Planet Positive Change

Planet Positive Change

Practical tools for positive change

Reset Your Leadership Mindset

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Self awareness is key for effective leadership. Knowing who you are enables you to respond effectively under pressure. Great leaders are defined by how they react in tough situations. Your mindset shapes your world and how you respond to it. What’s more, it’s a skill that you can learn, but how do you implement mindset change? Here’s how to reset your leadership mindset.

You Can Reset Your Mindset

Your leadership mindset isn’t fixed. Mindset is a skill, like any other. Just like you go to the gym to train your body, with a little focus, you can rest your leadership mindset. With a few minor tweaks to your daily routine, a leadership reset is possible. A growth mindset will take your leadership from good to great.

Growth vs Fixed

Stanford Professor, Carol Dweck’s research has demonstrated the critical differences between a fixed and a growth mindset. Leadership mindset is a key differentiator in business, but why?

Fixed Mindset Leaders

Fixed mindset leaders see failure as all defining. Believing that failure reflects negatively on them, they avoid it, shutting down valuable learning opportunities. Their concern with looking good in the eyes of others prevents them from moving forwards. What’s more, it limits their performance, stunting their growth. These leaders react emotionally when they are under stress. Those emotions negatively affect their clarity of thinking, impeding effective decision making. The fixed mindset effect doesn’t stop with them. Their mindset will trickle down to the rest of their organisation. What comes next is a culture of blame, sacrifice syndrome, burnout and lack of innovation.

If something doesn’t come easily to them, they withdraw and admit defeat. Innovation ceases, new ideas stagnate for fear of failure, blame and looking stupid. They believe that potential is fixed and there’s nothing you can do to change that. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Growth Mindset Leaders

Growth mindset leaders recognise that failure presents an opportunity to learn, to develop and most importantly, grow. These leaders believe that their people can change and develop their abilities and talents. A growth mindset is a foundational skill for effective leadership. It embraces black box thinking along with a no blame culture. They recognise that success comes from examining mistakes in order to push through obstacles.

Your Brain Is Malleable

Dweck’s research has demonstrated that the human brain is malleable. That’s great news for your performance, along with your ability to manage stress. Embracing growth mindset strategies will increase your neuroplasticity. Each time we take a growth mindset approach, our brain changes, creating new neural networks, building resilience and sustainable performance.

Reset Your Leadership Mindset

Become your own coach to reset your leadership mindset by building these 8 behaviours into your day. Mindset starts with you. Whether you’re leading an organisation with thousands of employees or taking your first steps as a start up. Once you begin to cultivate a growth mindset, your organisational culture will follow.

  • Consciously develop your awareness and recognise your fixed mindset bias
  • Practice self awareness by using mindfulness to develop clearer thinking under pressure. It needn’t take up a huge chunk of time, check out our mindful leader hacks by following the link.
  • Observe the situation without judgement. See if it’s possible to pause rather than jumping in with reactive decision making. Breaking knee jerk habitual thinking is possible with practice.
  • Focus on the learning process. Gather as much information as you can. Analyse it, learn from it and use it next time.
  • Remain flexible. Examine your thoughts and ideas without becoming attached to them. Keep an open mind to the opinions and ideas of others.
  • Develop opportunities to learn and develop by setting yourself stretching goals
  • Constantly challenge yourself to look for the learning information in failure
  • Reflect on your performance

Great leaders leverage peak performance with a growth mindset culture. If you’d like to find out more about mindset, take a look at our free resources along with our Growth Mindset Toolkit

We work with thousands of individuals and Fortune 100 companies to develop growth mindset workplaces, high performing teams and individuals. We deliver growth mindset coaching and leadership training using evidence based strategies from positive psychology, neuroscience and performance psychology Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

Organisational Resilience: Critical Component Or ‘Nice To Have’

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We’re living in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world that continues to change at an unprecedented rate. Take a look around you, the world looks nothing like it did ten years ago. And if you had been asked to predict the socio – political upheavals of the last 12 months, well, I’ll bet that you couldn’t have (and if you had? we would have sat and laughed). The world is changing rapidly and we need to find a way to change with it. Whilst we know much about the importance of individual resilience and it’s impact upon performance, we often miss the uncomfortable truth that even resilient individuals will struggle to thrive in organisations that are designed to stifle rather than support.

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Is a Toxic Workplace Damaging Your Health?

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If you arrived at work this morning, feeling good, shared a few words or a joke with colleagues then you’re probably in an organisation with a positive work culture. If your answer is ‘Yes’ feel the love and sit this article out. If you walked through the door and the toxicity was palpable, sticking to the floor, your shoes, eventually enveloping  you, then that negative workplace culture may be damaging more than your day.

Part of us knows already that this isn’t the right way to live. You don’t need to examine the science to know that sort of workplace produces a huge downer on your day, that sometimes it dominoes into the rest of your life, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and out of control. You muster all of your energy (and civility) for work, returning home with a huge vitality deficit, which slowly but surely infects both your personal time and your personal relationships.

But it could be worse than you think. I first noticed this phenomenon whilst working with a range of organisations over a period of years. From FTSE 200 to small charitable bodies, there was one thing that they all had in common. When the leader was all stick and no carrot the results were high levels of absenteeism, stressed out teams, demotivation and eventually a rapid staff turnover. Even more surprising at the time, this behaviour went unchecked and unchallenged leaving employees disclosing how undervalued, overstretched and frankly, ill they felt as a result. It was visible, easily recognisable. Leaders at the top had created a culture so toxic it was visible to everyone but themselves. Good businesses go bad, crack teams weaken or adopt bad practice by osmosis, emulating their leader’s despotic characteristics and eventually good people jump ship. It got me wondering. If negative cultures and dysfunctional leadership result in increased levels of absenteeism, what is the long term impact on our health?

Research in organisational psychology consistently demonstrates that a toxic environment characterised by hierarchical structures, narcissistic leaders, backbiting and gossip not only demotivates employees, reducing productivity, it also harms their health. Authoritarian leaders lack the self awareness necessary to recognise the hidden costs of such practices. Anna Nyberg’s research at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute highlighted a link between leadership behaviours and employee heart health. If your boss encourages a stressful practices in the false belief that a cut throat environment will increase productivity, it may just be damaging your health.

If you walk into work everyday feeling unsupported, dreading the next round of persecution or the pitting of team members against each other it could be time for a rethink. Sarah Pressman’s research from the University of California produced worrying data. Whereas the probability of early death is increased by 20% if you are obese, 30% for excessive drinkers, 50% higher for smokers it is increased an astounding 70% for those with poor social relationships. We do the same things, day in, day out, telling ourselves that we need to pay the bills, kidding ourselves that things aren’t bad, it’s ok really, when inside we know that we are in the wrong working environment. If your workplace is toxic it may just be reducing your life expectancy and that’s food for thought.

If you find yourself in a toxic workplace culture (or even inadvertently leading one) contact us to find out how you can adopt a more positive and productive approach at admin@planetpositivechange.com Like to find out how you can embed growth mindset or mindfulness into what you do? Check out our forthcoming events and course brochure. Looking for something more bespoke? We’d love to talk to you about getting the most out of your team by using positive psychology, contact us to find out more.