Mindset Leads to Action, Action Leads to Growth

Henry Ford was indeed right on this one: "Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, either way you are right.”?

I believe that everything starts with mindset and I know that many of you do too. The trick is how we turn our focus and efforts around mindset into action that sticks and brings you the desired impact and results for your teams and organization.

This is at the heart of my work for with Mindset to Action and as I keep developing my framework and approaches based on the growth mindset, psychological safety and mindset zones, I ponder a lot on questions like these in the context of my engagements and interactions.

#?The growth mindset

• What is your mindset today? Have in mind that this is often hybrid and situational.
• What does this current mindset mean for the strength and weaknesses for yourself and your teams??
• What can be done to improve on this and what would be your goals for doing this??
• How can you work with mindset in the context of achieving desired behaviors within your organization?

# Psychological safety

• How do you enhance the level of your psychological safety within your teams and your organization and what can you achieve with this??
• How do you align such efforts with your overall leadership approaches??
• What do you do with leaders and employees who are not able (training?) or willing (let them go?) to contribute to these efforts? This is a tough one and thus another reason why you need to get better at hard discussions.?

# Mindset zones (expand the comfort zone)?

• What does the comfort, fear, learning and growth zones look like for your teams and what insights can a mapping of this give you?
• How do you expand the comfort zone for yourself and your team-members and use this as a way to catalyze mindset development even better?

The learning and training efforts you can start on this of course depend on the starting point of your team, organization and thus in particular the people who are involved. We are touching on some highly personal elements here.

Goals and objectives

When it comes to goals and objectives, I see three clear similarities in my interactions with clients and leaders in general over the last year. A quick and dirty yet prioritized list would be something like this.

# Individual growth (we are all egocentric people, just a varying degree of it, right?)

# Build stronger teams, make teams great (most leaders know they increase their own chances for success when they achieve results through and with their teams)

# Scale to build agile learning organizations (this is a key element for the HR people I work and interact with)

The essence of these goals and objectives seems to be rooted in a desire to learn, get and apply new tools and techniques to get specific things done.?

This can be around getting better at learning in general, collaboration skills for teams, innovation for teams and organizational pockets and dealing with change/uncertainty/transformation in general. Improving agility mindset and skills is a growing topic in my discussions.

This is just fine with me as I believe we get better long-term impact if we focus on specific business/organizational issues.

Biggest challenges and hindrances

When it comes to challenges and hindrances, I clearly see two big issues.

# Time - or lack thereof?

We are just too busy at work today and this has to be addressed in a top-down approach before we get too much collateral damage in the form of burned-out employees, major recruitment issues and organization structures that will not work for the future where the ways of working will be different.

# Scaling that sticks

I already hinted at this but there are many initiatives around the world on this that get a good start but then hits a road-block when it comes to scaling and implementation. Some of the elements to look at here to overcome this are train-the-trainer programs and the use of digital solutions. Yes, the latter can be used in many ways even though we are dealing with people.

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”?―?Thomas Edison

Having this quote in mind, I will stop for now. Just a small promotion first as I am calling for test partners for my pilot-programs in the form of a half-day workshop, shorter sessions, a team experience based on the comfort zone and karate and a more expansive train-the-trainer program.?

The workshop is almost in place and works really well as so do the sessions. The team experience and the train-the-trainer program are just about to start and I hope to do this in a community form with 5-7 global teams.

Curious? Get in touch and let’s discuss how we can work together.