Developing your Growth Mindset through Purposeful Leadership

Part 2 - Driving mindset change through purpose-geared incentives & transparent leadership

Our last post dove into understanding how to develop your Growth Mindset through idea development and prioritization. Once you and your team / company has built these foundations, it's essential for you to start focusing on team motivation & retention through a purpose-focused incentive structure and transparency. Achieving this approach to a Growth Mindset will allow a cycle of ideas and team retention.

Extrinsic > Intrinsic Motivation

What drives us to do the things we do, whether for work, love, or family, is one of the most cataloged human studies, and the trend of the 20th century and beyond is focusing more on reasons beyond rewards and incentives. The consensus in management theory is that the arrow of time bends towards a shift up the hierarchy of needs - and to focus on ensuring that workers feel more at work than the update in their bank account by the end of the month. Taking this one step further, I believe that a focus entirely on intrinsic motivation is value capture vs. value generation (to quote Oberholzer-Gee’s Better Simpler Strategy maxim) for both the company and the worker. However - how can management actualize extrinsic motivation? After all, doesn’t everyone want more money and more rewards? How can a focus on extrinsic motivation foster a growth mindset? I have found a great answer in using Daniel Pink’s approach in Drive to focus on Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose:

• Autonomy – A desire to be self-directed increases engagement over compliance.
• Mastery – The urge to get better skilled.
• Purpose – The desire to do something that has meaning and is important. Businesses that only focus on profits without valuing purpose will end up with poor customer service and unhappy employees.

Send in the Experts

Instead of going through what each of the above means and why it’s essential (just read the book), I would like to dive into how you can ensure you use a growth mindset to create, foster, and maintain a work environment that achieves these outcomes. Expertise is the most critical vector in ensuring you have an Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (AMP) mentality at your work - that you hire the very best people to achieve the specific goal you need to complete. Expertise helps you not only ‘hit the ground running’ on the tasks at hand, but it also means that you can maintain a lean team that doesn’t have to spend time on tasks beyond their primary goal - this is clear. However, it is not clear that expertise is a two-way street, as experts are good at what they do and very good at helping others improve.

Being lean does not mean you have a team of IC experts with N+1 redundancy - this is a hellishly brittle environment for anyone. What it means is that you have at least 2N redundancy with a clear pipeline for employee development that is provided, in part, by the expert. One other thing of note is that being an expert does not just mean they are a specialist - I have worked with expert generalists with great success - and so when interviewing and building your team, make sure that you, as a leader, are hiring to the needs of the group. If building novel technology that needs SMEs to solve complex issues, then by all means - if it is a relatively common product, then I believe expertise is more in the ability to be pragmatic and solve problems. Often, hiring an SME for this need can lead to the “I built this at my previous company - it’ll work here,” something that has a high rate of failure in my (literal) experience.

The end of meetings

We have all been there. Sitting in a hot & stuffy room with a group of people who have no reason to be there for something that could have been solved over email. However, we do it because, as the organizer, it makes you feel in control, and as an attendee, you are concerned about missing out. These basic human heuristics are not a good reason for maintaining what a directly (1 hour of group, non-working wages) and indirectly (loss of flow and productivity) expensive business tradition is. Again - this is not something new. Analysis abounds on how meetings kill productivity, and though it differs amongst teams in terms of the perfect format, length, and frequency of meetings - this is to go above that. Meetings are a negative externality of modern business and management - the slurry of self-important command & control needs that are mostly not fit for purpose.

With this in mind, how can we use this to ensure the delivery of AMP and maintain a growth mindset for yourself and your team?? It is a combination of Mastery (mentioned above) combined with Autonomy - hiring experts to build what you need, working in concert with their support team to learn how to do it, and granted autonomy by management to deliver in their own time, tracked by the metrics agreed upon before that business cycle. Constant microdosing of middle management to check progress will often do the opposite and create an air of hostility that meetings will exacerbate. Trust your team to deliver on their tasks, and check in on them to solve the problems that surface during the creation of work - that is how to run a better team.

Purpose Development

Referring back to how AMP is summarized and focusing on Purpose alone “the desire to do something that has meaning and is important” - there is no more important thing to ensure that your team feels at work to motivate them, deliver to your company goals and ensure that you foster a growth mindset at work. As a leader or manager, it’s your primary role to ensure that you are developing your team’s purpose - understanding what has meaning & is essential to them, setting achievable tasks, and ensuring that you follow up / track progress. Setting the goals is a helpful exercise for you as it is an opportunity to learn more about your team - what motivates them, what is important to them - but it also helps you meld your team's personal goals with broader company goals.

