ROUNDTABLE REPLAY: Leveraging Growth Mindset + Personality Types to Adapt to Change
This Tuesday, January 24th, we heard from leadership and change management coach, Dr. Rachel Headley about Growth Mindset and Four “Culture Types” that help us understand how different people respond to chaos and change.
Key Takeaways:
-Dr. Headley kicked off the roundtable with some of the most common impacts of change: 1) we spend more time dealing with people problems, 2) teams can suffer from poor performance and lack of accountability, 3) costs, errors, and turnovers can increase, 4) leaders can become stressed, and 5) patients can look elsewhere for care. All of which can be reversed if we intentionally train our leaders in adapting to change.
Four mistakes organizations make:
1) Not building leaders for the future
2) Not training leaders how to lead through change
3) Not training leaders to create adaptable teams
4) Making decisions without data
Six steps we can take to bring our teams through change:
1) Keep our eye on the prize and the final finish line
2) Plan ahead for people to be overwhelmed
3) Notice those who have differing challenges
4) Understand how your personality type can cause frustration for others
5) “Break bread” together and commit to intentionally building relationships with your team
6) Do the heavy lifting on communication before problems arise
Some personalities heavily crave order. These individuals excel at:
-Organizing the details
-Thinking step-by-step about how to get processes in place
-Thinking of the right questions to ask
-Explaining what’s happening step-by-step to someone inside your organization once they’re well informed
**We can leverage their gifts to help communicate well during times of transition, but need to be sure we give them the information they need to create structures and systems around what needs to be done.
Some personalities thrive in chaos. These individuals excel at:
-Working within a flexible, unstructured environment
-Diving into a problem and deciding what needs to be done
-Owning projects and innovating creative solutions
-Focusing on how to contribute to the greater good and lead the team to success
**We can leverage their tolerance for chaos and let them go first on the path to the summit, but we need to be sure we help them create a roadmap their order-craving colleagues can use to follow them to the peak.
If we adopt a growth mindset and commit to learning and growing through the process, we can maximize each employee’s gifts and thrive through any challenge that comes our way.
Focusing on progress, providing clear and consistent communication, committing to being great teachers, and encouraging our teams to ask for help when needed will help us avoid the mistakes and challenges often presented by change.
Watch the replay to hear Dr. Headley’s tips on how to leverage your team’s gifts and strengths and use a growth mindset to adapt our leadership styles to provide what our employees need most.
COACHING WITH A GROWTH MINDSET: Using the power of “yet” to get the best results from your team
Growth mindset is the belief that with effort, good teaching, and persistence, we all can get better and enhance our natural talents and abilities, moving us from where we are now to where we want to be.
A focus on growth mindset acknowledges that everyone has the capacity to improve their skills with enough dedication and commitment, whereas a fixed mindset emphasizes that natural talent is most important and you either “have it” because you were born with it… or you don’t.
Coaching with a growth mindset:
THE POWER OF YET: One of the most powerful tools to coach with the growth mindset is learning the power of “yet.” If we have a fixed mindset and think that our innate, raw talent is what’s most important, and don’t believe we can grow and improve, we will get stuck in what Carol Dweck calls the “tyranny of now.”
Under this paradigm, we think that where we are now is as good as it’s going to get, and there’s no reason to keep trying to improve. However, when we embrace the “power of yet,” we can encounter a new challenge and simply know that “I can’t accomplish that goal… yet, but I can put in effort and perseverance to build my competency and improve my results over time.”
TRY THIS: When giving feedback to your employees, praise them for their effort, progress, strategies, and willingness to step out of their comfort zone rather than praising their innate talent or intelligence. Even when they stumble, because we’ve celebrated their hard work toward the goal and acknowledge they just haven’t achieved the result yet, they will be more likely to sustain their motivation and perseverance and deliver better outcomes in the end.
Luna Leverett gives 5 more tips in her 15 minute TEDx Talk entitled “You think you have a growth mindset, but do you?” Try these tips for leading your team (and yourself) toward your next big goal:
1) Tear off the label: you may carry limiting beliefs such as “I’m not a good leader,” “I’m a bad communicator,” “I’m not good at creative projects,” “I’m a slow learner,” but adopting a growth mindset simply allows you to say, “I’m not a great leader…yet.” Adding the yet opens the door for what you can become when you begin to seek to improve your skills. The labels don’t serve us and instead hold us back from even trying to grow. Drop them to allow your mind to create a new path forward.
2) Find a good teacher: Not only do we need to find a teacher to help us develop our skills, we need to find a teacher that understands our learning styles and personality types and teaches to those needs. You can find teachers anywhere- in mentors and leaders, TalentTracks videos, books, YouTube talks, etc. and with just a little effort and perseverance, you can find the right method of delivery that helps you best grasp the new ideas and make faster progress toward your goals.
3) Accept that failure is part of the process: failure is feedback in every new endeavor and as we work to learn and grow, we’ll all make mistakes along the way. Processing the failures and studying what you can learn from them will help you grow exponentially quicker and internalize the wisdom deeper. Use your 1:1 time to work through these lessons with your leader and get their support on your next move.
4) Celebrate the effort you put into it: even if you don’t accomplish the goal on the first try, every bit of effort is bringing you closer to your goal. With each attempt, you’re learning more about what does and doesn’t work and when you keep an open mind and focus on your effort, you’ll be able to continue moving forward to try the next option until you accomplish what you’re after.
5) Ask for help: find who’s doing what you want to do and go ask them how they’ve accomplished it! Seeking wise counsel helps us grow more strategically and avoid taking dead end routes on ideas that have already been tested.
When we embrace a growth mindset, it not only creates confidence in our own capabilities, it gives us more confidence and belief in what our teams can accomplish. When we know that focused effort and perseverance are keys to achieving our goals (rather than a “you have it, or you don’t” approach), we can be more committed to coaching our team and more encouraging as they make progress and improvements along the way.
Watch this 15 minute TEDx talk and refresh your commitment to leading with a growth mindset.
TRIANNUAL III REPLAYS AVAILABLE!
November 14-15 all members of the Trinity Leadership Quest gathered together in person to dive into leading change and innovation and preparing for Trinity Health’s biggest innovation in a century – the new healthcare campus and medical district.
Together, we learned numerous tools and frameworks for communicating change, we worked through the need to cast a compelling vision and “Start with Why,” and we mapped out how we can plan to maintain our resilience over the next several months of transition and evolution.
View replays and slides for each session and refresh your knowledge on how to lead your team from basecamp to the top of the summit, and use the communication frameworks to keep your team engaged, motivated, and encouraged along the way.