Keeping your team motivated and engaged is really important if you're striving to maintain a positive workplace. If you’re able to cultivate and develop staff who are happy, the benefits will feed right back into your business.
A growth mindset amongst your workforce is critical to creating the right kind of environment in which individuals can thrive while your organization grows. Growing your talent from the bottom up is both cost effective and successful, and staff are more engaged and encouraged to help the company grow as they do.
Below are five ways to cultivate a mindset of growth as a part of your business strategy:
1. Foster Growth as a Part of Your Culture
Weaving a growth mindset into the everyday helps encourage your team to adopt a progressive and upward-thinking attitude. This can be achieved by:
- making courses and training easily accessible
- allowing staff to set their own goals
- supporting off-the-wall ideas
Having a growth mindset is all about encouraging people to learn and expand, so you should support them in learning new skills. By allowing them to set their own milestones, staff feel personally invested in the goal, which makes it feel easier to achieve.
Often, individuals can be uncertain about coming forward with ideas because they're worried that they won’t be well received. But, follow the wisdom of Einstein, who said: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Creative thinking is not synonymous with safe thinking. In order to grow, you have to be prepared to take risks.
2. Be Open to Giving and Receiving Feedback
How do you expect staff to learn and grow if you don’t communicate with them? Offer staff regular and frequent feedback sessions to help guide them and show them that they're important to you. 69% of employees say that they would work harder if their work was recognized. This is crucial to helping your team stay motivated and valued.
Even if you, as a business leader, are unable to have feedback sessions with your team as often as you would like, make sure that your staff understand how important their development is to you.
If you have specialists in your company, give them time to give feedback to others. This will help to take the pressure off your time too.
3. Encourage Competition (to a point)
There are many who thrive in a competitive environment and push themselves by pushing their peers. Encouraging your team to push themselves is great, but too much competition can be a bad thing.
A growth mindset is about self-motivation. To work, a growth mindset needs to come from the individual and their own want to learn and improve. Many companies, whether realizing it or not, rank their staff from lowest to highest performing. This doesn’t take into account personal development and individual learning curves.
If praise and rewards are only handed out to those who do the best, this puts off those that are doing their best. With that in mind…
4. Make it OK to Fail
Failure happens; it's as simple as that. To encourage growth, you need to allow people to take risks, and that means accepting that it's okay to fail sometimes.
More often than not, individuals and teams of people are worried to take a chance for fear of failure. As is the case for many companies, figures such as productivity, efficiency and sales are the focus – with financial bonuses attached.
When results are held to such lofty heights, staff will worry about being experimental and simply stick to what they think works. This creates stagnation, not growth or innovation and can hold your company back.
Focus on learning and improvement-based objectives where appropriate. Setting measurable goals creates a framework that will naturally encourage personal growth. This will create a better, healthier balance within your business.
5. Lead by Example
Everyone, no matter what their job title, can adopt and benefit from a growth mindset. We can all learn more and improve our skills. If you want to encourage a growth mindset in your company, it's important to be your own ambassador for growth and lead by example.
A growth mindset is beneficial for everyone and can build a more productive and positive working environment. By focusing and encouraging self-improvement, you’ll soon find that the company improves as a whole.
The article was written by Andrew Margison, founder and director of ZZap Ltd, a specialist cash handling company focused on reducing operating costs for a wide range of businesses. From humble origins trading on eBay, today, ZZap is an international supplier of banknote counters listed amongst the top 10 businesses in London for the Lloyds TSB Enterprise Awards.
Strategic planning is an important part of organizational growth.
Learn how working with an expert facilitator can help you maximize your resources
and gain the most value from your next planning session:
