The one central question to every organisation on the planet is how do we enhance performance? All too often this challenge is answered through changes to system, processes or efficiency drives that might create some improvements and yet fail to tackle the most important aspect of any organisations ability to perform – the people!
If we truly want to shift the dials on performance we have to shift the mindsets of the people and help them to grow and develop.
The most important shift of mindset that is needed is in the boardroom.
This morning I was privileged to attend an event ran by our friends at www.BrainFoodCommunity.co.uk – this event was all about how learning drives performance. The guest speaker was Andy Lancaster, the Head of Learning for the CIPD (HR’s professional body).
Andy is at the leading edge of the shift that is happening in the world of learning towards being more self-determined and performance led. Yet what stands out most from this morning’s session is the fact that the learning is no longer something that is “nice” to offer people – it is foundational to the system on which long term business success is built.
Time for a new way of thinking?
In his session Andy asked a question – what the senior managers’ first answer would be if you asked them to describe learning. What would yours be?
For many I am guessing what comes to mind is a course. Perhaps a development programme, or maybe a traditional business MBA or some sort.
The reality is that learning is taking place all the time in our organisations and yet, we don’t even perhaps recognise it when it is happening. We certainly don’t always attribute the value it deserves to the actions we each take every day to become better at our jobs. Last week I was at a client where we discussed just this – people claiming to have very little personal development and yet then also claiming to be really strong at their jobs. This learning is happening otherwise every organisation would be struggling to perform.
The power of Growth Mindset
If you have been following much of our recent blogs and posts you will know how passionate we are about the importance of Growth Mindset and today’s session emphasised even more how critical this is. Creating the right environment to enable our teams to learn through the development of a Growth Mindset is absolutely business critical.
In my line of work, I often engage with business leaders who are struggling with the people side of their role, and for many it is the development and growth side of this what is left “with too little focus”. Leaders tell me that they are too busy with the business to invest time in developing their people. These leaders are missing the very purpose of why we have leaders in the first place – the central role of leaders is not to do stuff but is to help create cultures where their people can thrive, grow and be brilliant. If you are too busy to do this you are too busy to be a leader.
Leadership is about creating movement – creating progression on a personal, team and organisational level. When we examine what creates this movement we discover it is a great culture that encourages individuals to harness and develop a Growth Mindset which delivers performance gains. When leadership is applied to this model we create movement and the performance improvement is channelled towards genuine business progression.
Today’s complex organisations demands of our leaders the ability to grow and nurture talent and develop capability to enable our businesses to progress.
Mindset Leadership have an exceptional tool called Mindset Advantage which can help you to identify and build awareness around the current Mindset of your leaders. By providing actionable and clear insight this tool not only illuminates but it creates clear focus on what shifts need to take place to really help individuals, teams and organisations to grow.
If you would like to find out more simply email us on hello@mindsetleadership.co.uk
Have a great weekend.
Haydn