Developing an Employee Mindset Committed to Growth is Essential
In my experience, employee mindset is one of the most difficult and tricky issues for a leader or manager to tackle. Of course, in an ideal world at the recruitment stage, leaders would hopefully choose people with a mindset which is condusive to the success of the business, but often this is simply not the reality. Many circumstances can make employees appear bright and fresh right at the outset of the employee contract and things can go wrong, or a leader may inherit a team with an ingrained employee mindset. Often employee mindset is put down to personality and leaders feel helpless to make any kind of influence. In her ground-breaking book Carol Dweck introduces the concept that far from everyone being tied to a fixed mindset, a growth mindset can be fostered and can help individuals as well as organisations aspire and achieve in a more meaningful way. This understanding is essential for any leader or manager who knows they can get more of the best out of their people but just don’t know how.
There are many ways leaders can encourage and develop a growth employee mindset, although there has to be a committment to, and a vision for how this is to be achieved. Results need to be a part of the pay-off, but not the main focus, otherwise employees will feel manipulated and may well resist any moves to switch them from their fixed ways and beliefs.
In my coaching practice I use as a starting point two familiar and well respected theories to begin the process of determining mindset, which gives leaders something to get started on. In the form of a matrix questionnaire using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Robert Dilts NLP, Logical Levels, leaders can gather perceptions of both employees and managers to determine the level or levels they are at. The Employee Mindset Audit below shows a suggested way of using these two theories to estimate where employee mindset sits in an organisation. Using the audit can be used either as a tool for team meetings, as the basis of an anonymous employee feedback survey or simply as a way to develop organisational culture and behaviours based on desired mindset. The beauty and simplicity of the audit is that it identifies the level of mindset within the logical levels. One of the reasons development initiatives can be ineffective is because mainly they are introduced at either the level of capability or behaviour when the real problem is with mission/purpose or identity, for example.
Supporting employees to change from a fixed to a growth mindset
The actions needed will vary depending on the current level of collective and individual mindset determined. However, once a leader has determined the general mindset of employees within the organisation, there are a number of ways the work to change the mindset can be successful. The essential components of embarking on a journey are:
- A willingness to help employees grow
- A commitment to providing the resources to enable employee mindset growth and sticking to it, its not a quick fix
- Developing a management team who are bought into the concept and a commitment to changing culture
- A focus on improvement and learning and ditching any semblance of a blame culture
- A willingness to improve terms and conditions to support employees through lower levels
- Providing opportunities and challenge for growth
- Understanding the proven benefits of an improved mindset
Helping people to engage, be well and grow are essential to a successful organisation. While some businesses can get good results even though there is a “survival” employee mindset, it is unsustainable in the long term and will cost more in basic levels of customer service, lost production, slow reactions to change and unskilled and unprepared people. After all if a business is doing well in “survival mode”, think how well they could do when employees are “self actualised”.
