5 steps to cultivating a growth mindset culture in your team

Wavestone Asia

In the previous articles on Growth Mindset, here and here, we explain how it was first developed, the psychology behind it and the benefits. We discuss why developing a growth mindset is a good idea for your employees and the entire organisation.

Essentially, a company with a strong growth mindset ingrained into its DNA, is able to create a productive and vastly happy environment for employees to excel and produce positive business outcomes.

This article will codify the last two by delving specifically into the five main points:

1. Foster a culture of empowerment, support & flexibility

Whether you’re the leader of an organisation or a team, developing a growth mindset starts with you.

When it is cultivated internally, you indubitably lead by example.

When you have a handle on your own mindset, you can foster a culture of empowerment and support throughout your team.

Like the Michael Jackson classic, Man in the Mirror, you must look to yourself first, to make a change. After you’ve harnessed a growth mindset for yourself, proceed with the next steps to encourage it in your organisation/team by:

Empowerment

Empower your employees to experiment and innovate by providing them with the tools, resources, and freedom they need to do their best work.

You might be surprised at what they come up with when they are allowed to truly spread their wings.

Be supportive of your employees in their quest for growth

A growth mindset is part and parcel of agile transformation.

Agile transformation encourages companies to place emphasis on people and culture. This translates to enabling transparency and to encourage collaboration among team members as they work toward a shared objective.

This will enable team members to learn from and encourage each other in pursuing growth opportunities beyond their comfort zones.

Also remember to celebrate the right successes along the way (so you don’t trivialise it)—whether it was an individual who took a leap of faith or a whole team that tried something new and learned from the experience.

Celebrating these small but key wins will keep everyone motivated to continue growing together as an organization.

Provide flexibility

Despite what some business leaders believe or say, in a global study first made in 2020, then updated in late 2021, 95% of the workforce want more flexibility in their working hours rather than less.

In an article published on 26th June, 2022 by Yahoo Finance, it was written that most Gen Z workers would not want to work five days at the office unless they have control over the schedule.

In the article, researcher and author, Jason Dorsey said that, “Gen Z actually will take jobs working five days a week if they could pick the hours, move the hours around a bit, then work more days. But if the hours aren’t flexible, then the days become really important.”

With such pushback from the young generation moving into the work force, it’s going to be a challenge, post-COVID for employees to retain young talent if they’re not willing to adapt to the generational changes.

Fighting this to maintain some traditional ethos is just not worth it. Things change. You must change with it.

Embrace the fact that employees with more control over their time are happier. This doesn’t mean you have to pursue a total work from home situation. Obviously, the demands of each company differs.

But your staff are adults – treat them like responsible adults. Trust that they know how to self-manage their time and produce value.

It is not feasible to penalise everyone just to prevent a few bad eggs from abusing the system.

Give them the tools and time they need to experiment & innovate. Reward those attemps, even if they end in failure.

Employees who can balance their professional lives with their personal lives also report higher job satisfaction and lower stress levels, meaning less turnover for the company.

Organisations that offer flexible scheduling also tend to find it easier to recruit new employees who recognize the benefits of such policies on their overall well-being and mental health.

With the way things have gone and especially in a COVID-10 world, the up-and-coming generation are going to expect and even demand such things as the norm.

Rather than fight, embrace it and set the right foundation for a strong, positive and healthy culture from the beginning.

2. Encourage continuous learning

Part of cultivating a growth mindset is the encouragement to continuously learn and upgrade one’s skills in order to perform better.

Many organisations want this but they fail to create an environment where learning and upgrading is part of the culture.

Whether it’s a lack of resources, a sense of fear, motivation or anything else, you must remember that culture eats processes for breakfast.

Open avenues for them to update their skills and give them the time to actually pursue these trainings.

In the previous article, we discussed the fear of failure.

When the decision is made to enable growth mindset, as leaders, we need to understand a few things:

It never hurts to learn something new. It’s important for people to feel like they’re growing personally as well as professionally
Knowledge is power, so ensure that people are always seeking out more knowledge, whether through formal education or on the job
Communicate openly that you want people to be learning and collaborating with one another and give them the means to accomplish it

Encourage people to ask questions and provide feedback on the job; this will help break down silos between your business units.

Also provide clear avenues for mentorship so that everyone has an opportunity to grow together.

3. Creating challenges

Most employees want to be challenged.

People thrive on challenges that they can overcome. It motivates us with purpose.

It is how we adapt to changing situations, learn and overcome our limits to achieve something we can be proud of.

As part of developing and sustaining a growth mindset culture at the office, creating challenges whereby the staff can utilise their expertise or pick up a new skill in order to tackle the challenge is a powerful motivator.

Create challenges where your employees can use their expertise or have to learn a new skill in order to overcome.

It is a result of having a growth mindset wherein, the doldrums of daily work are reduced. Employees start looking forward to exploring beyond their capabilities or even to participate in something outside of their regular tasks, willingly.

In the process, this creates a rewarding culture of experimentation, empowerment and value which can be celebrated together.

