Nurturing Growth Mindsets in Budding Leaders

How do businesses evaluate and plan for growth? The time-tested KPI (key performance indicator) will always remain relevant. However, budding leaders ought not to become too obsessed with KPIs and miss out on the long game, the big picture of the organisation’s growth trajectory. Effective and sustainable growth comes from a growth mindset that is more than quantitative numbers and hard statistics.

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To successfully cultivate a growth mindset, you need a holistic point of view. Holistic in the sense that you can’t just focus on revenue, or on the quantitative aspects of your work. The qualitative, intangible aspects of growth can be more important in the long run, and budding leaders should never ignore those.

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Adopting a growth mindset is also synonymous with a zest to continuously improve and do more. In turn, when you do more, it’s not just for yourself; it’s putting in extra effort to help your own team. You can be more than a manager – as a good friend, you can help your team out in all aspects of their professional and personal growth, as one way to practice a growth mindset that is not solely quantitatively driven. This valuable asset should also be reinvested into every aspect of your professional and personal life, and when managing clients and teammates.

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360-Degree Growth Mindset

Growth mindsets encourage can-do attitudes, where you do a bit more for your people, managers or clients. Where you used to simply say “No”, choice answers now go “Yes, but these are the things I need support in to do my best work.”

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Resist the urge of complacency, and constantly ask yourself: How can I do it even better? What do I need to deliver better results?

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You can also interpret the growth mindset as taking every situation and looking at ways to optimise it, while asking yourself what more can be done to make it look better. If you have a client-facing role, how do you deliver the best possible results, services or goods to your customers? In a retail set-up, simply being warm to your customers is a great first step. When you show genuine interest in the needs of your clients and customers, rather than view interactions with them as purely transactional, that plants the seeds that will eventually grow into a robust growth mindset.

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While many people tend to think of growth mindsets as managing upwards, it’s also about managing sideways and across all dimensions. New and developing leaders should be aware of this and adopt the broad-based perspective that it stands for. While doing more than specified and continuously meeting KPIs are foundational aspects of growth mindsets, the concept in totality also encompasses much more.

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Conversely, if you’re overly focused on KPIs, you’ll tend to develop tunnel vision, eventually viewing everything from a transactional perspective. When you only gravitate towards issues that help you reach your KPIs, you’re subconsciously going to deprioritise everything else, including insights that can reap benefits in the long term and further refine growth mindsets.

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For example, employees tend to be viewed as the largest costs to running a business. I was once asked to find the best way to optimise costs for a bank, and had to look at where people were being deployed. Instead of zeroing in to the costs represented by employees, I opted to analyse the bank’s largest cost contributor, market data expenses. While this knowledge would be sufficient to begin renegotiations with market data vendors and change traditional mindsets of senior management around costs, one should not instinctively take the most direct approach with these new realisations.

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In this instance, the most direct approach to negotiation would be to ask the vendor to reduce their fees. A negotiator leading with a growth mindset would instead highlight the percentage of costs to the business that the vendor contributes to. Vendors will sit up and take note when you tell them that they’re responsible for 20% of your total business costs, because they’ll get the quantitative message that they are a significant partner driving your organisation’s success.

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The other half of the equation is in identifying like-minded business counterparts in growth and appealing to shared interests. If you talk to three vendors, two in three will likely be growth-mindset people. When you sift out the vendors that are willing to cooperate from those who are inflexible in their stances, then you can build more long-lasting partnerships with the former group, while they also benefit from your continued patronage.

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That’s how growth mindsets on both sides create synergy. Had I solely focused on KPIs, I would not have dug into market data costs or spoken to the bank’s vendors. In turn, I would not have known which of those vendors were aligned towards a growth mindset and open to working with us. In the end, we exceeded the KPI set for cost reduction – in eight months, we saved 7.5% to 8% in costs, when the original target was 1.5% to 2% for the year.

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With a growth mindset, you can get 11 when you put one and one together. A KPI mindset is limited to 1+1=2.

Value Leakage and the Big Picture

In the previous example, making less optimal decisions would have led to value leakage. That’s when you fail to capture the greatest possible value offered in a business opportunity. There’s a lot of value leakage in large organisations, especially by budding new leaders. The issue is structural, since large organisations can be very compartmentalised. If you’re not a leader, it’s reasonably hard to map out your value chain and figure out what is happening, where things happen and who is responsible for doing what.

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Some organisations have their product-oriented employees accompany the sales team to liaise with clients and take note of the feedback offered. The product team can also share their input and experience in developing and using product functions, providing a more holistic work relationship for all parties. While directly receiving feedback from end users is helpful, product specialists would need more bandwidth to incorporate this aspect into their overall work. To get this bandwidth, you must have an excellent relationship with your partners and counterparts. You should be able to work out a plan while trusting and empowering your product specialists to execute it.

