Growth Mindset Why It's Needed For Successful Leadership

Growth Mindset: Why It’s Needed for Successful Leadership https://blog.growthinstitute.com/the-edge/growth-mindset-successful-le...
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HR & Culture Business Leadership Growth Mindset
Growth Mindset: Why

It’s Needed for
Successful Leadership
Daniel Marcos
What is the #1 predictor of whether your business will scale into success? Is it the market
conditions, the capital venture you manage to raise, or high-profile investors?
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The answer is none of these. In reality, even when conditions look promising, scaling your
business will be an agonizing crawl to success if you don’t have one critical ingredient — a
growth mindset.
Look behind the curtains of any successful company and you will find an exemplary team
leader who has adopted a growth mindset. That’s why I believe the #1 predictor of a
successful company and leadership has to do with whether the leader has adopted a growth
mindset and let go of a fixed mindset.
The Key Differences Between a Growth vs

Fixed Mindset
A growth mindset is an attitude and belief that people have the ability to develop their
talents, abilities, intelligence, and emotional intelligence. It basically means that you
believe success comes from the consistent effort of working through challenges. Leaders with
a growth mindset tend to focus more on the process rather than just the outcome.
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On the opposite end, we have a fixed mindset. This mindset believes that people’s basic
qualities, such as intelligence and talent, are fixed traits that can’t be changed or developed.
Leaders with a fixed mindset are results-oriented to the extreme. They tend to interpret
challenges as failures, believing that all effort has been wasted instead of recognizing the
opportunity to learn and grow.
Let’s dive a little deeper into the different implications a fixed mindset and a growth mindset
have on a company.
How a Fixed Mindset Hurts Your Bottom Line

and Your Leadership
Executives who lead their companies with a fixed mindset will create a culture of fear.
Whenever problems come up — which they inevitably do — leaders with a fixed mindset
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immediately interpret the situation as a failure and look for someone to blame.
The leader may even let go or replace the person blamed. This is because they don’t believe a
person can improve their skills to solve the problem. Sometimes you’ll also see the leader
stepping in to fix the problem themselves because they don’t trust anyone else.
Leaders with a fixed mindset like this can find themselves tangled up in stressful conditions
that stifle business growth, such as:
1. A culture of fear where their team is too scared to take risks, innovate, or express ideas; they fear
being seen as incompetent if they make any mistakes.
2. An unmotivated team that is not performing at their full potential, nor expanding their potential.
3. Constantly fire-fighting or micro-managing their team, which often leads to everyone becoming
overworked, burnt-out, and stressed.
This environment fosters a defensive, finger-pointing culture where people are more invested
in keeping themselves safe than in working together to grow the company. When a company
culture exhibits these traits, scaling up becomes - at worst - almost impossible. At best,
scaling up becomes a path that is imbued with drama, negativity, miscommunication, and
stress.
How a Growth Mindset Develops Your Team

Talent
On the other hand, leaders who adopt a growth mindset will multiply their team’s potential
and create a healthy culture of accountability that drives business growth.
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A leader with a growth mindset sees opportunities for their team, even during times of
crisis. They don’t curl up in a corner believing all efforts have been wasted and they don’t look
for anyone to blame. Instead, they make every effort to accelerate their team’s growth to
overcome any business challenge.
Case Study: Scaling Up Sherpa

Kids
in Ireland
Dawn Engelbrecht, Managing Director of Sherpa Kids International, has been the driving force
behind the sKids and Sherpa Kids businesses growing from 10 sites in New Zealand to over
260 worldwide in just 20 years.
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What was her secret? She had a growth mindset which she also led her team to adopt. Take a
look at how she helped just one of her team members, John Miles, expand Sherpa Kids
throughout Ireland.
When John became Ireland’s master franchisor of Sherpa Kids, he had over 20 years of
experience working as a financier on Wall Street in London but no experience in childcare. He
was also in his 50s — an age where most people would be planning their retirement, not
starting a new business.
Someone with a fixed mindset would probably think that John doesn’t have what it takes to
succeed in the childcare franchise business. After all, his talents and professional experience
are in finance, and he should be retiring, right?
Thankfully, Dawn believed in John’s passion and capability for growth. She guided and
encouraged John to develop new skills to scale Sherpa Kids in Ireland.
Even John himself was skeptical that he could learn new skills. But thanks to Dawn’s belief in
him, he decided to join the course she recommended. “I'll give it a go. Maybe you can teach an
old dog new tricks,” John recalls his decision.
Developing new skills was everything for John. He said, “It gave me better clarity.
It’s not just knowing that I want to go from A to B. Now, I know how we’re going to get there,
what road we'll be taking — and most importantly — what vehicle we're taking and who's in
the vehicle with me. I also have more time in my business and life.”
How did John’s growth impact Sherpa Kids?
Well, John went on to scale Sherpa Kids in Ireland. He gained new inquiries from potential
franchisees of Sherpa Kids, from Derry to Cork and Dublin to Galway. With a real demand for
this product/service offering, and with newfound clarity, John set out to work towards
expanding Sherpa Kids into all 32 counties of Ireland within 5 years.
This achievement was only made possible thanks to Dawn’s growth mindset, which supported
and inspired her team to develop their talent and scale the business.
From Dawn and John’s story, you can see how leaders who push forward with a growth
mindset inspire their teams to do the same.
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Leading with a growth mindset is critical to developing your team into proactive,
accountable, and motivated solution-seekers. As your team grows and evolves, so will the
company.
Soon enough, you’ll have created a culture of people that are open to feedback, accountable
for their own evolution, and resilient enough to take on new challenges — all of which
promote innovation and business growth.
How a Growth Mindset Expands Your

