How important is adopting a growth mind-set during your digital transformation?
Technology is evolving and enabling a brighter future for us all, but technology itself won’t deliver the commercial success your organisation strives for, it can do the heavy lifting for you for sure, but it takes a positive and enabled workforce to ensure its adopted and utilised. The culture of an organisation absolutely needs to grow and adapt alongside it.
Many of us don’t like change. It’s in our nature to slip into a routine and be comfortable with the stability it brings. Human instinct is to feel secure and protected and so we surround ourselves with people and environments, which are familiar and predictable and the workplace is no different. While every individual is different and you will almost certainly have a change junkie in your team who thrives on the uncertain and ambiguous, the reality is for most of us it is a learned behaviour to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Change can be exciting and different and break the monotony of our daily routines. It can drive motivation and open up new opportunities that we never knew existed but successful change often requires us to learn to use data and insight to work with our human instincts and responses to play it safe, and consider all the possibilities before embarking on a preferred route.
Digital Transformation is no different. Often a term used to embody busy change work-streams across a business, successful programmes require leaders that are passionate about learning and experimentation to help deliver change, in short they will be the key to whether your programme is a success or failure.
Culture is something, which is harvested over time, and evolving into a learning culture with squads and scrums of fully engaged and enabled employees is not easy. It is the exact opposite of ‘build it and they will come’. You absolutely need to get the formal stuff right, the policies, the employee engagement surveys and recognition schemes etc but the micro conversations and moments in the day to day will be the first thing to dilute any investment into the ‘big bang’ interventions. This is where authentic leadership, comfortable with sharing their own vulnerability – therefore building psychological safety for their teams – is truly the making of any change initiative. Leading by example as they themselves progress from a fixed mind-set where all roads lead to them, and decisions are blocked with a ‘highest paid person’ hierarchy to a growth mind set that embraces learning, data and makes a healthy culture their priority – all go a long way to encouraging employees and teams to take the uncertain steps into a growth mentality that sees change embraced and not feared.
Lets compare a growth mind-set to that of a fixed mind-set
See how negative a fixed mindset is? Can you imagine the effect it can have on your digital transformation?
The promotion of a growth mindset, leads to more innovative creations. It’s a much more positive outlook and positivity will help all involved get through the transformation avoiding feelings of being ‘done to’ or the all too common change fatigue/burnout. Part of a growth mind-set is the willingness to strive through uncertainty, taking the right risks along the way but being able to learn fast from failure to drive the best possible outcome for the customer or user.
The journey to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mind-set isn’t easy. It takes a real commitment – commitment to feedback, commitment to doing things differently and commitment to holding your water when the path isn’t quite as you expected it to be.
For assistance with your digital transformation and support developing the right mind-set, please get in touch.