Making Success Contagious
Making success contagious should be one of the core goals of not just business leaders but every parent, friend, family or team member. It is the fuel we can give each other to foster creativity, learning, productivity, a sense of belonging and ultimately, our happiness. This article will outline a few fundamental principles (but by no means all of them) to get you thinking – and some of them you may already be doing daily.
Tune your mindset
Before doing anything else, we need to be aware of our own beliefs and behaviours. If we want to help people around us be successful, we’ve got to lay a foundation for growth anchored in our own attitudes and actions by adopting a growth mindset. If you are anything like me, chances are you will have added the term ‘growth mindset’ to your CV or LinkedIn profile. We like to show others and, more importantly, convince ourselves that we are about growth, achievement and moving forward. Who wants to be labelled with a fixed mindset? I sure didn’t!
My take on the growth mindset was very straightforward: set the bar high, work as hard as you can, and establish whether you hit your target. If not, go again, if yes, set the bar higher and start over. Easy. And If you want real growth, be ambitious and set the bar even higher from the outset. Done!
“Don’t confuse the performance mindset with the growth mindset. You risk focusing on becoming very efficient at the expense of learning new ways”
Well, not quite. In reality, that’s not an actual growth mindset but more a performance mindset fuelled by high tenacity – and mine was more fixed than I wanted to admit; I wanted recognition through achievement. There’s nothing wrong with a performance mindset. However, you risk focusing on becoming very efficient at what you do at the expense of learning new ways to become more effective. An always-on performance mindset can also be really exhaustive both for yourself and the people around you.
Sounds familiar?
I’m not saying don’t have aspirational ambitions; in fact, courageous goal setting can be very powerful (more about this later) – but your mindset will shape your ambition and determine the actions you take to achieve it.
The concept of growth and fixed mindsets was developed by Carole Dweck, a famous Stanford psychologist.
In short, a mindset is a set of beliefs. In a fixed mindset, we believe that our talents and intelligence are set whereas in a growth mindset, we believe we can improve our talent and intelligence through practice (Dweck, 2006)
Here’s the good news: Neuroscience has proven that our brain is equipped to acquire and apply new knowledge throughout life - if we chose to do so. The process is similar to going to the gym and exercising our body to improve our fitness and muscle strength. When we learn, our brain generates neurons which again produce new connections in our nervous system. Our brain is constantly creating and updating these connections with a great ability to produce changes. This is known as neuroplasticity (Passmore and Leach, 2022). In other words, ‘old dogs can learn new tricks’ (Passmore and Leach 2022:219)
On the flip side, we don’t always stay in a growth or fixed mindset. The situation we find ourselves in will trigger us and influence our behaviours and feelings. Becoming aware of how we feel, behave and think in a situation is critical to understand, and later change, our belief system.
“We are not always in a growth or fixed mindset. Situations will trigger how we behave and feel. Try logging your thoughts to see what mindset you are in when”
If you want to learn more about what triggers your mindset, try keeping a simple diary or log of situations where you notice yourself in either a growth or fixed mindset. Describe the situation, note your behaviour, and capture how you feel. Now give yourself a score from 1-10, 10 being a growth mindset and 1 a fixed mindset. If you do this daily over the course of 7 to 10 days, you will begin to recognise situations where you are perhaps not in a growth mindset, YET. This allows you to plan ahead and start conducting experiments to practice adopting a growth mindset more often.
Set Courageous Goals
I’ve known for a long time the concept of the comfort zone and the stretch zone - where growth happens. Now, really stepping into the stretch zone was a different story. I’ve always been a fan of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic, Timed). In many contexts SMART goals are… well smart – and for sure they move you to action, which is the important bit. I’m not telling you to ditch them (especially when doing your budgets). However, SMART goals are left brain oriented, and more importantly, there’s a good chance that they may keep you more in the comfort zone than you realise, playing it safe. That has been the case for me. I made my SMART goals on bets that I knew how to achieve (sounds pretty fixed mindset right?).
