Adopting an Organizational Growth Mindset.

Our mindsets are the sole director of our lives, whether our mindsets fosters the belief that our capabilities and knowledge can improve, or fosters the belief that we cannot change, know this; our entire lives shapes itself around our mindset. And on an organizational level, the entire collective achievement of an organization in meeting its goals rests on the adopted mindset within that organization.

When it comes to mindset in the human psychology and in exploring of the mindset work done by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, there are two ends of the spectrum: Growth mindset and Fixed mindset, having a growth mindset means that we look into what we can learn from the process, that we don’t see anything as “success” or “failure” but as a learning curve, that we see our intelligence as ever growing and look at challenges with excitement, knowing each challenge will deepen us, expand us and serve us in building who we are.

“I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures.I divide the world into the learners and the non-learners.” — Benjamin Barber

Knowing that our mental attitude has a direct tangible impact on our cognition, lets us see challenges as temporary hurdles instead of defeating limitations, knowing that we when we speak, our mind listens, and so our actions follow, modern psychology has let us know that our belief systems fuels our behaviors, conscious and unconscious and in short, dictates our lives.

So if mindset has this immense and undoubtedly profound impact on us as individuals, should we be curious about its impact on organizations? We know that research has emerged from the neuroleadership institute on how 20 different companies are applying the growth mindset in the united states, Australia and Europe, the main findings of this research were fascinating:-

• employees are 34% more likely to feel ownership and committed to their company’s future.
• Employees have developed 47% higher trust in their companies.
• Employees agreed by 65% that their company supports risk-taking.

These findings tell us a deeper story, a hidden treasure that can only be seen when looked for between the lines, adopting a growth mindset in organizations means that the employees will feel like the co-pilots of the organizations growth, they will see see processes as learning opportunities and have a higher mental and emotional elasticity for dealing with tough times.

Now, how can we co-create a growth mindset in our organizations? Let’s start with the language! Omit mentions of failures and replace with “learning”, spread the culture of “we have not reached our goal yet” instead of “we’ve not met our goal”, empower those around you in seeing them as unfinished artwork, as a possibility hub, as a learning and growing individual and culture, and magic will start to happen!