Define Beliefs and Behaviors that Enable Growth in the Context of your Strategy and Capabilities.

1. Define Beliefs and Behaviors that Enable Growth in the Context of your Strategy and Capabilities.

Consistent growth requires critical inquiry, constructive debate, collaboration, diversity of views, listening, trying new ideas, tolerance for mistakes and failures, and learning into your business. Leaders must empower, measure and reward behaviors that model growth change as well as model the behaviors themselves and work to remove hindrances of growth for others. Celebrate success, learn from failure and remove fear of change. Common popular belief contrarily proposes terms such as “groupthink”, “command and control”, “keep your head down” and “we know everything” in an effort to avoid an environment of fear. However meaningful change is birthed in an environment where learning is encouraged, constructive debate is heard, and an environment of constant improvement is applied to every aspect and individual of the organization.

Initially business leaders may find it difficult to change their mindset. Focusing on strategy and financial results is comfortable and straightforward. Businesses may start with concentrating primarily about the growth inhibitors, and secondly focus on the behaviors that cultivate growth. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What behaviors encourage or evidence a growth mindset?
2. What behaviors evidence the opposite of a growth mindset?
3. What behaviors promote growth creating processes: identifying opportunities, experimenting, and building growth portfolios?
4. What behaviors inhibit the effective utilization of growth-creating processes?

2. Culture – Align your organization to promote and enable growth boosting behaviors and to inhibit and penalize negative behaviors.

Once you have characterized behaviors you want to encourage, you must align your system to promote and enable growth encouraging behaviors and eliminate and penalize the negative behaviors within the culture of the organization.

Culture is defined by the beliefs and unspoken rules of how a company actually functions, not by what they say or desire to do, rather what they do. We’ve never read a company statement that claims “The only thing we care about is financial results. Our employees are commodities used to produce those results; and our customers are fish waiting for bait.” However some companies act that way and treat both clients and employees that way.

Successful growing companies that value meaningful change implement a variety of cultures. However most companies with healthy growth do not focus on creating shareholder value, rather concentrate on customers, employees and society. Instead of focusing on financial gain, the common theme throughout successful growing companies that influence positive change is constant improvement. Growth is not the focus, rather better serving its contributors.

3. Constant Improvement – a core building block that can create company-wide learning and growth exploration mindset it starts with me.

Constant improvement requires consistently challenging the way you do things, regardless of the success attained, engaging in constructive dialogue, encouraging diversity of opinion, engaging employees in doing their jobs better, faster and more efficiently, adapting new approaches, and most importantly having a willingness to always embrace change. Constant improvement compels learning and experimentation. It can become the foundation where growth operation transpires.

Constant improvement evolves as organizations embrace a culture that encourages critical inquiry, constructive debate, realistic assessments and collaborations. An active bias needs to be adopted that views mistakes and failures as leverage for learning. Guidelines need to be established that enable employees to try new things while incentivizing employees and customers to be engaged in creating and experimenting with new growth ideas. Conformity, fear and top-down command and control culture discourages freedom and devalues employees and clients.

The behaviors of leaders and managers either will reinforce an environment needed to sustain growth or crush it. Begin examining yourself:

• Do you really have a growth mindset and behave in a manner that enables growth behaviors in your employees and colleagues? If not, how and when are you going to change?

Growth starts with you. Before you lead your organization and employees, learn how to lead yourself. How do you do that? Veritas Management Group’s leadership training and tools are structured to enable business leaders with customized tools and frameworks from Ivy League schools to assist you in creating a growth environment and lay out how businesses can lead meaningful change within their organizations and communities.