Linked to self-awareness is an understanding of how people grow and develop. An important concept here is Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s notion of fixed and growth mindsets.
People with a fixed mindset believe intuitively that they have a fixed amount of intelligence, talent, and ability and that this doesn’t change over time. They worry that some things are beyond their capa- bilities, they fear that they’ll be “found out” and surpassed (perhaps by highly skilled subordinates), and they may prefer to avoid doing difficult or novel tasks rather than risk the shame of failing at them.
By contrast, people with a growth mindset believe that someone’s full potential is unknowable. Where they are now in terms of intelli- gence and ability is the starting point for where they could be in the future, particularly if they work hard and take on difficult and inter- esting challenges. Failure is no big thing; setbacks are just a prompt to learn more and to try again in different ways.
Clearly, it’s much better to have a growth mindset than a fixed mindset, and it’s more likely to lead to a whole range of positive out- comes in your teams. However, when you look honestly into yourself,
k k you may be surprised to find that you have much more of a fixed
mindset than a growth mindset. How can you change this? Dweck suggests the following steps:
1. Listen to yourself. What’s going on in your mind when you’re thinking about taking on a new project? Do you find yourself questioning whether you have the skills or talent for it or worrying that people may look down on you if you fail? If you do, challenge these beliefs rationally, per- haps using the cognitive restructuring approach we looked at in #6.
2. Recognize that you have a choice. Everyone faces challenges and setbacks through life, but the way you respond makes a huge difference. Force yourself to identify opportunities to take a different path from the one you would normally take.
3. Challenge your fixed mindset. When you hear yourself thinking from a fixed mindset perspective, remember that you can learn the skills you need to achieve your goals. For example, if you’re facing a challenge and you think, “I don’t think I’m smart enough to do this,” then challenge yourself with “I’m not sure if I can get this right the first time, but with practice and determination, I can learn.”
4. Act. When you work on developing a growth mindset, it becomes easier to tackle obstacles in a more positive way.
Think of it like practicing the guitar: It takes time, and nobody plays perfectly the first time. When you make a mistake, try to see it as a chance to learn and grow.
And how can you do this for your team? Make sure that you build an open, trusting environment where people feel comfortable expressing their concerns and their doubts. Talk about fixed and growth mindsets, and praise hard work and determined effort, even if it doesn’t meet with success. (Dweck’s advice is to praise effort rather than success; however, we need both in business.)
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Tip
Generally, it’s a good thing to encourage a growth mindset and to treat short-term failure as a “learning experience.” However, a risk-averse mindset is often appropriate in high-risk situations, such as where people’s health or safety are at stake, where reg- ulatory compliance is needed, or where large sums of money are involved. In these situations, be nuanced in the way you apply this idea.
Learn more about Dweck’s mindsets: http://mnd.tools/7
Source:Adapted from Dweck 2007. Reproduced with permission of Pearson Education, Inc.
Other Techniques for Knowing Yourself
The tools we’ve highlighted here were rated as the most important techniques of their type by the participants in our survey. You can view five other good tools that didn’t “make the cut” at http://mnd .tools/c1c.
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Chapter 2
Plan and Manage Your Time
Here is a simple and important question to consider: What is your scarcest resource during the work day?
Most people have a ready answer: My time! Sure, time is a scarce resource for everyone, and most of us feel we don’t have enough of it.
But this is actually the wrong answer. Consider your close colleagues in the workplace. Most of them work for a similar amount of time every day, yet some are dramatically more productive than others.
And these differences aren’t just about expertise – the smartest or most competent person isn’t always the most efficient one.
So what is the scarcest resource? It is your attention – your capac- ity to focus on the right things at the right time. This has always been true to some degree, but it is becoming even more important. In a world where information is plentiful, where the costs of searching for the information you need is almost zero, the premium on attention and focus is even higher than it used to be.
Simply put, the most productive and efficient managers are the ones who understand and manage their attention properly. They are sufficiently self-aware to know when they are doing valuable work and when they are wasting time, and they have the self-discipline to switch their attention toward the places where it is most valuable.
In this chapter, we describe a series of techniques and tools that help you manage your own personal time at work. The first, activity logs (#8), is simply about tracking what you are spending time on so that you know yourself better. Then we describe how to prioritize tasks effectively in terms of the amount of effort needed
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monitoring and tracking work – action programs (#10) are a good way of keeping major tasks and specific actions linked together nicely, whereas task scheduling (#11) is useful for planning the days and weeks ahead to make time for the most important work.
Finally, we tackle the psychological dimensions of being effective in the workplace. First, we consider the concept of flow, the state of being where people do their best work (#12), and then we address the problem of procrastination in terms of when it happens and what we can do about it (#13).