Leading with a Growth Mindset
Leading with A Growth Mindset is a Linkedin Learning course taught by Karen M. Allen.
The three key components of this course were communicating, coaching employees, and building culture, each within the frame of a growth mindset. A growth mindset is a framework where you see obstacles, challenges, and difficulties as opportunities to learn and grow, instead of as insurmountable barriers.
In the first section, communicating with a growth mindset, Allen covered strategies to navigate difficult conversations, overcome communication barriers, and communicate in times of crisis. All of these can be extreme obstacles that feel impossible to overcome in certain scenarios, but a growth mindset can help us garner the right frame-of-mind to tackle these challenges.
The second section, coaching employees with a growth mindset, covered coaching difficult personalities, employee development tactics, and how to give regular feedback. I especially found the section on feedback helpful, since I often find the balance of criticism and feedback difficult to master; Allen helped me clarify key points that help to make your comments improve the employee’s results instead of trying to tear it down.
The final section covered building a culture with a growth mindset. This primary focuses on this section were mitigating biases, bridging different cultures across a single team, and establishing trust inside the team network. I especially found bias mitigation helpful. Often times, in group dynamics, we only see a small fraction of a person’s interests, work ability, and personality. Even though this fraction is small, our brains can build this into their entire representation. It’s important to recognize this because people are more than the sum of their interactions with you at work. We need to be mindful of external factors, out of our control as group leaders, when working with group members; Such as family troubles, health complications, and unforeseen events.
Overall, this course has helped me dramatically in my ability to lead groups in a sustainable and holistic way. A growth mindset can help everyone learn to overcome barriers, without seeing them as insurmountable or too difficult to handle on our own. Everything is an opportunity for growth.