Which of the following is a benefit of having growth mindset in the context of entrepreneurship?

How can a growth mindset benefit your career?

Carol Dweck of Stanford University identified two mindsets people can have about their talents and abilities – growth mindsets or fixed mindsets.

People with a growth mindset believe talents and abilities are things they can grow and develop. They believe they have potential and can grow talent through effort, practice, and knowledge acquisition. Conversely, individuals with a fixed mindset believe their talents and abilities are stagnant. They believe they have a fixed amount of talent which can’t be changed.

Developing growth mindsets in relation to our careers is critical to thrive in today’s ever changing business environment. In the context of one’s career, those with a growth mindset are likely to see changes in their work, work environment and career as an opportunity for growth even if it’s stressful or challenging.

On the other hand, those with a fixed mindset are likely to believe that they can’t develop or grow their skills, and, as such, are likely to perceive changes to one’s role, work environment, and career more negatively.

Having a growth career mindset will keep you open to opportunities, help you continue to develop and expand your current capabilities, and ultimately, enable you to thrive in today’s ever changing business environment.

Benefits of having a growth career mindset

• You view obstacles and challenges in work tasks and responsibilities and/or the work environment as an opportunity for learning and career development. For example, opportunity to learn a new skills, become more adaptable, develop your ability to operate in other job roles, etc.
• You believe putting effort into developing yourself will help you to be successful in the long-term (i.e. learning something new may take time and practice – but this process will help you in other roles in the future).
• You understand that feedback provides you with valuable insights and targeted areas for ongoing learning and development (i.e. feedback can inform a learning/development plan by providing you with insights about yourself, including your strengths and development areas).
• You also understand that people who are doing what you’d love to be doing are not competitors but rather those best placed to help you achieve your goals – as such, you see others who are successful in their careers as valuable teachers, mentors, advisors who can support your own success (e.g. someone’s promotion provides an opportunity to for you to learn how to progress).

4 practical ways you can build a growth career mindset

1. Leveraging your self-insight means knowing yourself and the value you bring. It requires that you gain an understanding of your values, interests, strengths, personality and ambitions, in order to make an informed career decision about what you want for your future.
2. The next steps is exploring your options. Your aspirations need to be considered in the context of the opportunities available to you. This goes for any constraints that you may need to factor in to your decision making about your career, or obstacles you need to overcome if you want to pursue a certain direction. These constraints may be skills or education based, organisational or could even be geographical.
3. Step 3 involves setting both long-term and short-term goals – your short term career goals will relate to your role development, while your long term goals will be linked to the development actions you’ll need to take to drive your longer term career aspirations. Setting your future goals will ultimately determine the steps you need to take to achieve them and assist you in staying motivated.
4. Finally, it’s about taking action and implementing your plan to actually progress towards your career goals. This means doing things or getting things to happen – networking, gaining experience and searching for opportunities and roles that will bring you closer to achieving your aspirations and creating your future.

Importantly, the above 4 steps should be a continual cycle, an ongoing process throughout your career journey. It’s important to regularly review your understanding of yourself, your influences and the world of work, as these change throughout your life and, in turn, impact on your career planning. Self-reflection is a valuable way of checking that you are on track with your career planning and ask yourself what is working for you or what isn’t working so well. Reviewing your career plan with your manager or a mentor can help guide your reflection and help you to learn about new opportunities or changes that may impact you. Establishing regular career conversations to review your goals can also remind you of how far you’ve come on your career journey, and it can signal when changes needs to be made.

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Scholars are deeply gratified when their ideas catch on. And they are even more gratified when their ideas make a difference — improving motivation, innovation, or productivity, for example. But popularity has a price: people sometimes distort ideas, and therefore fail to reap their benefits. This has started to happen with my research on “growth” versus “fixed” mindsets among individuals and within organizations.

To briefly sum up the findings: Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning. When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive far greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation. In contrast, people at primarily fixed-mindset companies report more of only one thing: cheating and deception among employees, presumably to gain an advantage in the talent race.

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In the wake of these findings, “growth mindset” has become a buzzword in many major companies, even working its way into their mission statements. But when I probe, I often discover that people’s understanding of the idea is limited. Let’s take a look at three common misconceptions.

1. I already have it, and I always have. People often confuse a growth mindset with being flexible or open-minded or with having a positive outlook — qualities they believe they’ve simply always had. My colleagues and I call this a false growth mindset. Everyone is actually a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and that mixture continually evolves with experience. A “pure” growth mindset doesn’t exist, which we have to acknowledge in order to attain the benefits we seek.

1. A growth mindset is just about praising and rewarding effort. This isn’t true for students in schools, and it’s not true for employees in organizations. In both settings, outcomes matter. Unproductive effort is never a good thing. It’s critical to reward not just effort but learning and progress, and to emphasize the processes that yield these things, such as seeking help from others, trying new strategies, and capitalizing on setbacks to move forward effectively. In all of our research, the outcome — the bottom line — follows from deeply engaging in these processes.

1. Just espouse a growth mindset, and good things will happen. Mission statements are wonderful things. You can’t argue with lofty values like growth, empowerment, or innovation. But what do they mean to employees if the company doesn’t implement policies that make them real and attainable? They just amount to lip service. Organizations that embody a growth mindset encourage appropriate risk-taking, knowing that some risks won’t work out. They reward employees for important and useful lessons learned, even if a project does not meet its original goals. They support collaboration across organizational boundaries rather than competition among employees or units. They are committed to the growth of every member, not just in words but in deeds, such as broadly available development and advancement opportunities. And they continually reinforce growth mindset values with concrete policies.

Even if we correct these misconceptions, it’s still not easy to attain a growth mindset. One reason why is we all have our own fixed-mindset triggers. When we face challenges, receive criticism, or fare poorly compared with others, we can easily fall into insecurity or defensiveness, a response that inhibits growth. Our work environments, too, can be full of fixed-mindset triggers. A company that plays the talent game makes it harder for people to practice growth-mindset thinking and behavior, such as sharing information, collaborating, innovating, seeking feedback, or admitting errors.

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To remain in a growth zone, we must identify and work with these triggers. Many managers and executives have benefited from learning to recognize when their fixed-mindset “persona” shows up and what it says to make them feel threatened or defensive. Most importantly, over time they have learned to talk back to it, persuading it to collaborate with them as they pursue challenging goals.

It’s hard work, but individuals and organizations can gain a lot by deepening their understanding of growth-mindset concepts and the processes for putting them into practice. It gives them a richer sense of who they are, what they stand for, and how they want to move forward.

Which of the following is a benefit of having a growth mindset in the context of entrepreneurship?

Which of the following is a benefit of having a growth mindset?

What are the benefits of having an entrepreneurial mindset?

How does a growth mindset relate to the entrepreneurial mindset?

What are the benefits of application of growth mindset in a startup?