Leading Growth

This article was first written when Eagles Academy sat down to plan for ERC's Student Council's Leadership Retreat in June 2018. [Part 4 of 4]

Part 1 - Growth Matters / Part 2 - Growth is Change / Part 3 - Measuring Growth

Growth stops when we lose the tension between where we are and where we should be. If you think about it, there is no practical use for a rubber band unless it is stretched. This is the same for us humans.

Growth is also a result of dropping bad habits, changing wrong priorities and embracing new ways of thinking. People who do not grow get stuck in a rut because they are unwilling to leave what they have known and practiced for so long, to do something better. They are not willing to risk being wrong in order to discover what could be more right.

Growth’s highest reward is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it. ~ John C Maxwell

If leaders led with a growth mindset, they set the tone and reward for growth, for taking on challenges, improving and helping others improve as well as being a team player. These behaviours are more than just the bottom line of business, they are backups for a “greater” purpose.

Leading Growth

1. Leaders must value people’s ability to improve, believing that everyone in their team has tremendous potential, the ability to grow and move up.
2. Leaders must value creativity and innovation, allowing their team to take risks and have their back when things do not work out. 
3. Leaders must value teamwork, ensuing that their team feels empowered and committed.
4. Leaders must think deeply about what to do with failure, capitalise it to add value to company, taking blame while mentally processing errors to correct them and sharing credit.

If leaders led with a fixed mindset, cheating and deception will be more prevalent in their team. If one always has to be the superstar or the one who is smarter than others then they will focus all their energy into doing everything they can to appear so. They do this by keeping secrets, hoarding information and withholding help.

Leading Fixed Mindsets

1. Leader talks about growth but when something does not work out, ensuring that someone must pay the price. 
2. Leaders worship talent and pay good money but they are not able to keep them, because most people on their team have one foot out the door, waiting for next highest bidder.
3. Leaders see errors and move on as quickly as possible to the next thing to avoid having to deal with it, always running from the problems instead of facing them. 
4. Leaders push blame on pretext of team contributions, constantly trying to make oneself look less stupid than the rest of their team.

To lead growth, one must let go of what one thinks and feels is right and comfortable, in order to discover what is possibly actually right. One does not need to be brave, brilliant or lucky - only willing to change and get uncomfortable.

To lead growth, leaders must be willing to experiment with new behaviours in order to test our unconscious assumption that changing the status quo is dangerous and likely to have negative consequences.

The Goldilocks Principle

Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right. 

We humans love a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty. If you love badminton and play a serious match against a five-year-old, you will quickly become very bored. It’s too easy. If you play a professional badminton player like Kento Momoto, you will also quickly become very bored because the match is conversely too difficult.

Now consider playing badminton against a peer who is at a more equal skill level. You win a few points but you also lose a few. You have a good chance of winning, but you must keep trying and not let your guard down. You focus on the shuttlecock and keep distractions at bay, being fully invested in the game at hand. This is a challenge of just manageable difficulty - an example of the Goldilocks Principle.

Leading fixed mindset creates a zero-sum game in which their team members are either succeeding or failing and “winners” quickly get weeded out from “losers.”

On the other hand results also matter when leading growth, but in addition to rewarding success, they also treat failures and shortcomings as critical opportunities for learning and improving, individually and collectively.

Neurons grow new connections when tackling challenging situations. We gain IQ points in math and verbal areas because of the denser neutrons developed, likewise we need to view growth as being on a trajectory to do better. Much better. Instead of "failure", which makes people demoralised and lose interest, "not yet" gives people a sense of challenge that is manageable. (read more about this in my previous article, "Not Yet, Try Again")

Motivation, encourage persistence and this can be done simply by adding the word "yet" like this: I’m no good at this vs I’m not good at this yet.

Leading growth is not just about being open minded or a nice person. Leading growth is a lifelong journey. Here are three questions to help you start each day as you lead growth:

1. What do I need to learn today that I didn’t know yesterday? [Learn]
2. What do I need to let go of today that I held on to yesterday? [Unlearn]
3. What do I need to change today that I was doing yesterday? [Relearn]

--

Be a part of something bigger, share your thoughts with me - I am collecting ideas for a book. Like + Comment + Share, please. Ta!