Do you have a growth mindset and what difference does it make to your wellbeing and relationships if you do? Here we explore how the theory on growth and fixed mindsets, first introduced by psychologist Carol Dweck, plays out in a work setting.

A person’s mindset can significantly influence their performance, their relationships with colleagues, and their overall success. It can make a difference to how individuals approach challenges, development, and collaboration.

Understanding how growth and fixed mindsets manifest in work environments can lead to improved cultures, greater innovation, and enhanced personal satisfaction.

Growth Mindset at Work

A growth mindset is the belief that skills and intelligence can be developed through dedication, hard work, and continuous learning.

People with this mindset thrive in environments that encourage experimentation, feedback, and collaboration.

They tend to see challenges as opportunities for improvement rather than as threats and they tend to focus on what they can learn from an experience and what improvements can be made rather than allowing perceived obstacles or uncertainties get in the way of progress.

In practical terms, employees with a growth mindset:

1. Embrace challenges: They willingly take on tasks that push their limits, seeing them as opportunities to expand their capabilities. Whether it’s learning a new skill or taking on a demanding project, they approach the situation with a problem-solving attitude.

2. Persist through setbacks: Rather than seeing a mistake or failure as a reflection of their abilities, they view it as a temporary issue that can be solved with effort and adjustment. This resilience allows them to bounce back from difficulties with a focus on improvement.

3. Seek feedback: Individuals with a growth mindset actively seek feedback to learn how they can improve. They view constructive criticism as a valuable tool for self-improvement and are more likely to use it to refine their skills and performance.

4. Collaborate openly: They are willing to share knowledge and ask questions, believing that learning from others is an essential part of growth. They support the growth of their colleagues, creating a cooperative and forward-thinking work culture.

A growth mindset in the workplace leads to a higher level of innovation, as employees are more willing to take calculated risks and explore new solutions without the fear of failure. It also creates a positive environment where teams support each other and are not afraid to make mistakes in the pursuit of progress.

Fixed Mindset at Work

On the other hand, a fixed mindset is the belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents are static traits that cannot be significantly changed eg I am who I am and you’ll just have to accept me as I am.

People with a fixed mindset often avoid situations where they may fail or appear less competent, leading to stagnation in their professional development.

In the workplace, this mindset can manifest in several detrimental ways:

1. Fear of failure: Employees with a fixed mindset tend to shy away from challenging tasks or projects that might expose their weaknesses. They prefer sticking to what they already know, which limits their opportunities for growth.

2. Avoidance of feedback: They often resist feedback, perceiving it as personal criticism rather than constructive advice. This can lead to defensiveness or complacency, hindering their ability to learn from mistakes.

3. Blame culture: People with a fixed mindset may place blame on external factors or colleagues when things go wrong, as accepting responsibility would challenge their belief in their fixed abilities. This can also be an issue when issues arise in workplaces and workplace processes are targeted on finding fault and applying consequences rather than exercising curiosity to generate consensus solutions.

4. Undermining collaboration: Because they see skills as static, they may be reluctant to collaborate openly, fearing that others will outshine them or highlight their weaknesses. This can result in a competitive, rather than cooperative, work culture.

People with a fixed mindset are more likely to be threatened by change because they want things to stay as they are rather than venture into the uncertainty of something new. This is one of the reasons why change management always comes up as a significant area for improvement in employee satisfaction surveys.

Fostering a Growth Mindset Culture

To foster a growth mindset in the workplace, leaders need to emphasise the importance of learning, effort, and improvement over natural talent or immediate success. Encouraging employees to take risks, learn from failure, and seek ongoing development is key. This can be achieved by:

1. Praising effort and learning: Managers should focus on recognizing the process employees go through to achieve results rather than just the outcomes. This reinforces the idea that effort leads to improvement.

2. Providing constructive feedback: Rather than merely pointing out mistakes, feedback should offer clear guidance on how to improve and grow. This helps employees see challenges as areas for development.

3. Encouraging collaboration: A workplace that encourages the sharing of ideas and learning from others will naturally promote a growth mindset.

What can also be helpful is aiding employees to understand their inherent strengths by using character strengths instruments like VIA Character Strengths and giving them opportunities to use their signature strengths as well as supporting them when they need to leverage their lesser strengths.

Fostering a growth mindset mentality plays an important part in developing and maintaining a psychologically safe workplace culture because it encourages people to speak up and to work together to eliminate or control psychosocial hazards and to not be bystanders.

