BUSINESS
Growth-based mindset
How to go from prove to improve by Erin Saunders, Leica Geosystems
A study conducted by the Neuroscience Leadership Institute found that both giving and receiving feedback lit up the part of the brain that’s our stress response, and goes back to our core fight or flight response. Interestingly, feedback-givers were just as stressed out as askers. However, when people asked for feedback, it generated 50% less of a stress reaction in the body for both the giver and receiver of the feedback.
What do you want to achieve? Photo by Mikel Parera on Unsplash
If having a growth-based mindset could be explained in one sentence, it would be moving from “I don’t know how to do that” to “I don’t know how to do that yet.”
Earlier this year, I did something that has been one of the most popular moves I’ve ever made as an HR professional:
UAC MAGAZINE | SPRING 2021
I killed our performance appraisal.
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No more long forms. No more dreading of yearend conversations by employees and managers. No more employees hyper-focused on why they got a 3.6573 instead of a 3.6574. But I didn’t do away with performance management. On the contrary, we’re ramping up the ways in which we’re providing feedback to our employees. And it’s based in creating a shift in the organization from a traditional fixed mindset to a more adaptive growth-based mindset.
Why hasn't it worked? Why don’t the traditional means of performance appraisals work well? I think we all know that it’s a process dreaded by managers and employees alike. But why?
To understand how to manage performance better, we had to first understand what we were trying to achieve. The result was this: as an organization, we are ruthlessly focused on what’s important. To do that, we needed to move away from the traditional performance appraisal and instead move to ongoing coaching and feedback focused on continuously learning and being better.
What's your mindset? First, it took some education around what it means to have a fixed mindset vs. a growthbased mindset. According to research from the Neuroscience Leadership Institute, people with a growth mindset are: > More open and able to integrate feedback, thereby increasing their intrinsic motivation to learn and perform. > Better able to learn from corrective feedback because the region of the brain used to process this type of feedback is more active - allowing individuals to interrupt their current processing and attend to novel and salient information. > Better equipped to recover from setbacks and recalibrate their thinking and behavior in line with the feedback.
