As a business owner, in order to excel at leading your team in a rapidly changing environment, it’s essential for you to be equipped with a growth mindset.
Leading a team with a fixed mindset can lead to a culture of fear in your workplace, resulting in stunted output and creativity. Leading with a growth mindset can empower your employees to collaborate on innovative solutions to each new challenge you are faced with.
Below are four ways you can exercise your growth mindset to become a growth-focused leader.
Be on the lookout for new opportunities
Proactively keep tabs on your industry, and evaluate the gain that new opportunities will give you, whether it is seeking out chances to learn or develop skills through training, or trialling new mediums in which to reach new clients.
And are there ways you can shake up your own habits and practices? Mark Sanborn, author of The Potential Principle, suggests that leaders need to disrupt themselves before something else does it for them. He suggests that if change strikes due to another factor, such as failing of technology, you may struggle to adapt. However, if you’re the one driving change, you remain the one in control.
Forge genuine, strong customer relationships
Ensure you are going out of your way to create and maintain valuable relationships with your existing clients and prospects, as this trust and investment of your time will likely lead to sales. Often the best place to start when growing your base is in recapturing the clients you have relationships with already that may have fallen by the wayside, rather than focusing all of your energy on trying to reach new customers. Repeat customers are a warm lead, and therefore often result in a higher success rate.
Ask for recommendations and referrals
If a client or customer has had a positive experience with your company, ask them if they would be happy to leave a review or recommendation online highlighting the benefits your product or service provided them. This will drive search traffic to your business and increase your visibility to others, who may be faced with a similar hurdle that your business could provide the solution for. You could also be open to incentivising referrals, through offering added value to your current customers when they recommend your business to others.
Consistently set clear goals
Setting clear goals as part of a business plan that can be restructured and revisited is imperative to the success of your business. Goals provide clarity and focus, as well as motivation by giving you and your employees a common target to aim for. Try setting SMART goals (see mnemonic below) to ensure you have covered the criteria that increases your chances of achieving them.
