Rethink the Growth Mindset Part II
By: Aliyyah Abdullah
Tags: Growth Mindset, Thinking, 2021, Growth, Mindfulness

Sometime in April 2020, I wrote on the subject of the growth mindset and how it’s related to learning from others which by far, is the fastest route to learning.

If you want to read up on what happened, left click and follow link here Rethink the Growth Mindset Part I

A few other points were raised but the purpose of this article touches on how an individual who possesses a growth mindset generally interacts with others in the workplace as we encounter many persons with varying personas and attitudes.

To reiterate, “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success — without effort. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work — brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” (Dweck, 2015)

I do believe that people are actually a mixture of a fixed and growth mindset and an exclusive growth mindset does not exist in real world. Why? Because we can’t mentally and physically run down and develop every learning opportunity that comes to us. We make decisions as business partners based on an assessment and we prioritize what we learn. The decision made will always be at the expense of other decisions and especially so if you consider time, urgency and energy constraints.

I have 4 simple points explaining how interacting with others is related to learning:

1. We need to be more supportive of our teams and the abundance mindset really captures this point well. The abundance mentality is the philosophy that there is enough in this world for everybody, and that we can all prosper. It is the opposite of the scarcity principle which pervades certain societies. If you grew up in a capitalist society (as have I), you’d know that the scarcity principle is one of the first principles we learn at a young age in business and this is compounded even further, as finance professionals are close to the business. Its drilled into us over and over that everything is scarce (and rightfully, many things are and forever will be), so it’s no wonder some leaders apply this mentality when dealing with their teams. It stems from the principle that there isn’t enough for everybody and we must constantly be in a state of competition or give in to hoarding. This principle is not only tiring to enforce but some leaders thrive here because there is the belief that being more supportive of our teams is giving something away which goes against the scarcity principle or what we’ve learnt.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, clearly explains the difference between the scarcity mentality and the abundance mentality.

He states that “Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. And if someone were to get a big piece of the pie, it would mean less for everybody else. The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life. People with a Scarcity Mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit — even with those who help in the production. They also have a hard time being genuinely happy for the success of other people……The Abundance Mentality, on the other hand, flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth or security. It is the paradigm that there is plenty out there and enough to spare for everybody. It results in the sharing of prestige, recognition, profits, and decision-making. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity.”

We may have encountered leaders with these 2 very contrasting mentalities, however in my experience, the abundance mindset (in leaders) and by extension the growth mindset seems to prevail as they encourage teamwork and creates a more positive space where healthy competition and humane sportsmanship can still prevail. This type of mindset also calls for rewarding effort within teams. For leaders who have the scarcity mindset, these leaders change over time due to the unsustainability in having this belief. Some critics have even stated that being appreciative and supportive does not apply to having a growth mindset but if its anything we’ve seen this year amidst the pandemic and leading teams virtually, we need leaders to show praise and give credit where due. Even if you reflect and think back for a second in your own life, then you’d see that the persons we learn the most from were actually in many ways supportive!

2 — Linked to a growth mindset is having a sense of community because individuals know they can’t work effectively without others.

Years ago, I remember a very good friend chatting with me. This individual was very well accomplished and had put their career above everything else (e.g. relationships, family, etc), but because of their successes and their continuous growth in their field, they were misunderstood by their peers who did not pursue this field for as long as my friend did. Basically, their dilemma was that they did not stop learning as we are encouraged to do under the growth mindset but their peers did (in the workplace). I do remember going home and thinking about them, as they had difficulty in leading but I decided at the time, that the issue pretty much boiled down to self-construction.

Once you have some sort of self-construction (and self-awareness) on your side, it becomes easier to find something to relate to your peers and to your teams who are different from you, because you are now willing to do so. If you aren’t willing to do so or your ego is too large then this isn’t going to be important to you and so you won’t exactly make the effort. Think how you can solve a need for them instead. A growth mindset individual knows that each person, whether they have a fixed mindset or not has a purpose to being here and recognise the opportunities for some sort of positive impact. Why? Because as mentioned earlier, the limitation of the growth mindset is that we can’t possibly expect that everyone will make the same decisions we make. Realistically speaking, our teams will forever make different choices. The real challenge is in managing. Being open minded and rising above biases is crucial to developing new relationships.

