How Great Leaders Focus Their Mindset on Growth

The following is an excerpt from Grow Your Business: Scaling Your Business for Long-Term Success by the staff of Entrepreneur Media and Eric Butow, on sale now.

Are you running a business or startup that has made it through the past couple of tumultuous years? Congrats! Pat yourself on the back and take your team out to a celebratory lunch. You’ve all earned it. Your product is selling and your team is in place, so you don’t have to do all the work yourself. So what should you do next?

The first step is to adopt a growth mindset. Without a focus on growth, you’ll likely find yourself trapped in the daily challenges of running your business and miss out on opportunities to achieve new levels of success. Here’s how to unlock a “bigger and better” mentality.

What is a growth mindset?

Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Ballantine Books, 2007), who coined the term, defines a growth mindset as “the belief that an individual’s most basic abilities and skills can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point.” In contrast to a growth mindset, Dweck said, a fixed mindset is “the belief that an individual’s basic abilities and skills, their intelligence and their talents, are just fixed traits.” Dweck concluded that people who believe they can develop their talents through a combination of hard work, good strategies, and input from others have a growth mindset. She noted that people with a growth mindset are likely to achieve more than people with a fixed mindset because they put more energy into learning and aren’t as concerned about appearing smart to others.

Grow Your Business: Scaling Your Business for Long-Term Success is available now at Entrepreneur Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes and Noble

How to Create a Growth Mindset

How do you know what mindset you have? If you believe that intelligence is innate to a person’s nature and can’t be changed, you have a fixed mindset. But recognizing this is the first step toward building a growth mindset. A growth mindset requires that you accept and celebrate failure as part of learning and growth—not as a sign that someone isn’t intelligent. Once you understand that intelligence and skill develop with time and experience, you can give your team permission to experiment (and maybe stop being so hard on yourself). To consciously adopt a growth mindset, you must do some personal soul-searching and make the following changes:

Acknowledge Your Weaknesses

When you stay in your comfort zone and make excuses for unacceptable results, you won’t grow personally or professionally. If you give yourself a reason to get beyond your fixed mindset, such as learning a difficult new skill, it’s easier to set an overall goal and specific milestones, such as passing a product certification exam. See Challenges as Opportunities If you see challenges as an opportunity to grow and learn, you won’t be afraid to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Even if you fail, the experience can show you to look for a different path to take. Exploring different ways to do things for yourself and for your business can lead to new opportunities—and prove to be more lucrative.

Learn to Accept Failure

You can’t explore your options without learning to accept failure. Sometimes things just don’t turn out the way we hope they will, and it’s only after some time has passed that hindsight will show us how the failure has affected us, for good or ill. For example, you may have wanted to partner with a big company and kicked yourself after it fell through. But six months later, you learned that the company just went bankrupt, which would have threatened your company’s survival. So in the long run, that failure turned out for the best! Don’t Seek Approval People with a fixed mindset worry about what other people think about their intelligence and talent. This is especially true for those in a position of authority, who want to appear infallible to people who rank lower in the hierarchy. But people with a growth mindset don’t worry about whether they’re the smartest person in the room. Indeed, one maxim of leadership is to hire people who are smarter than you and let them work. Then you can focus on your own learning and growth.

Grow Your Business: Scaling Your Business for Long-Term Success is available now at Entrepreneur Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes and Noble

Accept and Use Criticism

People with a fixed mindset are easily offended by criticism, but when you have a growth mindset, you don’t see criticism as negative. Instead, you see it as an opportunity to learn and improve your product. Businesspeople with a growth mindset encourage feedback, ratings, and reviews from customers and employees alike. But how does that happen with performance reviews, which are dreaded by so many employees and managers because the judgments seem so final? Managers with growth mindsets don’t…