As you strive to maintain a positive workplace, it is important to keep your teams motivated and engaged. Having a positive work culture which nurtures the development of staff will reflect directly into the growth of your business. For organizational growth, influencing the mindset of your workforce to think in the same direction is critical through the right kind of environment.
Here are 5 steps to develop such mindsets as part of your strategy.
1. Growth Culture
Encourage your teams to adopt progressive and an upward-thinking attitude by encouraging them to undertake training and courses which are easily accessible. Have them set their own goal and provide mentorship in furthering those goals for them to achieve their best. By allowing them to set their own milestones, staff feel personally invested in the goal. Most importantly, embrace off-the-wall ideas that could lead to innovative thinking on addressing common problems hindering business growth.But, follow the wisdom of Einstein, who said: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Creative thinking is not synonymous with safe thinking. In order to grow, you have to be prepared to take risks.
2. Feedback
Open, honest communication is an absolute must if you want your staff to learn and grow. Host frequent feedback sessions to help guide them and show them that they’re important to you. 69% of employees say that they would work harder if their work was recognized. This is crucial to helping your team stay motivated and valued.
We all recognize that business leaders are often busy, but even if you are unable to have feedback sessions with your team as often as you would like, make sure that your staff understand how important their development is to you. Work with managers and team leaders to continuously capture staff feedback as a reflection of your strategy and their development.
3. Encourage Competition (to a point)
There are many who thrive in a competitive environment and push themselves by pushing their peers. Encouraging your team to push themselves is great, but too much competition can be a bad thing.
A growth mindset is about self-motivation. To work, a growth mindset needs to come from the individual and their own want to learn and improve. Many companies, whether realizing it or not, rank their staff from lowest to highest performing. This doesn’t take into account personal development and individual learning curves.
If praise and rewards are only handed out to those who do the best, this puts off those that are doing their best. With that in mind…
4. It’s OK to Fail
Failure happens; it’s as simple as that. To encourage growth, you need to allow people to take risks, and that means accepting that it’s okay to fail sometimes.
More often than not, individuals and teams of people are worried to take a chance for fear of failure. As is the case for many companies, figures such as productivity, efficiency and sales are the focus – with financial bonuses attached.
When results are held to such lofty heights, staff will worry about being experimental and simply stick to what they think works. This creates stagnation, not growth or innovation and can hold your company back.
Focus on learning and improvement-based objectives where appropriate. Setting measurable goals creates a framework that will naturally encourage personal growth. This will create a better, healthier balance within your business.
5. Lead by Example
Everyone, no matter what their job title, can adopt and benefit from a growth mindset. We can all learn more and improve our skills. If you want to encourage a growth mindset in your company, it’s important to be your own ambassador for growth and lead by example.
A growth mindset is beneficial for everyone and can build a more productive and positive working environment. By focusing and encouraging self-improvement, you’ll soon find that the company improves as a whole.