Possibilities to Scale
Other than developing your team talent, a growth mindset is equally important for your
evolution as a leader.
As your company grows, it will go through 4 stages of business growth:
• Startup: 1-5 employees
• Grow up: 6-15 employees
• Scale-up: 16-250 employees
• Dominate your industry: 250+ employees
Different stages have uniquely different challenges. An entrepreneur who successfully grew
their business through the first two stages may not be equipped with the skills to survive the
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third stage. This is where having a growth mindset is critical because the leader will need to
evolve their skills to tackle the next stage of growth.
Similarly, a leader may have helped another company scale-up in the third and fourth stages.
But this does not automatically qualify them to lead a start-up through the first few stages of
growth. Again, learning and developing the new skills required at these unfamiliar business
stages will be critical to their success.
Now that we’ve seen why it’s important to have a growth mindset, it begs the question:
How can a leader adopt a growth mindset?
How Does a Leader Create and Nurture a

Growth Mindset?
The most effective modern leaders all have a growth mindset to keep up with the demands of
a rapidly changing digital world. Here are some practices and beliefs you can adopt to
create and nurture a growth mindset for yourself, and your team.
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1. Embrace Change
The most effective modern leaders embrace the fact that we live in a rapidly changing digital world. By
embracing change instead of fearing or resisting change, they make themselves ready to drive meaningful
change — whether that means changing themselves, their team, the systems and structures of their
organization, or even pivoting their business direction and vision.
2. Become self-aware
Before we can change and grow, we need to first understand our starting point. What are our own limits,
motivations, and emotional states? With self-awareness as a leader, you become better equipped to make
impactful decisions and explore opportunities to grow the business. It will also help you identify the
areas that need more growth for you and your team.
3. Disrupt Yourself
Once you become self-aware, you are ready to disrupt yourself. According to Mark Sanborn,
author of
The Potential Principle, leaders need to disrupt themselves before someone or something else
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does it for you. If change hits you from some other source — say, a disruptive technology —
you’ll find yourself struggling to catch up and adapt. But if you become the one driving
innovation, that makes you the game-changer.
Mark recommends asking yourself these questions to build the habit of disrupting yourself,
making yourself ready for change, and developing a growth mindset:
1. What habits, practices, and routines in your life need to be shaken up a bit?
2. Are you doing things that used to succeed but no longer work as well, if at all?
3. Are you spending valuable time on unproductive activities?
4. How could your time be better invested elsewhere?
5. What is the ratio between your “daydreaming” and your “daily doing”? What
can you do to focus your energy on more important goals?
6. Are you spinning your wheels in unhealthy relationships? Do you need to
change, limit, or end your relationship with someone who is influencing you
negatively?
By putting in a conscious effort to disrupt yourself, you’ll plant the seeds of change in your life
and this will reflect in your ability to develop your team with a growth mindset.
4. Recognize and reward the value of learning in failure
Failure is inevitable when it comes to running a business. Leaders that learn from their
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mistakes and add these lessons into their personal toolkit are better equipped to continually
push the boundaries of their own growth and that of their teams. It’s also important to create a
culture in your company where failure is recognized as a learning tool. This way, your team will
be encouraged to grow and take innovative risks.
5. Focus on the process as an ongoing project
A key part of the growth mindset is to focus on the process and not just the result. No team or
company will execute perfectly, 100% of the time. There will be moments when results do not
meet expectations. This is why it’s important to also focus on the process. By focusing on the
process, you’ll grow your team to achieve continued marginal improvements in execution.
6.Practice perseverance
An oak tree does not grow forty feet overnight. The fruits of growth require time, and so
perseverance is key. Learning to push through failure, treat obstacles as challenges, and persist
in spite of difficult situations will allow you to lead a team to more impactful goals.
The Right Mindset for Success

To lead your team into success, a leader must first exemplify the right mindset for success. This
begins with a growth mindset, where you break free from the shackles of fixed beliefs and
limited potential.
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When you consciously adopt the practices and beliefs of a growth mindset, you will open new
doors of possibilities without being held back by the fear of failure. As T.S. Eliot once said,
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
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Growth Mindset: Why It’s Needed for Successful Leadership https://blog.growthinstitute.com/the-edge/growth-mindset-successful-le...

Default HubSpot Blog

HR & Culture Business Leadership Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset: Why

The Key Differences Between a Growth vs

How a Fixed Mindset Hurts Your Bottom Line

being seen as incompetent if they make any mistakes.

overworked, burnt-out, and stressed.

How a Growth Mindset Develops Your Team

Case Study: Scaling Up Sherpa

How did John’s growth impact Sherpa Kids?

How a Growth Mindset Expands Your

As your company grows, it will go through 4 stages of business growth:

• Startup: 1-5 employees

• Grow up: 6-15 employees

• Scale-up: 16-250 employees

• Dominate your industry: 250+ employees

How Does a Leader Create and Nurture a

3. Are you spending valuable time on unproductive activities?

4. How could your time be better invested elsewhere?

can you do to focus your energy on more important goals?

6. Are you spinning your wheels in unhealthy relationships? Do you need to

4. Recognize and reward the value of learning in failure

5. Focus on the process as an ongoing project

The Right Mindset for Success

Business Strategy and Growth Scaling Up

How to Develop an Entrepreneurial

Business Leadership conscious capitalism

How Conscious Leadership Increased

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