In this fast-changing world, if you can't grow, you can't keep up. Growth is the way—the only way—to make the most of change for any of us as business leaders, individually and collectively.
To me, growth, whether personal or organizational, means summoning the strength, knowledge, and agility to accelerate. It’s the growth I see in employees navigating through adversity and extreme change; and it’s the growth I see in companies I work with as they shift and plan and prepare for an indefinite time of turbulence. They are navigating new hybrid ways of working, re-engineering supply chains, digitizing their customer management processes- and their HCM systems; and they are pushing their teams to develop new approaches to customer problems, even as interest rates make the near term outlook more murky and global food and energy problems threaten.
Leaders who choose growth not only think, act, and speak differently, they align their organizations ... [+]
I would credit not only the leadership of those companies but people up and down the workforce for confronting change and disruption with a growth mindset. The people and leaders who choose growth not only think, act, and speak differently, they align their organizations around a shared growth mindset—the resilience and agility to respond to change and take advantage of disruption. Growth then becomes their oxygen. It feeds their culture. The workforce senses the momentum. It elevates their ambition.
Growth mindsets impact financial measures of growth. In the world financial crisis of 2007 through 2009, McKinsey found that resilient (strong, agile, thoughtful) companies generated about 20 percent greater shareholder returns. This accelerated to around 50 percent in the turnaround years of 2009 through 2011—then 120% growth during the stable period of 2011-2017. These companies had the resilience and the mindset to leapfrog ahead as soon as the opportunity opened.
Contrast that with those who thought that as Covid eased and hiring rose, they would simply pick up where they left off. Likely, they are still in retrench mode because new challenges—upended societies, militancy and war, scarce access to resources—are here. And more challenges are no doubt on the way. The dust didn't settle. The dust may never settle.
So how does an organization become a force for growth?
First, assess the reality. How open to growth is your workforce right now? What’s the level of risk for downward spirals into discouragement, disengagement, or even depression? Aggregated data about the adaptive capacity and the mental wellbeing of your workforce is transformative and predictive. Strategically leveraging that data puts HR leadership and business leaders at the same table. It can move the HR leader’s role from passive and reactive to informative and proactive. The data is critical to drive awareness across the C Suite—and with business leaders—and to make the case for action.
Act to build skills in growth orientation. Help people build their psychological skills and capacity for change, and they have the desire and ability to take on challenges. Growth includes three psychological basics, all of which can be learned and adopted.
- Realistic Optimism: The ability to deal with what’s real while remaining optimistic about an ultimate positive outcome.
- Problem Solving: The ability to see and evaluate a range of solutions, and to learn and grow from each iteration.
- Self-Confidence. The belief that we have agency, that we can identify what we can control.
Help managers help their teams. By learning, modeling, and encouraging growth, managers can lead the culture. People with growth mindsets learn from setbacks and mistakes, fundamentally changing the way team members get critiqued and directed. That, in part, helps create an environment of “psychological safety,” the shared belief that the team is a safe place for individualism, idea sharing, and for taking risks. Employees in highly innovative cultures report high levels of psychological safety and associate innovation with joy, inspiration, and courage.
Safety, innovation, and engagement are closely related. Google’s “The Aristotle Study” set out to identify the ingredients of the most effective teams. Google’s People Operations leaders found that the ability of the manager to establish psychological safety was the #1 attribute regardless of team composition. This was reinforced in recent meQ research: Employees who report that their manager is supporting their well-being are 72% more likely to feel safe taking a risk than people whose managers are not supportive. Resilience also correlates: Those with high resilience levels are 25% more likely to report high degrees of psychological safety.
This may seem like an unusual moment in time to advocate for growth. But in fact, it’s the most critical time. The sense of instability demands it. For example, who on the world stage has better demonstrated a growth mindset than Volodymyr Zelensky?
For individuals, growth means opportunity and satisfaction. For companies, it means cultural cohesion and sustainable business growth. If we work on this together, as a collective, across companies it can positively impact society. For society, resilience means economic growth, improved quality of life, equity, and inclusiveness. And boundless possibility.
Be that force for growth.
