Organizations that are strongly committed to creating a diverse workforce and culture of equity and inclusion integrate training programs for their people from leaders to front-line workers with changes to policies, practices, and resources allocation. The mindsets of individuals are scrutinized and retrained through workshops, readings, and viewing, to change, but the organizational mindset is rarely even considered. This is a mistake.
Carol Dweck popularized the concept of a growth mindset as contrasted with a fixed mindset. A growth mindset is marked by an attitude toward a difficult problem as a challenge and learning opportunity in contrast to a fixed mindset, grounded in the belief that only if a person has the ability and talent will they be able to address the difficult problem and if not, they will fail. The importance of shifting toward a growth mindset has been demonstrated repeatedly. Organizational mindset is whether a company is perceived to view talent as fixed or malleable.
Three studies published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2020, demonstrate the power of organizational mindset on key metrics of inclusion, equity, and organizational culture. When organizations are perceived to view their people as fixed, employees also perceived a more negative culture with less collaboration, innovation, trust, integrity, and commitment.
As always, it falls on empowered leaders to create the environment, the context, in which the work gets done and it is the leader’s choice of whether to cultivate a fixed or growth organizational mindset. Microsoft leader and CEO Satya Nadella opted to employ a “Model Coach Care” approach to develop the growth organizational mindset and this simple model can be applied in your business.
In this model, managers practice and demonstrate a growth mindset for approaching problems and rebounding from setback. Doing so, models this way of thinking and behaving for their team members to emulate. They use coaching techniques to help their team members develop and learn. The demonstrate that they care about their people by investigating each person’s capabilities and goals and providing resources (time, developmental experiences) to each person for their persona development.
How do your organization’s leaders demonstrate their own growth mindset or are they demonstrating that the really have a fixed mindset?
Do your leaders know how to coach and use coaching techniques in their training methodologies? How do they use reinforcing and redirecting feedback to help their team members development and improve?
What do your organization’s leaders do to find out the capabilities and goals of their team members? What resources are offered to their team members for team members’ personal development?
