How growth mindset can improve business

Skills gap is a very present problems in today’s business world – CBI and McKinsey have found that 9 in 10 employees are in need of reskilling in the UK by 2030. Another report by Microsoft’s Dr. Chris Brauer says that 69% of business leaders believe organizations face a digital skills gap. The first step of reskilling should be enabling employees to develop by building confidence in their ability to grow. How we approach this topic depends on our preference of these two statements:

1. People who are good at a particular skill were born with a higher level of natural ability.
2. If you practice something for long enough, you develop a talent for it.

Based on Carol Dweck’s theory (author of „Mindset: How you can fulfil your potential”), if you agree with the first sentence, you are prone to have a fixed mindset meaning you believe that many human qualities like intelligence and abilities in different areas are innate and unalterable. If you prefer the second statement, you gravitate towards a growth mindset, which means you think abilities can be evolved by hard work, dedication, and practice.

The growth mindset
In our culture, we are more likely to seek harmony, „fit in” and avoid situations disrupting the norm which brings about a fixed mindset approach. Of course, this is all we good intent – this way we can protect ourselves and others and maintain the status quo. Still, this is not a good fit for the world we live in today. Business and life require questioning and challenging the norm to transform and find better solutions.
The science of neuroplasticity tells us that our brains can form new neural connections and reorganize themselves – this way, we are able to learn new skills and abilities. It is natural to evolve for humans, and the best example of this is our evolutionary story. Even so, we are also designed to survive, seek pleasure and avoid pain. Change comes with fear and uncertainty, therefore we will try to come back to the norm, the habit, because it is more comfortable.

Leadership and the Growth Mindset
It is our responsibility to create and find opportunities for learning. Ronald Heifetz (author of Leadership on the line) introduced the concept of technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges refer to problems that can be solved with knowledge that already exists. Adaptive challenges on the other hand, require innovation because of their complex nature. The world we live in today certainly produces more of the latter. Adaptive leadership means the activity of mobilizing people to face challenges and thrive. We cannot grow without vision, strategy, experimentation, trials, errors, effective change, people management, time, and persistence.

Growth in 2021

1. Shift your focus to „not yet” from „now” – Carol Dweck mentions a great example of this in her ted talk „The power of believing we can improve” – an American school gave grades to those who did not pass as „not yet” to implant the mindset that we are all on a learning curve and with patience and effort, we can all improve. In an earlier study, she gave complicated tasks to children. There were two different reactions from them. Some of them have said „I love a challenge” or „I can learn something from this”, while others showed a fixed mindset, and regarded failure as a measurement for their intelligence. In the next exercises, the latter group cheated, or found somebody who performed worse than them to try to rebuild their confidence. It is also essential to understand ourselves, our own reasons for believing we can’t deal with something. After this, we can reframe the problem as a challenge and learning opportunity.
2. Reframe effort – On another occasion, Carol Dweck put emphasis on the process and not the outcome. In a mathematical game, children were rewarded for their effort, persistence, and strategy instead of their intelligence. The group showed more engagement with the game, more strategy, more active and longer lasting participation, and more endurance when facing more serious challenges. She worked with struggling students, too (Harlem, Native American reservations). Some classes were introduced to growth mindset, meaning teachers explained that their brain makes new connections every time they learn something new and this way, they can become smarter. 1-1,5 years later, classes that performed the worst, became one of the best in the stately mathematic test. We can conclude that the presence of equality and growth mindset had a more beneficial effect on their performance than intelligence based on their current knowledge. 
3. Get comfortable being uncomfortable – Change will inevitably require us to step out of our comfort zone, be uncertain at times, fail (sometimes many times) and start again. We should not think of ourselves as unchangeable; our skills are not carved in stone. Instead, we can focus away from past experience and current skills to start learning.
4. Leadership is contextual – The perspective that may have worked before does not necessarily align with today’s needs. Our work lives are changing rapidly – we have to recognise that and adapt to the new ways.

It is essential for us as individuals to learn, enhance our resilience, agility, and wellbeing in an unpredictable world. We gain a sense of empowerment, achievement, and expertise from doing this. As leaders, growth mindset can benefit us by enabling transformation. The culture of reflection and continuous learning implies that a mistake is an opportunity to learn from and brings us one step closer to a better solution. Research has shown that applying growth mindset in business has many positive effects, for example behaviour change at scale, increased employee engagements and greater employee satisfaction. It might be that before up-skilling and re-skilling our employees, we need to change the organisation’s mindset first, so that we can enable improvement.

The original blogpost can be accessed here.