To keep up with the fast-moving business world, organizations have to adapt to latest trends, technology and processes. Businesses that fail to embrace change will fall behind competitors and lose business opportunities.

Changes within an organisation result in numerous positive outcomes, including better business opportunities, improved processes, higher functioning teams and increased creativity. However, organisational change cannot be achieved overnight and even faces employee resistance.

Did you know?

According to report, 70% of change programs fail to meet their objectives and reasons behind it are employees’ resistance to change, lack of resources, budget and managerial support.

 The longer a process/technology has been in an organization, the more invested people are in it, which restricts them from adapting to changes. This type of mindset is addressed as fixed mindset. On contrary, growth mindset encourages individuals to take failure as a lesson, learn from it, and grow from it.

Mindset matters. Let’s understand how.

Carol Dweck, a Stanford University researcher, was the first to address fixed and growth mindset ideologies. According to her, people with a fixed mindset consider their intelligence is static. While those with a growth mindset believe talent, creativity and intelligence have no limits and can improve by working on them.

“Everyone can grow in growth mindset, while fixed mindsets imprison your creativity.”

According to research, an employee working in an organisation with a growth mindset is:

• 47% more likely to trust on colleagues
• 34% more likely to take ownership of task
• 49% more likely to agree that their company promotes innovation

Let’s understand the effectiveness of growth mindset within an organization.

A growth mindset encourages employees to challenge their thought processes and help achieve full potential through improved creativity, effective teamwork and increased productivity.

How does a growth mindset among employees help organisations grow?

Growth mindset can transform a stagnant workplace into a place for innovation. Employees within a growth mindset organisation accept challenges, learn from them and keep improving. One of the best examples of how growth mindset can bring massive success to an organization is Microsoft’s transition after Satya Nadella took over as CEO. He worked on the rigid hierarchical company structure and developed a company culture based on growth mindset, cooperation, learning and adaptability toward technological advancements envisioned by him.

Let’s look at the benefits of growth mindset in organizations.

• Aligns skilled professionals to achieve team goals.
• Encourages employees to upskill
• Nurtures creativity and improves productivity

How do you develop growth mindset within an organization?

To develop growth mindset within an organization, we must

Learn together

Upskilling employees makes them adaptable to technology shifts, improves employee engagement and enables them to effectively handle their responsibilities. When people learn together, they tend to learn faster. Group learning also builds trust among employees and results in teamwork.

Open communication culture

Open communication between the management and employees resolves the problems/hurdles employees face and develop growth mindset within the workforce.

Embrace change

People with fixed mindsets are not open to changes and avoid taking risks as they can reveal their inadequacy. Embracing change is the key to success. Organizations aiming to grow must develop growth mindset within the workforce, which not only creates a tendency to believe they can grow but also consider hurdles as opportunities to learn.

Teams with growth mindset do not worry about looking smart but work towards bettering themselves. It is the attitude of constant learning and evolving. Not only this, agility introduced into business processes by growth mindset continuously improves interpersonal and technical skills and helps employees grow as a whole.

Knowledge Sharing and Training Mentees

It is proven that the most effective way to retain and utilize a new learning is by sharing the knowledge and training new team members on the same concept. As per the Learning pyramid, the highest retention rate of a knowledge or a skill occurs when you tutor others on the same. Therefore, two derivatives of the Learning pyramid for an organization to succeed is, for mentors to constantly acquire new knowledge and also impart or disseminate the same to the mentees. This not only allows the curation on new skill and knowledge, but also develop immense mutual respect and admiration towards each other. That is a classic recipe for establishing trust worthy teams.

In today’s digital market, businesses are continually scaling their offerings portfolio and essentially realigning their internal organisational structure with strong emphasis on core principles like trust, skills, and quality of delivery. When an organisation has its workforce aligned towards delivering quality outcomes, it becomes trustworthy inside-out for both employees and clients.

To ensure delivery excellence for customers, attribute that weighs most is skills amongst workforce. Skilled professionals are true assets to organisations and perform major roles in project delivery, customer retention and acquisition.

Aligning skilled professionals towards the team goals is essential to achieve delivery excellence. Having skilled team members unchanneled is like 2 strong horses pulling a cart in opposite directions. The cart can only progress if both horses pull it in a same direction.

When skilled professionals work as a team, they learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and work with an agenda of complimenting each other, thereby developing confidence among themselves. Team members begin relying on each other’s ability to deliver, which creates a work culture built on trust. Additionally, confidence in team also encourages upskilling, leading to improved performance and productivity of personnel. As a result, within a team of professionals, everybody grows as an individual. Consequently, faith among skilled professionals within an organisation yields premium quality products or services.

When business outcomes are channelled towards excellence in delivery, it effortlessly cultivates customers’ trust in the business. Resulting in trust within the organisation and in customers.

“According to statistics, around 72-73% of consumers say a good experience is key in inducing their brand loyalty.”

Quality work is initiated by commitment and a positive mindset towards completing tasks to the best of your abilities. When team constantly acquires new skills, they inspire each other and constantly push themselves towards levelling up their skills. It not only improves quality of work but also induces trust in the brand. Moreover, a team comprised of skilled professionals with a vision of achieving a common business objective gains confidence and works effectively without supervision from leaders, which is one of the greatest benefits of working as a team.

In this competitive market world, success of a business is dependent on work culture, internal organisational structure and employees’ skillsets. That is why organisations are constantly expanding their offering portfolios and focusing on realigning their organisational structure and core principles around delivery excellence.