VIC This months Management Article

Management Article – Mind Sets

Attracting and retaining staff is an issue facing most businesses. In fact the problem isn’t limited to the services industry or Australia. At a recent breakfast presentation David Irvine of Hayes Recruitment shared some interesting statistics. He said over 70% of businesses had skills shortages and that one of the solutions that 46% of organizations are working on is changing their culture in support of offering job flexibility and investing in up-skilling their people. He also said knowing where your business is going, developing a plan and identifying key roles were crucial in identifying the right people.

The most interesting aspect though was the statistics on staff interviewed about their job experience. When asked if their job reflected what they were told about their employment at their job 32% said it was nothing like it, 42% said something like it, and only 26% said it was as expected. Do you do an exit interview with employees who are leaving to find out why? When it comes to your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) reality must match your values. 

So what does all this have to do with attracting and maintaining good employees? Well it’s all about profiling employees and prospective employees to understand their mind set and how coachable they are. In an amazing book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, the author Carol Dweck PhD, describes two distinct mindsets: fixed and growth. What is talent—and how important is it? What lies behind great achievement? What stops people from pursuing their dreams?

Benjamin Barber, an eminent sociologist, once said, “I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures... I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.”

What on earth would make someone a non-learner? Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, and they get up. They just barge forward. What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset, that’s what!

In the fixed mindset it’s not enough just to succeed. It’s not enough just to look smart and talented. You have to be pretty much flawless. And you have to be flawless right away... After all, if you have it you have it, and if you don’t you don’t. Beyond how traumatic a setback can be in the fixed mindset, this mindset gives you no good recipe for overcoming it. If failure means you lack competence or potential—that you are a failure – where do you go from there?

The people who give up sooner typically suffer from a fixed mindset. Invariably, they are trying to get it right the very first time they try something. And if it doesn’t gel instantly, they quickly lose interest, and can even give up and stop working on the project altogether.

A dead giveaway that you have a fixed mindset will be the little judgments that pop into your mind such as, “I’m no good at this. I’m not creative. I’ve never been good at all this marketing stuff. I’m hopeless at learning. It’s too hard. Our business is not that special or different.”

People with a growth mindset don’t experience an absence of problems but they treat obstacles as a learning experience even if it feels difficult at first. And a growth mindset can be cultivated. We now know you can teach old dogs new tricks and new skills can be learned and developed ... and at any time.

So treat so-called obstacles and failure as learning or feedback and as a signal to keep thinking and trying. You’re going to hit some obstacles on your journey. Expect the dip. But a growth mindset sees you through these patches. And you can develop a growth mind set - all it takes is a willingness to be coachable.

To get you thinking about how you can apply this to your business here are some more interesting statistics; the average age of the Australian workforce is 42 years; 69% of organizations are not targeting mature age employees and 85% of the growth in employment will be in the over 45 year old group.

Suggestion, focus on experience not age.