Thinking of expanding your business?
Then according to the latest research – your team may need to cultivate a ‘Growth Mindset’.
The work carried out by world-famous psychologist Dr. Carol Dwek on ‘Growth Mindset’ has gained much popularity in recent times.
According to Dweck there are two kinds of people, those with a ‘growth mindset’ and those with a ‘fixed mindset’. The former is underpinned by the belief that your abilities are fixed by your upbringing, genetics or intelligence.
“In a ‘growth mindset’ people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work, brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment” writes Dweck.
Our belief at Human-ByDesign is that results in organisations flow through people. When we apply the principles of ‘Growth Mind-Set’ to organisational culture and support our employees and teams to stretch their cognitive skills and emotional intelligence to new horizons, this, in turn, supports the organisation to also stretch beyond its capabilities to innovate, change and grow.
Here at Human-ByDesign we are interested in understanding how we can begin to harness the principles of growth mindset to build positive organisational culture. Our business is grounded in behavioural science and we are currently in the process of developing scientifically sound methodologies and tools to support organisations to develop a growth mindset.
In doing so, it will be important that our work is grounded not only in theory but also in the practical application of the methodologies.
We believe answering the following questions will help to provide clarity and shape a trajectory for that will have a beneficial outcome for the organisations that we will serve:
- Why is creating an environment for growth mindset important when developing organisational culture?
- What behavioural attributes constitute a growth mindset?
- How do we know if we have a growth mindset or not?
- How can we measure growth mind-set, in our employees, teams and across organisational culture?
- How can we develop a reliable diagnostic tool that provides a behavioural mirror so that we can have visibility on precisely were our employees need to focus on development interventions?
- How can we develop a scientifically validated process, which provides us with a data – set that we can rely on and have confidence in to support us make the best decisions for recruitment and internal employee development programmes?
Before diving in to answer these questions, there is an additional piece of the puzzle that I believe is worth noting:
When we juxtapose Dr. Carol Dweck’s Research with Professor Dan Harrisons 30 years of research on *enjoyment theory, we can see that cultivating a growth mindset as part of organisational culture is not as straight forward as we might initially think.
According to Dr. Dan Harrison’s research, employees who are aligned with tasks of the job that they find intrinsically rewarding, tend to be three times more productive in their role.
His central thesis is human beings are designed to enjoy their work. Even when there is career progression in the organisation with ample opportunity for growth offered by the company, his research found that it is human nature to feel restless and seek to move on when we don’t experience ‘job satisfaction’.
The research on this suggests there is a balance to be struck between creating psychologically safe environments to support our employees stretch and grow, while at the same time being mindful to align our employees with work that allows them to be their authentic-self and engage in work they find meaningful, purposeful and intrinsically fulfilling.
Organisations can then tap into a much larger reservoir of creativity, energy and productivity from their employees, which will in turn lead to more mutually beneficial outcomes, for both the employee and the organisation.
To explore further how your organisation can cultivate a ‘Growth Mind-Set’ culture, get in touch with us by Clicking here.