Upon completing this cycle, the team members feel they have achieved a delta in delivering work purposefully and helping the company achieve its broader goals. I recommend binding intent to success through leveraging Nir Eyal’s Hooked mentality, where you can build habits around achieving purpose through company success via effective management. You just need to format the triggers and rewards your team members feel and format the investments to align with broader company goals.

Hill of Transparency

Having given the team the support they need to develop crazy ideas and helped them grow to achieve purpose at their work, the final step into completing a proper growth mindset is to understand that trust is a two-way street. You have indicated that you trust them enough to work autonomously, but do they trust you enough to know that leadership is taking care of their needs? Again - I’m not new to this discussion on how to be a good leader (even though I am part of the droves of MBA graduates who think they are), and there are many books to read on achieving this. However, from my experience, being a transparent leader is an essential step in achieving a growth mindset, whether for your team or a company as a whole. But why a hill?

Transparency is not a boolean state - it isn’t something you just turn on, like an opaque divider at a fancy house you see on television. It takes work and is usually at odds with what feels right because you feel as if you are giving away information that feels material nonpublic (it usually isn’t) or flattening the org too much (it isn’t). It allows you to focus on what is essential for the company while breaking down the barriers of knowledge, ensuring that even the newest team member feels part of the team. This type of leadership somewhat follows a line from radical transparency to Radical Candor and ends up at a place where ideas and information flow more freely. Once you hit the summit of transparency, everything is visible (see what I did there?!)

Leadership down

Transparency can assist leaders aiming to achieve a growth mindset by ensuring they are open regarding goals, performance, and decisions. In my experience, the best growth-mindset leaders are open and transparent with company goals and performance to achieving (or missing) them. Whether you are a CEO who reports to the whole company on fundraising updates or a CFO describing why you are taking on a convertible note, sharing information like this helps your entire company feel like they are in the room, part of the company. It also passes on the baton of trust that they will keep the information to themselves - further reinforcing their importance to the broader company and flattening the barriers of the company hierarchy.

As mentioned above, goals are a vital component of AMP, so having goals that you, as a leader, are accountable for helps build camaraderie and acts as a forcing function for you to see the importance of tracking performance for your accountability. Transparent goal setting has the final benefit of pushing you to publicly own decision-making regarding changing the tangent of you and your company’s performance. While you do not need to justify your decisions (though the data are likely to explain a great deal), you should share your reasons for doing it. The most outstanding leaders I have worked with are incredibly open and humble about their performance, often too much so. They consistently aim for greater transparency, which helps break down the barriers between leadership and team.

Team up

As mentioned, trust and expertise are two-way streets, but this also holds for transparency. Ensuring that your company has the kind of environment that supports feedback to well up from the team is essential in maintaining a thriving growth mindset ecosystem. More than this, it helps support idea generation and sharing, which is so crucial to you achieving the pursuit of the impossible, as mentioned above. What this should not be, however, is some kind of opinion box where people put their grievances in, often left to be forgotten. As we have all experienced, people are more than willing to share less than vital issues with the company when given a podium.

Accordingly, in group settings, you have to, as leaders, set criteria and goals for hearing feedback from the team to ensure constructive transparency. In a more one-to-one context, you should also nourish the ability of your team to provide you with feedback not only on you as a leader but also on ensuring that you have the kind of open discourse where their needs can be actively listened to. Whether it is the ability to share the things that are important to their purpose development or for them to learn more about why leadership made certain decisions- in this instance - an open discourse is a value-generative opportunity for you and the wider team.

Applying your Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is not a destination - it is the culmination of a series of winding decisions and experiences that allow you to be a better leader by creating an environment that nourishes the free flow of ideas, challenges, and opportunities within your company. While this approach is best suited to an early-stage company, it also works for companies of a much larger scale. At the individual level, you can use these learnings for managing your work, priorities, and motivations - constantly checking with yourself that you are supporting time for idea generation, understanding what truly motivates you, and being radically honest about how / if they are helping you.

At a team level, your group is a small company, possibly operating within a larger one, and your self-contained unit has all the challenges and opportunities that face a startup. If you are finding, as the leader of your team, challenges in getting support for this approach in thinking within your company, you can apply some of the techniques mentioned here to ensure its success: motivation, transparency, and innovative idea generation as the key differentiators between your and other teams within the company. The path to a growth mindset is a constant cycle of learning and can only start when you take that first step into the unknown - this can act as a map to get you there.