Today we’re sharing insight from guest blogger Adam Kronk, Program Director for the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership. We hope you enjoy Adam’s wisdom and perspective.
My day job is working with scholars and executives to figure out how to foster ethical behavior in business. It’s a fascinating gig, and one of my favorite parts involves interviewing C-suite leaders about their own experiences on the subject. During a recent conversation with the Chairman and CEO of a financial services firm, we came to the topic of performance reviews and promotions. I asked whether and how they incorporated a person’s values and character into the process at his organization.
“We don’t look for perfection,” he said. “We look for people who are genuinely trying to improve. Do they really want to grow, to get better? Are they always trying to show that they’re the smartest person in the room, or are they more focused on learning and developing, and helping others do the same?”
For the leader of this large company in a competitive industry, competency isn’t a scarce commodity, it’s the table stakes. What makes someone an MVP is openness to growth.
Sounds great, right? Here’s the problem: most of us have had it ingrained from a very young age that we will be measured by, graded on, and rewarded for intelligence and results, not effort and growth. Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, has done fascinating research into mindsets, and draws the distinction between a fixed and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is where one views his or her success as a result of innate ability. A growth mindset is where success is believed to come from hard work, learning, and perseverance. She’s got a great TED talk on “the power of believing you can improve,” and this short video demonstrates the marked difference when young learners are praised for effort instead of intelligence.
Now let’s apply this thinking to your workplace. How is success measured and defined, and how are things like raises, bonuses, and advancement through the ranks determined? Most importantly, does your performance management process—or even just the prevailing culture—instill a growth mindset among members of your team? If an employee doesn’t know something that he or she already should, does the environment encourage asking a question or hiding a deficiency?
What about the F-word? Is feedback an awkward, necessary evil delivered on an annual basis through a formal tool? If so, it is most likely missing the two essential ingredients that make feedback a worthwhile learning mechanism—timeliness and accuracy.
Google is making a huge push at their company to “make feedback normal.” They call it feedback seeking. A leader on their people analytics team recently presented at a forum we hosted on how they look for and develop feedback seeking as a crucial trait among their managers. Notice that it’s not feedback giving. They are emphasizing the thirst for it, which they believe will in turn drive its delivery.
Maybe your company already has a wonderful performance management system and an environment where feedback is frequent and comfortable. (If so, contact me! I’m always on the hunt for best practices in these areas.) I would still assert there’s room to make the growth mindset concept a bigger part of your daily efforts, and that doing so will yield striking dividends. Costco founder Jim Sinegal once told me he thinks 80 percent of a manager’s job is teaching. Let that sink in for a minute—that’s four whole days out of a work week!
As is true with most leadership-related phenomena, teaching by example is a great place to start. Ask where you might grow and let folks see you try—and maybe even fail!
What’s The Risk?
We’re all busy and have pressure to perform. The risk is we create a culture on our teams where results are the only things that get measured. If we can foster a growth mindset, we will have happier, more resilient, harder-working employees.
This content was written and shared by guest blogger Adam Kronk.
Adam runs the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, which aims to understand how ethical behavior is generated in work contexts and then to disseminate that understanding to business leaders. He teaches business ethics to undergraduates in the Mendoza College of Business and presents regularly at corporate and academic conferences on topics related to ethical leadership and effective management practices, especially focusing on what makes people tick, how leaders can affect culture, and which cutting-edge best practices hold particular promise for the business world. Prior to this role, Adam worked as a Chief Operating Officer in the nonprofit education and social service sectors, overseas and domestically.
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn and Twitter, and the Center for Ethical Leadership on Twitter.
