Why You Need to Hire People With A Growth Mindset

2 of the key traits we see in top performers in Phorest are:

• They are motivated by the impact of their responsibilities, not the status
• They ask “how can I help Phorest be better?”

It doesn’t matter what someones job title is, great value and ideas come from everywhere in the company and people with growth mindset do this the most.

“All the effective leaders I have encountered — both those I worked with and those I merely watched — knew four simple things: a leader is someone who has followers; popularity is not leadership, results are; leaders are highly visible, they set examples; leadership is not rank, privilege, titles or money, it is responsibility.” — Peter Drucker

The point here being — you should do everything in your power to fill your organisation with people who take ownership and responsibility for their role, these people are leaders — and you can be a leader without necessarily managing people. In our experience, the type of personality where this trait is prevalent, are people who have a “Growth Mindset”.

People who have a Growth Mindset do some of the following:

• Make decisions based on where this is going to be in 12 months, rather than making the decision that might be easiest to make in the short-term
• Don’t look out — look within

When they receive what can sometimes be harsh feedback from a client or in a 360 review for example, they take a step back rather than retaliate (which can be the natural reaction sometimes) — and try to understand why somebody might say that, and then work on how they can improve that. Of course, it’s not easy — but you need to try and not take it personally.

• Embrace challenges and change — Adapt and overcome is very much something a person with a Growth Mindset does.
• Someone with a Growth Mindset understands the importance of honing their self-awareness, if they are not good at something they don’t pretend that are — but they will try to figure it out. If they don’t know the answer to a question, they don’t bluff or give you a political answer, they say “Right now I don’t know the answer to that, but I am going to go and find it.”
• This one might sound obvious — but somebody with a Growth Mindset is constantly self-developing — what was the last blog, book, product industry related topic you read up on?

Having a Growth Mindset is one of our core company values here in Phorest — but how do you identify potential new employees and if they have a Growth Mindset? Some of the below questions and observations will help in the interview process:

• In role X, what was the biggest mistake you made in that role?
• Not only will someone with Growth Mindset be candid about what they did wrong, they will tell you what happened next and what they learned from the experience, and most importantly, what they did the next time.
• Does the person use words to start an answer such as “I think” “I was supposed to” “I’d like to” OR do they preface an answer with “I believe” “I will” or “I have learned”
• What have you learned in the past year that you didn’t know 12 months ago? This should give an insight into how the candidate comes up with the answer and leads on to more conversation around it.

As with any organisation, getting the right people on the bus is half the battle — filling your team with people who genuinely want to grow and better themselves will accelerate the growth of your company. It won’t apply to every role or industry, but hire people for where they are going to be in 12 months, people that see their talent as malleable as opposed to fixed. Carol Dweck explains this really well in this video.

Your mind is a very powerful thing, and anybody can have a Growth Mindset.