If you would like to explore the ways that we might be able to help you to make yours a great workplace, please call us on 0438 533 311 or email info@poswork.com.au.

To us, the findings from SEEK’s inaugural Workplace Happiness Index survey are no surprise – study after study has shown much the same findings about the factors that are most important to people feeling happy at work. Let’s have a look at them.  

According to SEEK’s Head of Customer Insights and Strategy, Aimee Hutton: “The aim of this inaugural Workplace Index is to spotlight the strongest opportunities to improve happiness at work for both employees and employers and, ultimately, drive a happier workforce in Australia”.

You might think that pay and promotional opportunities and flexible working would be among the key factors that people reported as the things that make for a happy life at work. Not according to this study which found that the top 5 factors ranked as the most important for happiness at work were:

1. Purpose
2. Their manager
3. Day to day responsibilities
4. Company culture
5. Stress levels

Salary came in at a distant #9.

So why are we not surprised?

Because we have known it for years, for example:

1. In 2009, “Engage for success”, the report on employee engagement commissioned by the UK Government and created by Robert Macleod and Nita Clarke was published. We use their 4 pillars of engagement in our Better Workplace Projects and the first of those pillars is “Strong strategic narrative”, the centrepiece of which is “Purpose”
2. Again in 2009, the famous Simon Sinek published his celebrated work “Start with Why” which is all about purpose being at the heart of successful organisations.
3. Then in 2011, Professor Martin Seligman’s masterpiece “Flourish” was published. It sets out the 5 pillars of wellbeing that are necessary for living a flourishing life – the PERMA model in which the “M” stands for “meaning”. It is on his work that the PERMAH workplace wellbeing survey that we use in our Better coaching process is based.

That’s why we aren’t surprised that “purpose” has come out as the #1 factor for happiness at work. There is a huge body of evidence that has been telling us that for years.

Looking at #2, the second pillar in the Engage for Success framework is “Engaging management” which is about providing people with clarity of role and expectations, equipping them to be successful and coaching them to be the best that they can be. That is, it is about THEIR MANAGER enabling and supporting their people to be successful in managing their DAY TO DAY RESPONSIBILITIES.

Additionally, Gallup has been telling us for decades that the first line manager is the most dominant causal factor in whether an employee decides to stay or to go. They also preach a coaching model where there are regular catchups between an employee and THEIR MANAGER and they feel trusted and supported in undertaking their DAY TO DAY RESPONSIBILITIES.

So there isn’t really anything new in these latest findings from SEEK, is there?

Our “EngageMentality Coaching” model has been specifically designed to help managers to become coaches and be a reason why people want to stay because they feel trusted, supported and appreciated.

Perks are nice but…….

Over the last couple of years, we have seen new positive duties being introduced to prevent sexual harassment and gender-based behaviour and to eliminate or control psychosocial hazards. That is because, in too many workplaces, people aren’t enjoying work – the SEEK study showed that nearly half of the people surveyed said they were not happy at work.

The COVID experience has had the effect of causing people to reevaluate their priorities in life and what they want to do in a work sense, who they want to do it with and where they want to do it.

The value of the SEEK news is that it brings us back to what really matters when it comes to how we help people to enjoy work and be productive so that business and employees flourish together.

That is what PosWork is about – we have the tools and programs to help your workplace to flourish by design.

If you would like to explore the ways that we might be able to help you to make yours a great workplace, please call us on 0438 533 311 or email info@poswork.com.au.

Did you know that poor change management is one of the most common psychosocial hazards in Australia? And In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving world, change is a constant as we strive to find new and better ways to do all sorts of things in business and in life. One of the problems that we have is that traditional problem-solving approaches focus on identifying what’s wrong and fixing it, rather than working positively towards an optimal solution. However, there is another method that takes a more constructive and empowering perspective—Appreciative Inquiry (AI). This transformative approach centers on discovering strengths, amplifying successes, and fostering growth through positivity.

Appreciative Inquiry is built on five core principles that shape how individuals and organizations can create sustainable change. These principles promote collaboration, resilience, and innovation, helping people focus on what works rather than what’s broken. In this blog post, we’ll explore these principles and how they can be applied in practice.

What is Appreciative Inquiry?

