Evolve Your Team’s Growth Mindset
By Lisa Bodell for Forbes
As we’ve learned from thought leaders like Carol Dweck and Adam Grant, a workforce with a growth mindset is a powerful asset. When your employees view learning as essential for improvement and feedback as a productive tool, your work culture is both healthy and capable of evolving further.
The next iteration is an innovative mindset, which sees the world through a lens of disruption. People with this mindset are able to see beyond what exists—and envision what could be. For a lucky few, this superpower comes naturally. For the rest of us, there are techniques designed to re-orient our perspectives.
As an innovation expert and author, I’ve led hundreds of thousands of people through techniques that shift mindsets away from the status quo. Three of my favorite exercises for cultivating an innovative mindset are below and they’ve all led to innovations at Citibank, Novartis and Farmers Insurance.
1. Shed the skepticism. Establish an environment where wild ideas get a chance to shine, instead of being instantly dismissed. During your next brainstorm, introduce the following four-step framework for civilized feedback. Before anyone can say anything negative about an idea, they must first answer these four lines of inquiry: What’s good about this idea? What possible benefits could result from this idea? In what ways could we overcome [insert key concern about feasibility/funding/etc.]? And finally, what’s an example of a solution that would address my key concern?