Growth Mindset
The ‘engine’ in your growth chain reaction
A strong collective growth mindset is the growth generator within your business. It connects every person in every role in your business to the financial goals and results of your company, enabling you to achieve new revenue targets not previously attainable. Based on a shared vision for your company’s growth and a remuneration and incentive scheme commensurate with achieving new growth goals, a growth mindset creates new motivation, and underpins the ability of people and teams to embrace change, create ideas and opportunities, impact customers, and deliver ongoing growth in challenging markets.
A growth mindset can be measured and developed. The roadmap below explains how individuals and teams with a growth mindset have a progressive impact on your business’s growth and commercial results. The first six elements address your company’s ability to Adapt. The next 7 elements address your company’s ability to Innovate. The final three elements address your company’s ability to Execute new value with precision. Although these three aspects of your business are explained separately, in the real world they should happen simultaneously and continually. The concept of individual and team performance and reward being linked to their ‘customers’ is central. This includes your company as primary customer, your external paying customers, and appropriate other teams in your business.
Ability to Adapt
Your company’s Growth Chain Reaction™ is launched by the collective ability of your leaders and all teams to identify, define and pursue new opportunities to impact their ‘customers’. The roadmap provides an objective for each element supported by a corresponding mindset.
Objective 1
Clarity on new opportunities to impact customers and the business.
Owning Opportunities
Employees embrace the principle that their personal growth and career advancement are inseparable from the opportunities they create for your company’s growth. New opportunities are created when they constantly hunt for ways to contribute tangible value that is unique to them, that would otherwise be lost without their personal motivation to make a difference. They own these opportunities because they take personal responsibility to ensure their contribution is delivered in a way that produces its full impact and value. This way of thinking and acting demonstrates their commitment to your growth vision.
Objective 2
Ability to lift customer expectations and the willingness to pay for more value.
Customer Bonding
Employees bond with customers (internal and external) because they understand that their biggest opportunities lie beyond their own interests, often hidden in the unspoken needs of their customers. Their goal is to find them. They do this by taking the trouble to gain customers’ trust and understand what is important to them that they don’t usually verbalise to others. This shift from service to impact is much more than just a shift in performance. It is also a shift in the motivation behind their actions brought on by a Growth Mindset.
Objective 3
Entrepreneurial confidence to pursue ambitious growth goals.
Inviting Change
Inviting change is what employees do to challenge their own current performance standards in order to lift their opportunities and earnings. They make things happen and take the initiative in shaping the future that they, and your company want. Rather than trying to keep up with ‘change’ they become ‘change’ initiators. They knowingly embrace change because they are not afraid of it because they know that within change lies their opportunity. By inviting change, they develop the confidence to see and embrace opportunities to pursue ambitious company goals.
Objective 4
Motivation and commitment to pursue ambitious growth.
Goals
Your company’s pursuit of ambitious goals requires a corresponding pursuit of ambitious goals by every team in your business. Goals bring clarity to the impact required of every team and reinforce the personal and team desire to win. When this is achieved, company goals are achieved. It is this focus on goals and the actions that flow from them that transforms how teams use their time. This brings ‘new life’ to your strategic plans, ensuring everyone stays focused and disciplined to see your goals accomplished.
Objective 5
Maximising the use of time to focus on achieving growth goals.
Harnessing Time
People and teams are usually so overloaded with work that they are not free to focus on delivering commercial impact. People with a growth mindset view time at work as a personal business asset. This adds an important element in how they manage their personal impact, by bringing a shift from ‘how much’ they achieve to the ‘value’ of what they achieve. It is this conscious focus on ‘value’ that connects the activities of people and teams directly to the commercial interests of your business.
Objective 6
Ability to endure difficulty and persevere to achieve ambitious goals.
Personal Leadership
Achieving ambitious commercial goals requires employees and teams to sustain their personal impact to overcome the many obstacles that emerge when things become difficult. This requires emotional resilience and a solid platform of motivational beliefs. A Growth Mindset creates an unshakeable internal confidence within employees and teams that they can achieve what they set out to do. It gives them the inner strength to keep going and the discipline to do what they sometimes do not enjoy, to accomplish what is important.
