“Our leaders need help in operationalising the concept of ‘growth mindset’ in their teams by ensuring we put it into practice and get the actual growth delivered. How do we get there?”
This question was recently posed to us by our client, heading one of the fastest growing entities of their company. They wanted help to close the gap between the internal training they had done on growth mindset, with the growth promises they had made to the capital markets.
As with many of our clients, we support and encourage ‘growth mindset’ as described in the research of Prof. Carol Dweck. The challenge many companies face is to go beyond growth mindset as a concept and make it work in practice, and deliver tangible growth results.
This challenge is evidenced by what we have found in several organisations, we call it a kind of post-growth mindset training vacuum: “We have had 100s of leaders going through a growth mindset training, yet we do not see enough of the growth being realised in our results. Now what?”
GROWTH REALISATION CAPACITY
For the last 20+ years we have worked intensely on identifying and codifying, why do some companies manage to stay and become more relevant for their customers, while others, seemingly equally ambitious and informed organisations fail to do so? Enter growth realisation capacity.
Growth realisation capacity is a set of business, organisational and behavioural practices that translate the concept of growth mindset into tangible and concrete ways of working, ways of talking and ways of thinking.
These practices put the growth potential, objectives, and ambitions at the centre, and invite executive teams to co-create and enact their critical growth path:
- the considerate choice
- of the critical few interventions in business strategy, organisation, and leadership
- that will have the biggest leverage for the growth of the value of the organisation in the coming 12 months,
- in light of the three-to-five-year growth story and ambitions.
While growth mindset training may boost awareness of the needed mindset and skillset in the short-term, there is an increasing body of research suggesting that leadership styles and team climate have a (much) bigger impact on driving growth than individuals’ mindsets alone. This leadership style and team climate for growth gets built in the daily business interactions more than it does through discrete training activities alone.
Working on growth realisation capacity is creating the climate for growth mindset and behaviours by the way we work on carefully selected business priorities, make decisions, and interact to get things done, together. This approach leverages the behavioural change adagio of “we do not think ourselves into a new way of action, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking”.
Growth realisation capacity is about taking growth mindset beyond our minds; it is a consistent way of working in and on our business, a way of doing things as an organisation and hence build the behavioural climate needed, in an uncertain and volatile context. And hence make the growth happen, every day.