Importance of "Growth Mindset" in the Workplace

Daniel Roth was in his element talking to the top NBC News anchors about what recruiters are really looking for .... turns out it's having a growth mindset !

In these changing times recruiters are looking for "people who are always learning, seek out challenges, grow from mistakes and adapt on the fly."

My Commentary

I've been on LinkedIn right from the beginning, and believe it has the potential to become the #1 platform in the world. According to AJ Eckstein ?? Gen Z's are now "flocking " from Twitter to LinkedIn , (link to his article) and that tells you everything you need to know. LinkedIn as a platform is constantly in growth mode.

As great as having a growth mindset sounds, we need to remember that we're in a time where people have less motivation than before, and our systems have become very complicated.

At a time like this the best thing employers can do is look for new ways to simplify things, and get closer to peoples' hearts to understand what they really want.

But here's the catch: all the things for checking off the boxes next to Growth Mindset, actually belong to the old way of learning. After all, Carol Dweck started her research in the early 1970's, when we were living in a completely different world. When kids still grew up doing all kinds of challenging things outside together for hours, instead of being indoors glued to devices.

So with all due respect to the fascinating concepts she introduced back then to motivate students, I don't think it's relevant for our time where we've put up all these barriers between us. I don’t think there’s any training or academic learning that can teach a person flexibility around change, or how to shift from one paradigm to another - there is no such thing.

In our time, the human ego is celebrating its newfound freedom. We love not having to deal with so many other people throughout the day. We love things like remote work where we can set up our schedule the way we want to. Yet it is precisely our live interaction with other humans that develops us the most!

What's the solution? Encourage groups of people to come together to teach themselves.

What's their motivation? It's both professional and social.

If you don't read any other part of this post read this:

Since we've become so isolated in our daily lives, now our professional development must go hand in hand with our social development.

Today we can’t escape the combination of professional and social, because this is the next form of our economic development.

What better example of this do we have than LinkedIn ? Yes, it's a social network but we're all at our best there because it's also where we present our professional image to the world.

So by gathering people with a common denominator, such as some professional training - that group of people are participating together for a common goal of succeeding in the training. In these scenarios where we're inspiring and motivating each other we're creating 10 times more opportunities for development than we could ever hope to achieve on our own.

How does this work? During this process there is a transfer of knowledge and many other things between these individuals. This gives us access to potential forces that exist in each person, but which are dormant at the moment. Once we connect the way humans do - mainly through talking and listening to each other - these forces operate on us like an amplifier. We provide a group of professionals with everything they need to identify more with the company, and with each other. So they can really become integrated in each other's hopes and dreams for the future. This will be the most powerful source of motivation the world's ever seen. Team members who go through this kind of process will never want to part.