A Growth Mindset is Golden
Do you want to scale? Do you want to grow revenues? Do you want to succeed as a Founder and as a business? You can, if you develop a growth mindset.
A growth mindset will help you successfully transition from a Founder to a CEO, it will lead to greater innovation from you and your team, and it will let you pivot and move faster.
What do I mean by a growth mindset? It’s a belief that skills, intelligence and personality are not fixed. Rather, with effort and perseverance talent can be nurtured, intelligence fostered, creativity and leadership developed.
Let’s Learn
As I have talked about in a previous blog, it is hard to go from being a Founder to a CEO of a growing business. The work, the skills, the behaviors and habits needed to successfully lead a $1mm business are very different from launching a one man show.
How do you do it? Well, you could take the trial and error approach which is slow and disruptive. Or, you can seek out knowledge from someone who knows what they are talking about and learn it.
Take a look at your strategic plan and objectives. What skills do you need to execute on that plan? Think you are missing some of those skills. Go take a class, seminar, workshop with an expert, watch a webinar, reach out to your peer network or mentors who can help you find the right person to talk to.
Need to become a better leader? Hire a coach or take a leadership course.
Seek out feedback. Be open to constructive and objective perspectives (again this is why a coach is great – neutral! Just saying). Take actions based on what you hear that is of value and credible. Not everyone’s opinion or insight is equally valuable (except your customers). As you grow you will be surrounded by more people who all have an opinion, listen and extract what resonates with you. Or makes you think, huh ok maybe?
Do 360 reviews, listen to what your team has to say about your leadership so you can grow personally.
The Test
What’s the result of all this personal development?
You are willing to take on more risk. You see failure as a learning opportunity. You believe you build on both your failures and your successes. A fixed mindset sees failure as proof that they are not capable, not good enough. Insecurities arise. Not you. Try, fail, learn something, try again.
You are more resilient. As you work through the challenges and put in the hard work to develop the skills you need, you become more resilient. You embrace the surprises that come at you, you believe effort is the path forward, and you bounce back in the face of failure or a setback (a better way to say failure I think!). Or maybe if you are resilient you have a growth mindset. Either way, they are connected! And can be developed.
You can move quickly and proactively adjust to a changing business landscape and the internal growth pains that come with scaling. You embrace the challenge. Not just you, but by encouraging a growth mindset among your team, you will allow for more creativity, innovation, and experimentation. With new learnings, new ideas flowing, a willingness to take risk and push yourself beyond your limits, you can get one step ahead.