As you continue down this path, the fear of failure may never truly disappear, but it will instead fade to something manageable.

4. A feedback system

A feedback system isn’t something new. Most organisations have one in place. But there is a stark difference between having something and using it.

A feedback system is an invaluable tool when it is given the anonymity and impartialness it needs in order to function as intended.

Unfortunately, there are organisations that somehow take negative feedback personally, or they require non-anonymity.

The latter can be a good thing on a case-by-case basis but regardless of the noble intents, it creates an unnecessary barrier of anxiety and fearfulness between the staff and management.

In an agile organisation, this level of transparency can be justified by already having a positive and judgement-free internal culture.

But many companies are not agile or they lack certain touchstones where being transparent exposes the individual to scrutiny or worse. It is a fact that many people take negative feedback personally and are unhappy with it. It’s a normal reaction.

However, if you truly have a growth mindset, or have the correct feedback culture, then there is no such thing as negative feedback.

Every feedback is a gift we give to each other to help us grow. That’s why having a growth mindset is so powerful. Granted, there is a need to educate people on how to provide constructive feedback.

You need to be honest, but you can do it without being rude or unprofessional.

Establish a feedback system and a dedicated team in place, as a neutral party, to listen and act upon good feedback.

Then, the onus is on the department head to institute changes – changes that may or may not happen depending on how busy they are.

It isn’t a stretch to say that in many cases, the existing feedback systems in the current form in companies these days do not work.

A proper feedback system welcomes and encourages constructive feedback to improve the organisation. There should also be a system in place in which a dedicated team actively reviews the feedback and identifies the most salient ones to address within the next three months.

This intent should be transparent to the entire organisation with regular updates on the progress or issues they might face in answering the feedback.

It is a necessary component of any organisation. In a growth mindset one especially, it can be the difference between continued success & growth, and failure.

5. Value collaboration and learning from failure

Developing a culture of collaboration and learning from failure isn’t going to be easy, but it will be worthwhile.

Here are some suggested ways to do this:

Share credit, responsibility, rewards, learning, success, mistakes, failures and ideas
Share resources, knowledge and wisdom
Give praise freely. Don’t hold back praise for fear of inflating egos or making them feel too comfortable that they end up becoming complacent. Be liberal with your accolades so people feel inspired to continue their good work and even do more good work! People are not mind readers so don’t expect them to know they are doing a great job unless you tell them
Encourage people to share the successes they create in their teams by posting about it on the bulletin board or email space where these accomplishments can be announced and celebrated together

By implementing this, you create a culture where employees are going to feel undaunted when trying new things that might fail.

They might in fact, become excited and driven by the prospect.

Share everything equally, from successes to failures. Give praise liberally & encourage staff to share their learnings with others.

The other problem is, even if there is a feedback system in place, there is a high risk that the feedback is collated and disseminated once every few months with a token round table meeting to discuss how to act on the feedback. Then, the onus is on the department head to institute changes – changes that may or may not happen depending on how busy they are.

It isn’t a stretch to say that in many cases, the existing feedback systems in the current form in companies these days do not work.

This intent should be transparent to the entire organisation with regular updates on the progress or issues they might face in answering the feedback.

It is a necessary component of any organisation. In a growth mindset one especially, it can be the difference between continued success & growth, and failure.

A growth mindset is a significant factor in employee happiness and productivity

In closing, we touched on how a growth mindset is a significant factor in employee happiness and productivity. We also detailed how you can begin immediately by implementing these steps within your organisation or team.

In our previous articles, we explained how Carol Dweck’s study discovered that those with a positive outlook about learning and development opportunities are more engaged, creative, collaborative and productive than those who have a negative outlook on the same topic.

This is a rather obvious point.

People do more when they’re happy. Science would refer to this as the dopamine effect.

When you work out, receive a gift or are congratulated for a job well done, the brain releases a feel-good chemical called dopamine which acts as an internal motivator to continue doing the thing that earned you praise in the first place.

In the workplace, where happy and engaged employees are an integral factor in the success of the business, a growth mindset rich environment will be the fertile soil in which a rewarding, symbiotic relationship between the people and the organisation can thrive.

These five points expand on what we discussed initially in the two articles. They serve as instructions on how to start and the mindset shifts that should happen.

These points are intrinsically linked. A company with a growth mindset culture would encourage their employees to continuously learn through feedback, through challenges and especially through failure. From there, they can grow, develop their skills, are better positioned to achieve business objectives and are happy doing it.

And the way to make all this happen is to start at the top, with the leaders empowering their employees and providing the necessary support to serve as a foundation to start developing a growth mindset culture.

It’s tougher to do this at the start, but that is an important point because it reflects reality. Rarely are worthwhile things simple to execute and achieve. To truly excel, continuous, measurable effort must be applied.

When you do and are willing to ride out the rough seas at the start, the results are going to be worth the effort.

Have a question?

Wavestone Singapore has vast experience in cultivating and integrating growth mindset into organisations. If you want to learn more about growth mindset or are ready to take the plunge with help from an experienced coach, reach out to us.