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Trust and empowerment are especially important, since new leaders are vulnerable to micromanaging practices. If you’re a leader in product functions and your job is to manage product specialists and add features, then you have less to do. Correspondingly, when you have less to do, you end up poking your nose into everything under your scope of work. Micromanaging occurs when people don’t have enough to do, and leads to value leakage when you continually obsess over existing efforts instead of growing new possibilities.

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When you take a step back and zoom out to the larger picture, you will be able to better understand the context behind the work you’ve been tasked to do. You will also need to identify your stakeholders and their incentives for supporting you. What do they get out of their continued support, and what can you offer? Within a larger organisation, you have to be able to look at the same project from the viewpoints of different stakeholders and ask yourself: besides the direction given by senior management, what else can we offer the stakeholders?

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Another example of a growth mindset is that if you can make your stakeholders look good, then you also look good by association. It’s very possible to do things that make stakeholders look better without significant effort or trade-offs involved.

I’m a firm believer in the innate ability of any person to adopt a growth mindset, no matter who they are. It begins with behaviour, and like everything else, behaviour can be inculcated.

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Firstly, you should understand the state of your mindset. Does it come naturally to you? You may be more confident in some situations and less confident in others. In the latter, you’re bound to be carrying either a risk-fearing or risk-loving perspective. This knowledge also feeds into the development of a framework to inculcate your growth mindset.

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It can also be situational – in what context do we display our growth mindsets? Conversely, what are the contexts in which we do not possess or display this quality? This equips you with an understanding to ask yourself, “How do I make the most of the context in which I am most unlikely to be a growth-mindset person?” If you don’t know this, or if the situation is an ambiguous one in which you’re a risk-fearing person, you cannot be a growth-mindset person in that particular situation. Take another step back and identify the qualities you need to possess in order to become comfortable in uncertain situations – come back later and build your growth mindset with a firmer foundation.

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If you’re looking to spur a change in your thought process through behaviour, it’s good to reflect on tasks you’ve done and ask yourself what else you could have done. It’s an effective way to generate and absorb feedback into oneself, and can become a positive habit if consistently done. While you may not be able to take every optimal action in a given situation, it is good enough to question yourself and register the fact that there are things that you could have done with the benefit of hindsight.

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Perhaps you would benefit from expertise that rubs off on you from external sources. If you’re putting yourself out there and have good existing relationships with your peers, team or customers, you’ll be more likely to convey the right messages, opening new opportunities to better grow the right mindset. Within a conversation, it’s important to be able to contextualise information and obtain unique insights. Shared contexts mean more engaged participants, and more engaging conversations are also more useful for everyone involved. If your conversation points aren’t relatable to them, they’re just going to lose interest and switch off, shutting down potential opportunities for further growth.

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Helpful Tips for New Leaders

To hone growth mindsets and keep them sharp, newly minted leaders should be open to being challenged. You should be open to new perspectives and challenges by your mentors, peers and those whom you can freely discuss and debate with. Self-reflection is important and beneficial, but it also surfaces uncertainties and grey areas best clarified with a second opinion. It helps to be able to unpack or unbundle these issues with someone whom you’re comfortable asking for help or getting challenged by, on a semi-frequent basis.

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Growth can come by much more easily than one anticipates, and sometimes it really does come down to taking a breather. When you take time to breathe and space yourself out throughout the day’s work, it’ll be easier to zoom out and see the big picture. When you’re not preoccupied with replying to emails and dealing with short-term tasks, you’re more likely to map your tasks into the overall value chain and ask yourself, “What’s going on?” For growth mindsets primed to find the best in opportunity, questions beget more questions – “What else can I do?” The more likely you ask yourself these questions, the more likely it becomes a habit.

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Even as you work towards a growth mindset, you’ll want to foster that thinking within your team. If your team remains quite KPI-focused, you should lead by example while working with others. After all, you can’t change people who do not accept or perceive the need to change. As a leader, you’ll need to put in the effort, not to change people, but to demonstrate a need to change and the benefits that come from doing so.

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As they progress towards growth mindsets, you’ll need to support them throughout the learning process. Failure is inevitable, but also a treasured opportunity to learn and improve. It’s more likely that your team will encounter obstacles when trying to change long-standing habits, and you’ll need to be there to support them, jointly reflect on what’s wrong and lift each other up.

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A growth mindset goes a long way in realising your own potential. Once you actively practice it and nurture the same culture within your team, you’ll be able to capture the maximum possible value from opportunities that you’d otherwise miss.

1 Look Beyond KPIs

It is only when you look beyond KPIs and specific targets that you can begin thinking about capturing added value, hidden behind opportunities that are not obvious or explicitly stated.

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2 Reflect Often

By frequently evaluating your own performance and digging deeper to unearth alternative possibilities, you strengthen your own mindset to perceive more opportunities in future instances.

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3 Step Back for Big-Picture Views

By taking a breather, you can space yourself out from the constant hustle of short-term tasks and better understand how your actions generate (or do not generate) value for the organisation.