniques, focused on a mix of breakthrough and routine or incremental innovation. Whilst breakthrough innovation often gets a lot of attention, the power of incremental innovation should not be underestimated. Incremental innovation focuses on making small, iterative improvements or changes to an existing approach, process, product or service. Incremental innovation can be applied to many types of organisational objectives, such as improving customer satisfaction and retention, reducing number of errors, or improving the efficiency of a process, as well as many others. Importantly, incremental innovation is something that most employees can apply day-to-day. Innovation doesn’t need to be the preserve of a few. When combined, a collection of small changes can make a significant and measurable difference to performance.

As part of this working session, we apply the Marginal Gains technique to a key business objective. We enable the group to identify opportunities to make a series of marginal gains that have the potential to generate significant performance improvements (e.g. costs savings, increased revenue, better products and services).​

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Pre-Mortem Method

Most people are familiar with project post-mortems, where successes and failures are reviewed and identified after a project or initiative has been delivered. Imagine being able to bring this learning upfront in the process before the project or initiative has been launched, before the costs have been incurred, the time spent, the relationships strained, and foreseeable errors have been made. The Pre-Mortem method uses prospective hindsight to change the way people think, reduce overconfidence, and encourage diverse thinking and constructive challenge, in order to uncover risks more effectively and avoid failures and unintended consequences before they happen.​

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Assumption Reversal Technique

Past assumptions may limit the way we think. Reversing our assumptions and asking ‘what if?’ can open up new ways of thinking and lead to disruptive innovation. It forces us to think in different ways. When asking questions, we often focus on questions that help us understand the way things are today (i.e. What? How? When? What caused?). To generate disruptive ideas and innovation, we need to ask more ‘why?’ and ‘what if?’ questions. Assumption Reversal is a technique designed to apply curiosity and challenge the status quo using the power of ‘what if?’ questions.​

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Tackling Complexity with a Growth Mindset

Leaders’ ability to engage with complexity is important when solving ambiguous and difficult problems, as well as when looking to assess the reasons for any failure. In complex situations there are likely to be multiple factors that interact to cause any given outcome.

While it can be tempting to look for simple answers, and sometimes seek to blame others if something goes wrong, this can have many unintended consequences. It can leave individuals fearful of providing feedback. It can result in a lack of empowerment to take risks and innovate. It can lead to ineffective and oversimplified solutions to complex problems. And, crucially, it can lead to a culture of cover-ups, where individuals don’t admit to their mistakes and so can’t learn from them. By taking a more nuanced approach that considers the situation and context people are operating in, leaders can identify systemic issues that may be at play and provide valuable opportunities to learn.

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Expanding Capability

We all want to be the very best version of ourselves, but can get stuck with how to expand our capabilities. We often view others as talented with skills and experience that we think are out of reach. Talent can feel fixed and innate, whereas potential is learned and malleable. If potential is nurtured well, it can lift individual, team and organisational performance above expectations. When we view ourselves and those around us as a “work in progress” we open the door to many possibilities and opportunities previously seen as impossible to achieve.

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