What Are the Leadership Mindsets Required for Growth?
A leadership mindset encompasses the attitudes, understandings, and expectations of not only who you are but how you lead, interact with, and influence your colleagues. In general, the kind of leadership mindset required to create organizational growth slants toward the future.  High growth leaders and managers exhibit certain behaviors to help ensure team alignment regarding the beliefs, processes, resources, investments, efforts, decisions, and actions necessary to create consistent and profitable revenue growth.

The Four Attributes of Leadership Mindsets Required for Growth
Based upon data from our people manager assessment center combined with decades of action learning leadership development workshops, compare your leaders and new managers to the list of mindsets needed for successful growth. Growth leaders need to:

  1. Have a Clarity and Growth Mindset
    Strategic ambiguity and workplace complacency are the enemies of consistent growth. High growth leaders invest the time and effort to ensure strategic clarity.   Growth strategies are primed for success when everyone required to create growth understands and believes in the plans for growth and feels that it makes sense for your unique culture and marketplace.

    Once everyone is brought into and committed to growth goals (where the team is headed) and growth strategies (how it is going to get there), the next step is to define how growth success and failure will be measured, tracked, and rewarded.  For true growth to occur, everyone must feel like the growth journey is worth it — personally and professionally.Growth leaders consistently ask for, expect, and give more.

  2. Play to People’s Strengths and Desires Mindset
    High growth leaders and managers are tuned into what each team member can do best and what they like to do best. In the sports world, it is rare to find a baseball player who is equally adept at every position. Teams rarely ask a natural shortstop to develop skills as a catcher.

    Research by Gallup confirms that people who know and use their strengths are more engaged, more productive, and happier in their roles. Once people discover their desires and talents and align them with business priorities, teams can use strengths to perform at their peak.Growth leaders consistently focus on and invest in people’s natural talents and desires to turn them into meaningful strengths for growth.

  3. Establish a Positive Team Culture Mindset
    Growth leaders and managers value an open and transparent culture of constructive debate where different perspectives are welcomed and shared, where there is mutual respect, and where healthy conflict is encouraged and resolved.

    A healthy corporate culture requires psychological team safety, agreed-upon decision making processes, and high levels of individual, team, and organizational trust.

    Growth leaders create the trust required to turn conflict into commitment.

  4. Keep an Eye on the Prize Mindset
    If the goal is growth, there must be a well-conceived business case for growth, a compelling vision for growth, and enough organizational growth urgency for it to matter for those responsible for making growth happen.

    All projects, meetings, hires, and conversations should be about growth. Activities and conversations which do not create growth should be minimized or stopped.  Hiring, onboarding, training, internal communications, performance management, compensation, and reward systems should all be adjusted to highlight, encourage, and promote growth.

    Growth leaders relentlessly maximize the way people think, behave, and work for growth.

The Bottom Line
If you think of growth as an outcome of raising the performance bar, it clarifies what a growth leadership mindset should be. Do your leaders and managers have the mindsets required for growth?

To learn more about the leadership mindsets required for growth, download 3 Steps to Set Your Team Up to Make Better Decisions During to Grow

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