Growth Mindset really is the right tool and concept for talent development.

As businesses evolve and grow to meet the new normal, it is essential to have talents who are not only competent and committed, but also able to learn fast and adapt to rapidly changing ways of working and doing business. AI is sweeping across the world in record speed up-ending many traditional approaches and thinking. Meanwhile we are reinventing how businesses produce and use energy to tame the rampant rises in temperatures and sea-levels.

Successful leaders must not only develop their own mindset, but also the mindset of all team members. We need cultures in our organizations and teams that make it possible to improve, change and disrupt. We need growth-minded teams and entire organizations.

When employees embrace a growth mindset, they are more likely to seek out feedback, take risks, and learn from their mistakes. This culture of continuous learning can lead to increased innovation, improved performance, and a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

What does this mean for talent development?

Over the last two decades, Skip Bowman has been consulting and delivering talent development programs to global organizations. Here is a summary of the key reasons he argues for using the Safe2Great Growth Mindset tools and approaches in your talent program.

First, tools that measure mindset are better suited to talent development because they enable you to assess, develop and track improvements over time. Common personality assessments and profiles measure permanent qualities and thus do not lend themselves to tracking progress and building accountability.

When we are working with talents, we are not trying to help them be themselves, but rather how they can become the best version of themselves or even transform into something greater. Two of the key attributes of great leaders are self-mastery and self-transformation. By using mindset assessments in a test-retest approach, we can provide insights into how well talents are absorbing feedback, learning to master their potential and over-coming current dysfunctional behavioral and thinking patterns to transform themselves.

Second, we need to assess and develop how talents are leveraging not only their own gifts, but more importantly, how they enable, encourage and inspire others to bring their best selves to work. Leaders must bring out the best in others. And that shift in focus from being a great individual performer to being a great team leader is one of the hardest development steps for talents.

Do you assess how well your talented people are able to motivate, develop and inspire others?

Third, we need to assess how well talents can become effective role models for an inclusive, fair and transparent organization. Do they have the integrity and desire to serve a purpose rather than personal ambition? Are they able to lead with inspiration, integrity and vision rather than control, criticism and exclusion?

Fourth, talent development must be linked to your organizational vision, objectives and purpose. You need to build community and common purpose in your talent cohorts. A common language enables you to align your cultural expectations and provide feedback both when people display great behaviors, but also when people are not living up to our standards.

the most common personality assessments like Hogan, MBTI, Insights or DISC are UNable to support these 4 important aspects of a great talent program.

Over the last 8 years, Safe2Great has developed and tested the Growth Mindset Leadership 360, the only tool to provide a comprehensive assessment of how your current behavioral patterns create psychological safety and growth. It not only reveals how well you master the growth leadership behaviors, but also how much your current behavioral patterns are dysfunctional and inhibiting your own performance and the performance of others.

The assessment provides unique developmental insights about your values, assumptions and beliefs that often handicap or even derail the career of talented people. It also helps you discover situational triggers that get you stuck in self-limiting and other-handicapping habits.

Your talent program can also benefit enormously from the scalable language which has been created by Safe2Great to provide a common framework for personal and organizational change.

The tool can be used in various settings, from individual coaching sessions to team-building exercises and company-wide training programs.

If you want to take self-mastery to a new level on your talent development programs, you need to consider the Growth Mindset Leadership 360 and the Safe2Great approach.

The Safe2Great concept as been turned into a book. Click on the image below to pre-order the book or e-book.