3 — It takes a certain level of skill and intelligence to apply a message (even a complex one) into something simple for a target audience to conceptualize, understand and accept. This part of the growth mindset relates to effective communication

To illustrate, one of the instructions I remember receiving as a junior finance professional in my first year in the industry was to ‘follow up on outstanding receivables’ and while this is something easy to do, let’s picture the scenario as the main culprits being members in a group. The situation was made even more complicated because the feedback from these group companies were to hold off on payments due to a well known and top level strategic decision. I remember going to my senior at the time and asking, so tell me exactly what I need to do to ensure receivables are collected? My senior, only later understood that the instruction did not add up. Its just a simple example of how important it is to break down strategic options into easily digestible and desired behaviors for a team because it promotes job efficiency and enables them to learn as well or they’d simply not take you seriously.

4 — In applying the growth mindset to teams, consider idea generation. Failure is all around us and as the more complex systems become, the more unpredictable leading will be. Accidents, system failures, inexplicable events would occur, but we can change how we navigate within them and some sort of reverse or creative thinking will help.

An example of this is changing a positive statement into a negative one or flipping something over. Instead of doing things in the regular, logical way, a growth mindset individual would want a different spin. New ideas come by doing the exact opposite of what would normally be expected . It leads to creativity and innovation and honestly, the fresh perspectives are actually really inspiring and motivating.

Throughout my social sciences studies at university we’d call these individuals devil advocates because they always had a great perspective. They’d think, well, what could happen if this plan of yours goes wrong, then what should we look for?

Reverse thinking sounds great on paper so to illustrate even further, in March of 2013, Target attempted to set up a branch in Canada by opening 124 stores in the country in about 9 months in every province, even in the tiny Prince Edward Island. 2 years later and Target closed all of its branches. What happened?

“Target’s plans were big and complex and by no means considered easy. Moving to Canada required a set up of a massive supply chain management system. The system had to keep track of every single product and produce reliable data to help Target forecast demand, replenish stocks and manage its distribution centers. So Target chose a system that was labelled best in class to work with. It was fancy and cutting edge but only a few people at Target really understood it. To set it up, employees entered data for all 75,000 products. There were many fields to populate and because it had to be entered quickly, errors occurred e.g. typos, missing fields, product dimensions. The inventory system therefore did not work properly but what happened was products didn’t flow to stores, demand was overestimated and warehouses were overflowing with demand. Target then rented other stores to store these goods but lost track of what they were. Attempts were made to try and fix it but because there were stores in every province, the errors were just too much and so the business ultimately had to close down”. (Source: Joe Castaldo, The Last Days of Target, 2016)

If you’d ever work in supply chain then these are the stuff for nightmares but its easy to be smart in hindsight even though Target’s plans were ambitious.

In Meltdown (2019), Gary Klein calls reverse thinking as a premortem which diagnoses potential problems before. All it entails is using hindsight that occurs from events that could go wrong. It’s a trick to make hindsight work for us and not against us. As Gary says, ‘The logic is that instead of showing people you can come up with a good plan, you think of all the insightful reasons why this project might go south’. So we say, instead of planning Target’s expansion, let’s imagine that this has failed, what’s going to happen then? It will surely help with risk management, looking at concrete obstacles, so we know what we can do to address and seal loopholes in a strategic plan. Aside from encouraging reverse thinking in teams, finance professionals could also model and simulate. And you can read up on that in Anders Liu-Lindberg’s article here What-if A New Black Swan Event Happens Next Year.

Leveraging and using the growth mindset is therefore pertinent and spread across these very 4 dimensions to promote learning and create successful teams.

Feel free to share your thoughts on the article!