“SMART goals may keep you in your comfort zone more than you think. Try creating Courageous Goals to move into your stretch zone”
To move into the stretch zone, requires us to connect with the right side of our brain, and create emotional or courageous goals. Courageous goals differ from SMART goals in that they generate excitement, fear or imagination, and require courage to get there. Courageous goals are characterised by feeling impossible at first, frightening and transformative (Blakey & Day, 2012). They are aspirational to us and we don’t know exactly how to get there YET – but they matter. For example, J.F Kennedy aspiring to put a man on the moon, or Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ calling for an end to racism, inspiring equal rights movements to this day. These are two very powerful, courageous goals. Once you have created your courageous goal, create accountability by sharing it, but more importantly start moving in the direction of your goal. In the words of Lao Tzu: ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step’.
The only real problem in life is what to do next (Arthur C. Clarke), so breaking your journey down into your very next step will give you the focus and excitement to move into the stretch zone and experiment! The most important thing is to accept that it’s not always going to pan out the way you expect – and that this can be just as exciting. If you are in an organisation or part of a team, set that expectation up front with your manager and peers. It provides the reassurance and safety needed to try out new ways. When we operate in a low anxiety, high trust environment, our brains produce more neurons and learn faster (Bossons et al, 2015)!
Make it contagious
Humans are built to connect and our social connectivity is considered to be one of the major drivers of our cultural evolution (Belfer-Cohen and Covers, 2020). We believe that when we give opportunities to people around us, we all grow.
A key component for our connections is the ability to engage in reciprocal exchange, in particular with others who are not close relatives. It is one of the main qualities that sets us apart from non-human animals. Most animals direct altruistic efforts towards genetic relatives, whilst certain hunting primates such as lions may cooperate through a mutual expectation of instant gratification, from catching and sharing prey together (Rilling and Sanfey, 2011). Humans have developed the ability to give first, with an expectation of delayed gratification, or as a contribution for the greater good. A key component to this according to Riling and Sanfey (2011) is our willingness to trust. It is important for leaders not only to build an environment of trust for teams, but to understand that our own actions are influenced by the trust we receive in return.
So, how do we build trust?
Zak (2017:6-8) identifies some easy to apply behaviours that stimulate oxytocin, a brain chemical which fuels social bonding and ultimately trust – and they work both ways:
1) Give recognition
Tangible, unexpected recognition has a significant influence on building trust. Make it authentic and real – and recognise the process over the outcome. Remember, it’s about facilitating a growth mindset, not a performance itself.
2) Induce challenge
Facing a stretching, but achievable, challenge produces oxytocin, fosters collaboration and sharpens our focus. With courageous goals in mind, it’s all about finding the right pace - ensuring the next step is not too big, or too small.
3) Provide autonomy:
If people know what to do, let them get on with it! Trusting people to figure things out for themselves creates trust. It’s as simple as that.
4) Share information transparently
The more information we openly share, the more we bring people around us on the inside. When we feel ill-informed, stress and uncertainty kicks in and undermines our sense of belonging.
5) Be vulnerable
Ask for help with challenges you don’t know how to solve YET. It builds trust and credibility. It also encourages the growth mindset and encourages others to step into their stretch zone too.
6) Facilitate whole person growth
When we invest time to understand the whole person and not just the context of the challenge, we facilitate engagement and bonding. Afterall, if we want success to become contagious, it’s about growing the people around us, not growing what they do.
The power of YET
You may have noticed frequent use of the word YET in this article. There is a powerful difference between “I failed to reach my goals” and “I’ve not reached my goals YET”. Any journey, big or small, will experience bumps in the road. It’s perfectly normal - and growth is a journey towards our goals. It’s ok that we are not YET in a growth mindset every day. We may not have defined our courageous goals YET, or started to move in their direction - and maybe we haven’t YET shown vulnerability to build trust. That’s fine. Making success contagious is a journey, not a destination.
References
Belfer-Cohen A and Hovers E (2020) Prehistoric Perspectives on “Others” and “Strangers”. Front. Psychol. 10:3063. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03063
Blakey, J and Day, I (2012). Challenging Coaching, Going beyond the traditional coaching to face the FACTS, London, Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Bossons, P, Riddell, P and Sartin, D (2015) The Neuroscience of Leadership Coaching, London, Bloomsbury Information
Dweck, C (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York, Random House
Passmore, J and Leach, S (eds) (2022). Third Wave Cognitive Behavioural Coaching, Shoreham By Sea, Pavilion Publishing & Media
Rilling, J.K. and Sanfey, A.G (2011). The Neuroscience of Social Decision-Making, Annual Review Psychol 2011.62:23-48. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131647
Zak, P.J. (2017) The Neuroscience of Trust. Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2017