Before diving into the principles, it’s essential to understand what Appreciative Inquiry is. Developed in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, AI is a change-management approach that emphasizes the power of positive thinking, focusing on what gives life to an organization or system when it is functioning at its best. It seeks to identify strengths and success stories, using them as a foundation for envisioning the future and making strategic decisions.

In contrast to traditional problem-solving methods, which typically focus on identifying deficiencies or weaknesses, AI involves asking questions like, “What’s working well?” and “How can we build on that?” It encourages optimism, engagement, and collaboration, making it a highly effective tool for driving long-term, positive transformation.

The 5 Core Principles of Appreciative Inquiry

At the heart of Appreciative Inquiry are five foundational principles: the Constructionist Principle, the Principle of Simultaneity, the Poetic Principle, the Anticipatory Principle, and the Positive Principle. These guide how AI practitioners approach change and improvement.

1. The Constructionist Principle

This principle is based on the idea that our realities are socially constructed through language and conversations. In other words, the way we talk about our experiences shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world. This means that positive change begins with the stories we tell ourselves and others.

For example, if a team continuously discusses challenges and failures, they are likely to reinforce those negative experiences. In contrast, if they focus on what’s going well and celebrate successes, they create a culture of positivity and possibility. The Constructionist Principle teaches us that by changing the narrative, we can change our reality.

This is why a lot of our work is around changing the narrative in organisations through our “Better Stories” suite of positive communications services.

2. The Principle of Simultaneity

This principle highlights the fact that inquiry and change happen simultaneously. The moment we ask a question, we begin to create change. This is why it’s important to ask questions that focus on the positive rather than the negative. By asking about strengths, opportunities, and successes, we start the change process on a constructive note.

For instance, if an organization asks, “What makes our customer service exceptional?” it shifts the focus from problem-solving to possibility-building. By exploring what’s working, they immediately begin to create a shared vision for continuing that success.

In our “Better Workplace Projects”, we look at an organisation’s culture through its people’s experiences and perspectives and narratives about what is working well as well as what could be improved. 

3. The Poetic Principle

The Poetic Principle suggests that organizations, like poems, are open to interpretation, and individuals have the ability to influence the stories they tell about them. In essence, this principle teaches that we can choose which aspects of our reality to focus on, just like a poet selects themes and verses to create meaning.

In an organization, this could mean emphasizing stories of innovation and teamwork over stories of struggle. By choosing to focus on the best parts of an organization’s past, people can inspire greater creativity and collaboration in the future. This principle encourages individuals and teams to look at every aspect of their experiences as an opportunity to discover what works.

In our EngageMentality coaching method, strengths is one of the 5 lenses through which we develop Personal Performance and Development Plans and another is relationships which encompasses teamwork.

4. The Anticipatory Principle

The Anticipatory Principle states that our vision of the future influences our current actions. What we believe about tomorrow shapes what we do today. In other words, when we hold a positive and inspiring vision of the future, we are more likely to take actions that align with that vision.

For example, an organization that envisions itself as a leader in sustainability is more likely to invest in eco-friendly initiatives today. This principle reminds us that focusing on a positive and hopeful future allows us to align our actions with our highest aspirations.

This is where having a strong strategic narrative which gives employees clarity of the purpose and future plans of an organisation is critical – that is one of the four pillars of employee engagement in the Engage for Success model that we use in our Better Workplace Projects.

5. The Positive Principle

The Positive Principle reinforces the power of positivity in driving change. Positive emotions and experiences inspire individuals to engage more fully and be more open to new ideas and possibilities. When people feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to contribute creatively and work toward a shared vision.

Research shows that positive emotions lead to increased motivation, stronger relationships, and enhanced problem-solving abilities. Therefore, focusing on strengths and successes rather than problems and deficits creates an environment where people can thrive.

And that is the core ethos of PosWork – making better workplaces by applying g positive psychology so that people and businesses flourish by design.   

Applying Appreciative Inquiry in Practice

Now that we’ve covered the principles, let’s explore how Appreciative Inquiry can be applied in real-world settings. AI is often implemented through a process called the “4-D Cycle,” which includes the following stages:

1. Discovery: Identify what works well within the organization or system by asking questions focused on strengths and successes.
2. Dream: Envision the future by imagining what the organization would look like if it fully embodied its strengths.
3. Design: Plan how to achieve the envisioned future by leveraging existing resources and capabilities.
4. Destiny: Implement the plan and empower individuals and teams to bring the vision to life.

