Proving Versus Improving – Exploring the Growth Mindset to Benefit Your Leadership Career

It can be lonely at the top – as a leader, there is often combined pressures when it comes to managing your team effectively, making strategic decisions all while driving for the overarching growth and success of your team. Where do your own professional goals come into it?

Leaders are often expected to manage their own development, but with so many other priorities to juggle, creating and maintaining a healthy relationship with your own development as a leader can be difficult.

If your leadership career to this point has been goal-oriented in terms of delivering on tangible aims, creating and maintaining an effective self-development mindset might feel out of your comfort zone. You’re used to proving your worth as a leader by hitting targets and maintaining cohesion in your team, but are you actually suffering from a focus on proving yourself, rather than on improving yourself for a more holistic development journey?

In this blog, we’re going to look at the benefits of moving away from the need to prove yourself, towards a focus on continuing improvement instead.

Proving Yourself – What to Look Out For

Let’s caveat this by saying there is nothing inherently wrong with the desire to prove yourself. Striving to over-achieve is likely part of what got you into your leadership position in the first place. But when was the last time you took a step back from your leadership duties to take a helicopter view of what drives your desires and behaviours and ultimately, your success, in your role?

If you do feel the pressure to constantly prove yourself, what is behind this? For many leaders, it can be one or a combination of the following:

• The expectation of being a role model to your team
• To seek recognition and validation – as I mentioned, being in a leadership position can be a lonely place, and leaders may feel the need to seek out praise from others as a marker that they are performing adequately
• The pressure of performance – depending on your sector, there may be high expectations on you personally to meet or exceed targets
• A lack of self-belief or imposter syndrome

These are all understandable reasons to strive for excellence, but whatever is behind the desire to prove yourself, it’s essential to recognise what lies behind these drives, in order to better understand yourself and how to manage these feelings for the benefit of your career.

For example, it could be that the reason you yearn to prove yourself is rooted in a lack of self-belief – this needs to be addressed in order to achieve growth in your leadership skills and further your career. It can be uncomfortable but rewarding to have a frank and honest analysis of your inner drives and motivations – something that most people, including leaders, can neglect to do.

A Focus on Improvement

So what does it look like when leaders move towards a focus on improvement and away from the reactive need to prove themselves?

Developing A Growth Mindset

Fire-fighting is a big part of any leadership role, and it can be difficult to switch from a problem-solving mindset to a space where you allow yourself to dream big and make the necessary steps to develop your own self.

It will help to re-frame what you might think of as ‘growth’. Yes, growth is about meeting tangible business goals, but it is also about; setting and accomplishing your own learning goals, recognising effort and perseverance (in yourself and others) over innate talent or success, and viewing challenges as learning opportunities.

Engage in Self-Reflection

Develop the habit of self-reflection. You can set aside regular times to do this, maybe once a month to reflect on any significant events that have happened, reflect on how they made you feel and if that shaped your approach to dealing with them. Did your instinctive reaction to solve a challenge cause you to act in a blinkered way? Did your past experiences with a colleague or client shape the way you interacted with them? Reflecting on patterns of feelings and behaviours is the key to understanding your leadership style and will help you develop a more holistic approach to decision making.

Approach Versus Accomplishments

Focus on the value of the approach of a process, rather than simply the end goal.

When, as a leader, you highlight the value in your team’s approaches and not just the end result, this allows people to feel comfortable thinking innovatively, and reduces their fear of failure – this way of working can lead to long-lasting and more sustainable success for the whole of your team, not to mention the positive impact this will have on morale, as well as contributing to reducing stress and burnout.

Finally

Proving versus improving is all about the mindset shift. Put into practice some of the guidance highlighted here and see what positive changes you notice in yourself and your team.

Developing an improvement mindset is all about approaching your leadership duties with a curiosity and a desire for meaningful growth, as opposed to a laser focus on results over approaches. At Zestfor, we have a number of programmes to help leaders develop their management style to achieve success borne from coherence and a deep understanding of themselves and their team – click here to find out more about our leadership programmes and how they can help your business.

Until next time,

Julia Carter

About Julia Carter

Julia Carter is the MD of Zestfor?Ltd and specialises in working with leaders and managers of virtual and hybrid teams to improve team effectiveness.

Effective leadership involves numerous competencies, but it also requires a core mindset which is rarely explored in leadership programmes. Julia’s mission is to instil this core mindset into as many leaders as possible so that they can empower their people in their areas of specialty...and hopefully in their personal lives too.

In 2009, Julia founded Zestfor - a training consultancy and continues her mission.