Why A Growth Mindset Matters

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• Can startups survive without scaling? (USA Today)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Leadership lessons from the trenches: How fast-growth founders avoid burnout (Inc)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• 20 tips to boost productivity with AI while managing its risks (Fast Company)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Canva has a shiny new text-to-image generator (The Verge)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Companies are firing Gen Z workers soon after hiring them (Euro News)

👀 ICYMI

• How to adopt a playbook to scale your operations (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🚀 Growth Mindset: The foundation of scaling yourself

Being a founder requires agility to adapt to all the things business will throw your way.

With the amount of obstacles, fires, personnel situations, and just plain miscellaneous items that come from running a company, there’s no shortage of learning opportunities.

How you use these opportunities will oftentimes help in building a strong growth mindset.

Coined by psychologist, Carol Dweck in her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, the term “growth mindset” is shown in individuals who believe they can develop through dedication and hard work.  Whereas, the opposite “fixed mindset” is defined by feeling that one’s talents are static and unchangeable.

As you scale your company, it’s imperative that you’re able to take the lessons learned from the things that don’t work and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Being open to change, or simply being willing to be wrong and then pivoting, can provide the necessary perspective you need to better see the path forward.

A growth mindset will level you up, not only as a founder, but also in how you lead your teams.

The founder’s perspective & team dynamics

A growth mindset isn’t just about self improvement, it’s a foundational principle that sets the stage for how you manage and grow your team.  It’s also a philosophy that enables your employees to do their best work.

When I’ve lead teams, I’ve always encouraged my employees to be open in how they approach their work, here’s a few growth mindset elements we’ve focused on:

Challenges are actually opportunities

Some days it can feel like there’s a new challenge to solve the second you wake up.  But as a leader with a growth mindset, you’ll view obstacles and barriers as opportunities to learn and evolve.

This kind of attitude shapes your own growth, while setting a tone with your team in how issues should be viewed, and subsequently dealt with.

Open feedback breeds new perspectives

As you’ve probably read before, feedback is so important to me and my teams.  I encourage any and all feedback, creating a culture for employees to share good, bad, and other with the goal of building an understanding around everyone’s perspective.

The idea is to then take this feedback to make better informed decisions.

Learning is an ongoing journey

As your company grows, new roles and responsibilities will inevitably be created.  Applying a growth mindset to these changes, and effectively embrace them, will help you see where you should then prioritize skill development and learning.

Knowing there’s going to be a need for fresh skills and knowledge as your company scales, and committing to learning them, sets the tone for your employees, thereby encouraging them to also commit to the same approach in upskilling themselves.

🔄 Your mindset in and out of the office

As the leader, it all starts with you.

How you shape the culture often times depends on how you shape yourself first.  And this takes time - here are ways you can start to incorporate a growth mindset into your professional and personal life:

Milestones marked by knowledge & learning

Instead of only focusing on business metrics, set learning goals for yourself once a quarter.  This could be attempting to master a skill or complete a course, as an example.

Have this become a metric you can track by encouraging your team to set their own learning based goals quarterly as well.

Reflect to see reality

Make time for regular self-reflection.  Ask yourself questions like, “What did I learn from this?” or “How can approach the situation better next time?”  Give yourself a chance to put things in perspective.

As we all know, looking at a roadblock from one angle can easily be an opportunity from another.

Taste everything

Staying curious is the way you continue to grow.  Learning things that have nothing to do with your industry keeps you sharp and innovative - not just for you as a business leader, but for life in general.

When growth defines the culture

Encourage your team to just go learn.  It could be as simple as providing budget to take courses or paid time off to learn.

Allowing your employees feel like they can safely take the time to focus on their own development really emphasizes the idea of a growth driven culture.

In the end, successful founders and businesses will win because of their resiliency.  The ability to adapt and pivot to anything, and not let it defeat you, is the very definition of a growth mindset.

This is a foundation that gets built little by little, year by year.

The same way you nurture your business, nurturing your approach to life ensures you’re always ready to tackle that next phase of growth.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Pick a current challenge your team faces and turn it into an opportunity for the company as a whole

• Scale Yourself → Set a quarterly learning goal for yourself

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