Whether used for organizational change, community building, or personal growth, Appreciative Inquiry encourages positive thinking, collaboration, and sustainable progress. By applying the core principles, leaders can create environments where people feel motivated and inspired to achieve their best.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to inspire growth and development in your personal or professional life, consider embracing the principles of Appreciative Inquiry and start focusing on what’s already working to unlock your full potential.

If you would like to explore how we can help you to implement Better Change using Appreciative Inquiry I your organisation, please call us on 0438 533 311 or email info@poswork.com.au.

The wonderful team at the Michelle McQuaid Group has done an update for the PERMAH workplace wellbeing survey adding a suite of questions specifically addressing the 14 psychosocial hazards in Safe Work Australia’s “Model code for the management of psychosocial hazards at work”. That means that you can address your positive duties to assess risks and consult your people while giving your business and your people a great platform for improving wellbeing at individual, team and organisational levels.

About PERMAH 

In his celebrated book “Flourish”, Professor Martin Seligman, a world leader in the field of positive psychology and wellbeing theory, set out the PERMA model for wellbeing as “a practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier”. Other positive psychologists subsequently added an “H” for “Health” to his model with his endorsement.

The 6 pillars of wellbeing in PERMAH (as described by Dr Michelle McQuaid in the context of  workplace wellbeing) are:

POSITIVE EMOTIONS: such as joy and hope have been found to have a significant effect on our wellbeing. Researchers suggest that experiencing positive emotions broadens your outlook, helps you to build creativity and resourcefulness and to be more resilient and successful.

ENGAGEMENT: being able to use and develop your strengths at work – those things you are good at and enjoy doing – has been found to boost your confidence, engagement and energy at work.

RELATIONSHIPS: creating genuine connection with others at work can give you satisfaction and enrichment. Researchers suggest that it can also lower your levels of stress, improve your concentration and help advance your career.

MEANING: understanding how what you do at work makes a positive difference to others has been found to increase your wellbeing motivation, commitment and sense of satisfaction at work.

ACCOMPLISHMENT: cultivating grit has been found to give you the determination to pursue your goals and having a “growth mindset” can help you learn and grow from setbacks and challenges to achieve your true potential.

HEALTH: staying healthy by eating well, moving regularly and sleeping deeply has been found to build a solid foundation for your wellbeing.

Source: https://www.michellemcquaid.com/ 

PERMAH and psychosocial hazards

One of the central tenets of Professor Seligman’s work is the recognition that we all have our struggles in life but that doesn’t mean that we cannot flourish. If we work on our wellbeing with a positive mindset, we can equip ourselves to deal with our struggles more proactively and productively.

The positive duty that is being imposed through State and Territory legislation on Australian workplaces is also requiring “Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking” to be proactive in conducting risk assessments and putting in place appropriate measures to eliminate or mitigate/control any risks arising from psychosocial hazards. 

As noted in the preamble, part of the positive duty is also to consult your people about psychosocial hazards.

There are  clear links between the psychology underpinning PERMAH and the positive duty as well as between  the content of the PERMAH pillars and the prescribed psychosocial hazards.

The addition of the suite of survey questions on the psychosocial hazards just adds to the relevance and effectiveness of the PERMAH survey as a tool for measuring wellbeing and workplace risk and building cost effective risk controls based on real data provided by your own workforce.

The other bonus with the PERMAH workplace wellbeing survey is that every employee who does the survey gets their own personal report on where they sit against the 6 PERMAH pillars, a template for putting together their own personal wellbeing plan and access to a stack of resources that they can use to explore and improve their personal wellbeing. 

So there are lots of reasons why we use and recommend the PERMAH workplace wellbeing survey with the psychosocial panel add-on as a great place to start the process of meeting your positive duty to eliminate or control psychosocial hazards in your workplace.

PosWork Practice leader Peter Maguire is accredited to debrief on the PERMAH Workplace Wellbeing Survey with the Psychosocial Panel add-on. If you would like to learn more about how we might be able to assist you in the areas of workplace wellbeing and management of psychosocial hazards, please call us on 0438 533 311 or email info@poswork.com.au.

Want to know more about how we can help you to find your WHY? Call us on 0438 533 311 or email info@poswork.com.au.

Want to know more about how you can use Appreciative Inquiry to run better change management programs? Call us on 0438 533 311 or email info@poswork.com.au.