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Employees’ Growth Mindset: How to Develop It

Mindset is the foundation of the success and failure of any organization. The most successive organizations are known to be oriented on growth. A manager has to build a learning-oriented culture at the workplace and help the employees switch from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

A growth mindset provides motivation and support to employees to progress in their careers. It is beneficial for the employees as well as the business. An employee who has a growth mindset believes that success comes from the right effort and time.

The psychologist ‘Carol Dweck’ says that success comes from the right mindset rather than intelligence, talent, or education. She categorized mindset into two types:

Fixed mindset

People with a fixed mindset believe that they are inborn with certain intelligence, skills, and abilities that cannot be changed. They fear that they might not succeed the challenges often stops them from progressing.

Growth mindset

People with a growth mindset believe that they can learn from experiences, develop their skills and improve with practice. They embrace challenges and lead to greater achievement.

Developing the growth mindset in employees

Help the employees learn the growth mindset in the following ways:

Establish the workplace environment:

The growth mindset requires establishing an environment where openness, transparency, and risk take place. As these will help to make it easier for the employees to adopt the growth mindset.

  • Openness: The ideas and suggestions for the growth of the organization should be given openly to the employees. In the same way, employees should be open to sharing the issues and feedback with the managers.
  • Transparency: There should be transparency in the organization. The vision, strategies, goals of the organization should be transparent. It helps to build the growth mindset of the employees in the organization.
  • Risk-taking: Growth comes from new experiments and the implementation of new ideas. So, the risk factor automatically gets involved while we experiment with new things. The employees should be ready to take risks.

Learning from success and failures:

Nobody likes to fail in their lives. But, when projects don’t succeed, the managers should not demotivate the employees. It will bring their confidence levels low and they might not share any ideas in the future. Instead, managers should encourage the growth mindset of the employees by making them learn from their failures. Also, celebrate the success of the employees and make it a part of their learning. The learning doesn’t end while you achieve success, you can learn from your success also. Learning from success is as important as from failure. They both provide a practical approach to learning to the employees.  

Individual Development:

The individual developments include encouraging the employees to stretch themselves into the new area of development. The employees attend training and development programs to adopt the new changes and get fit into them. The employees who take part in these programs indicate that their organization believes in themselves as potential employees. It promotes a growth mindset at the individual levels. It ultimately benefits the organization and retains valuable employees. The organization achieves its growth and development when the employees have reached their own growth and development.

Evaluate Performance, not Output:

The performance should be evaluated based on learning, not based on output given by the employees. The employees always learn from their work, they may fail or succeed in their job, but ultimately they learn. So, learning plays a very significant role in employee performance evaluation.

While developing the growth mindset in the employees of the organization, this approach changes the evaluation method of the performance. It helps in the growth of the employees and the organization gets the best from the employees.

Recognize Individual Accomplishments:

The employees need recognition of their achievements to stay motivated. Always recognize every small achievement of the employees and celebrate them. The recognition gives them the motivation to make more efforts to reach their goals. When a team gets successful, it should be considered as the achievement of the whole team, not just the manager. Individual accomplishments within the group should also be recognized and rewarded.

This helps in building the growth mindset in which the employees are willing to step out of their comfort zone to take initiatives and reasonable risks as well.

Feedback:

The employees assume that they are working their best unless they get feedback from the managers or given a day off as an award, which gives the idea of how their performance is. Feedback help to know where their performance stands and how to make it better.

In a growth mindset, the employee often shares and requests feedback. By actively listening to the feedback of the manager, the employee develops a tactical plan to improve his performance. It is also recommended to document the feedback and goals so that both managers and employees have access to them. Meaningful feedback can actually help to develop the employees.