Ability to Innovate
Your company’s ability to innovate is not determined by technique. It flows naturally when people collaborate in deploying their unique ability to solve problems and achieve innovation goals in pursuit of their larger commercial goals. Innovation can be applied to improving everything that is done in a business. It is not restricted to products, and everyone can contribute in modest ways that result in a powerful collective reshaping of company performance and saleable value.
Objective 7
Purpose that sustains motivation to achieve extraordinary results.
Purpose
Inspiration for innovation comes from employees having a personal work mission which encapsulates their purpose at work and which defines what it is they want to accomplish that is important to them. It includes work aspirations and personal benefits to their work life – financial and non-financial. Employees having a purpose driving their motivation to achieve extraordinary results is a fundamental building block for company ability to innovate.
Objective 8
Ability to add Unique Value directed at achieving commercial and innovation goals.
Unique Ability
A person’s unique ability is what enables them to bring a definable difference to their work and your company that sets them apart from everyone else. Every person has inherent unique ability and potential to deliver high impact value which often remains unidentified. Unique Ability is a person’s ability to do things in a unique way or have a unique perspective that enables them to see solutions to problems that others do not see. This is particularly useful in the context of innovation.
Objective 9
Deployment of Unique Ability to achieve ambitious goals.
Building Reputation
A person’s reputation is their daily transportable advertisement of their ability and what they are able to achieve for your company, their team and customers. It is their career ‘equity’. Unique ability helps a person build their reputation and ability to contribute to innovation. If you achieve this collectively in your business it will have a huge impact on your company’s brand and reputation.
Objective 10
Resilience and motivation to maintain peak performance.
Performance Beliefs
For your company to innovate and confidently achieve its growth goals, employees must maintain peak performance through emotional resilience and a solid platform of motivational beliefs. This gives them unshakeable confidence to overcome the many obstacles they will face in delivering innovation and performance goals.
Objective 11
Ability to collaborate.
Relationships
The ability of a team to collaborate to deliver innovation and high performance goals for your company and customers, is dependent on the close bond that is formed between the members. An elite team develops through four stages culminating in a partnership forged by appreciation, support and integration of unique ability that emboldens the team to take on new and bigger challenges…and win.
Objective 12
Collective drive to achieve financial results.
Risk and Reward
Embracing risk and reward is that part of a person’s Growth Mindset that emboldens them to reach for the goals and rewards they believe strongly enough in and want to achieve, but are fearful of attempting. This is crucial to your company achieving goals it is never attempted before. Risk and reward connects individuals and teams directly to the achievement of company goals that were previously considered impossible. This fuels motivation and collaboration to innovate and drive growth.
Objective 13
Focus on creating new value.
Innovation
People with a growth mindset provide your business with the creative capital it needs to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage. Innovation happens when teams apply their creative capital to solve problems or create new value that did not exist before. Innovation draws on all six previous growth mindset elements.
Ability to Execute
Because the growth mindset elements work sequentially and progressively, the previous 13 elements form the basis of your company’s ability to execute new value, enabling you to achieve capability, precision and efficiency that is impossible without a growth mindset.
Objective 14
Capability to execute ambitious goals flawlessly.
Unique Teamwork
Drawing on the unique ability of every team member redefines what a team can achieve because team performance is now based on collaboration between team members who are all focused on, and committed to executing growth goals commensurate with their new ability. Applying this principle to teams throughout your business transforms your company’s ability to grow despite market conditions.
Objective 15
Commitment to protect team and business interests.
Aligning Aspirations
Teams that have worked hard to earn their success and the reputation that comes with it, have been through a rigorous process to understand each other and to explore synergies. They have developed the capability to build your business, and from this success generate opportunities in which everyone has a vested interest. Successful teams have a lot to protect, and the greater the success, the more commitment there is to this protection. This is what will protect your businesses interests well into the future.
Objective 16
Ability to sustain growth into the future.
Sustaining Growth
The ability of your company to confidently sustain growth in a rapidly changing world is made possible when the people in your business reach beyond their current experience to learn, adapt, innovate and execute new value expected by your customers. This is possible when the people in your business continue to apply all previous mindset elements. This will keep them and your business economically relevant and highly competitive in a fast changing world.