Understanding Leadership
Key Skills
To drive innovation, today’s leaders need to be more than just managers, they need to embrace an attitude of leadership that inspires, coaches, and equips their team members to navigate new technologies, roles, and ways of working. Mindsets are an invaluable tool leaders can use to reframe their thoughts, attitudes, and opinions. This self-awareness enables them to create environments in which team members feel heard, respected, and empowered to drive innovation by sharing their unique ideas and perspectives.
Leadership Development
As leaders embark upon their development journeys, these mindsets serve as valuable guideposts to help keep them pointed in the right direction. GP Strategies’ research and work with clients across the globe have illuminated four mindsets that offer the most value for leaders. These include growth mindset, agile mindset, inclusive mindset, and enterprise mindset. Each mindset is critical on its own, but together they add additional value as they come together to drive a strategy of innovation.
Leadership Mindsets
Growth and Inclusive Mindset
Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is the belief that skills and behaviors can be cultivated through effort. With this mindset, challenges, obstacles, and feedback become opportunities to grow and learn. Elemental to innovation is the willingness to see failures not as setbacks but as opportunities to grow. Failures that have turned into successes exist all around us. Even something as simple as the lubricant WD-40 got its name because it was the fortieth attempt to perfect that household product.
A more spectacularly and well-known failure is Apple. While a consumer electronics icon today, Apple’s road to success was paved with many ups and downs. Steve Jobs had some colossal fails, including getting ousted as CEO. Instead of accepting defeat, Jobs channeled that failure into renewed energy, and today Apple is one of the most technologically advanced organizations on the planet. In the embodiment of a growth mindset, Jobs said in the book The Journey Is the Reward by Jeffrey Young, “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
Innovative leaders continue to chip away at solutions using the information they glean from their setbacks to spur innovation—even if it takes 40 tries! They recognize that failure is part of the process. What’s more, innovative leaders have a higher tolerance for failure among the people they lead—knowing that setbacks create the space for further growth. In growth mindset leadership, obstacles and setbacks are not byproducts of innovation, they are drivers of it.
Inclusive Mindset
An inclusive mindset is the belief that a diverse and inclusive environment unleashes superior contribution and performance. When a leader has an inclusive mindset, they see differences in how others think and behave as advantages, leading them to consistently seek out diversity. They recognize that sameness breeds smallness. A leader with an inclusive mindset seeks alternate perspectives, thereby expanding the view of what is possible. Inclusivity opens the door to innovative ideas. It creates growth and expansion and invites what’s different and innovative.
Inclusive leaders create psychological safety. When psychological safety is present, individuals feel comfortable surfacing ideas—including those that may be out of the ordinary. When an inclusive leader creates an environment of psychological safety, they show that ideas are valued, even if they are not chosen, which increases the likelihood that individuals will surface innovative ideas again in the future.
But inclusivity is more than just a feel-good notion. Its impact, particularly on innovation, is very real. According to research by the World Economic Forum, more inclusive companies are 25-36% more likely to outperform their competitors in profitability. They also experience up to a 20% higher rate of innovation.
Agile and Enterprise Mindset
Agile Mindset
An agile mindset is the belief that success in a complex and volatile world requires flexibility, adaptation, innovation, and resilience. With this mindset, we fail fast and achieve success by being nimble in the way we think and act. Leaders have massive amounts of information at their fingertips. An agile leader is able to take in, filter, and assimilate information quickly. They assess their decisions frequently and adapt, when necessary, at a pace that reflects the speed of business.
An agile leader embraces new approaches. They come up with fast, creative responses and implement these new methods. This doesn’t mean that they lack discipline or vision. Agile leaders are clear on their final destination and their desired goals; they are simply more open to the fact that the path to those goals may take some unexpected twists and turns.
In fact, research conducted by GP Strategies asked leaders what mindset they needed to be successful in the future. Leaders across all levels prioritized openness and adaptability, followed by discipline. While these three mindsets might initially seem contradictory (how can someone be disciplined if they are adapting?), they perfectly describe an agile leader. Agile leaders have a goal and are disciplined about reaching it. They also understand that being too attached to a particular plan can prevent them from adapting when it is needed to reach their goals.
Enterprise Mindset
An enterprise mindset is the belief that we maximize success when we prioritize the needs of the larger organization. With this mindset, all decisions in a team or business unit are made with the benefit of others. A leader with an enterprise mindset reaches across the organization, breaking down barriers and making decisions for the greater good. When those barriers come down, greater organization-wide collaboration and innovation are possible.
A leader with an enterprise mindset also reads the external environment, spotting or, better yet, anticipating trends. Assessing the external landscape can allow a leader to anticipate change and get ahead of it. They can choose being innovative over becoming obsolete. History is filled with stories of organizations that failed to pivot despite signs pointing to the need for change. By removing internal and external barriers in service of the greater organizational good, a leader with an enterprise mindset is clearing a path to doing things differently and drawing in a diversity of perspectives.
Leveraging Mindsets to Create Innovation
Leaders often wrestle with what it means to have a mindset of innovation. But in looking for a singular way to “program” the mind of an innovative leader, we’re missing the point. It is the combination of these four key mindsets—growth, inclusive, agile, and enterprise—that shape leaders’ attitudes in a way that enables innovation to flourish.
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