Growth Mindset in Business Management

Introduction

The economy relies on the creation of jobs by different people and organizations leading to the development of businesses, companies and organizations that generate income on various levels and keep the economy running. The economy is significant in many ways for individuals including determination of the general standards of living as well as impacting power and social status. As such, successful business creators, Job owners and company managers all have a common factor in their innovative and creative thinking that stirs their businesses and companies to eventual success. In being able to be a successful manger however, one must be effective at work being able to properly manage the companies various departments, overseeing the status of different departments within the organization and how they can be progressively improved overtime to impact the company’s growth and development. As such managers need to be reflective professional practitioners, constantly evaluating every occurrence within their company and developing ways of impacting their development in terms of effectiveness and efficiency overtime to minimize any costs and maximize all profits. In this way they can effectively develop a growth mindset rather than a fixed one significantly impacting planning, strategizing and decision making processes. What do I mean however by managers being reflective professional practitioners and having a growth mindset?

Part 1

Reflective Professional Practice

Reflective practice in its simplest form refers to the ability of an individual to reflect on his/her own actions so as to engage in the process of continuous learning which results to growth (Crawford, Morris, Thomas and winter, 2006). Moon (2001) on the other hand highlights that reflective practice is an active, dynamic, action based and ethical set of skills, placed in real time and dealing with real, complex and difficult situations. In professional terms as such, reflective practice highlights the ability of an individual including employees and managers to be able to evaluate and critic their own actions in line with their intended goals and objectives, and learn from the success and failures impacting growth. Reflective practice enables mangers to be able to effectively evaluate and critic the performance of the company including all the departments individually and in totality with relations to their specific individual department goals as well as the overall organization or companies goals and objectives. As such managers need to be reflective professional practitioners in order to be effective at work

Bussinessballs (2019) highlight that reflective professional practice involves activities in which managers and leaders use their own self awareness, behaviors and interactions as a source of learning. Being the vision bearers of the company, the managers are responsible for understanding the position of the company or organization they lead at all times and charting out a path for the future accomplishment of objectives with lessons learnt from the past. To do this, often managers engage different leadership styles that are effective for enhancing their reflective practice. While some may develop effective organization culture to work in their advantage, some may develop frameworks of maintaining constant awareness of the company’s development through frequent and scheduled reports. Regardless Crawford et al. (2006) highlights that through an effective development of a reflective practice managers develop the capacity of using challenges, failures and success alike as learning opportunities and subsequently building stronger alliances and effective development paths for the company impacting its eventual success. A wide range of professional reflective practice models have been developed overtime by scholars including Borton 1970, Kolb and Fry 1975, Gibbs 1988, Johns 1995 and Brookfield 1998 (La Trobe University, 2019). While all these models are effective for reflective practice and can be applied by anyone including students, professionals and basically anyone in reflection upon anything depending with their preference, I will use two of the models to illustrate the process and importance of reflective professional practice for managers. These include the simplest model the Borton 1970, and the most acceptable model Gibbs 1988.

Borton 1970 Model

Terry Borton proposed the model in 1970 as a simple learning cycle that was inspired by Gestalt therapy and is composed of three steps/questions impacting the analysis of a situation and highlighting inferences thereby effecting growth. According to La Trobe University (2019) the three processes include the answering of three questions, what? So What? and what next? Basically, the first step what? Highlights a situation or experience or in our management case, an activity of undertaking within the company, the second step, So what? Highlights an analysis of the activity including resources used, impacts of the activity, whether or not the intended purpose was achieved and how better the sums purpose can be achieved through a potentially improved process and all other necessary aspects. What next there after highlights what can be done to further optimize the activity or endeavor for the eventual improvement, profitability and eventual success of the company.

Terry Borton’s reflective model (1970)

Business balls (2019) emphasizes that through use of Borton 1970 model in the analysis, a description of a situation is given which then leads into the scrutiny of the situation and the construction of knowledge that has been learnt through the experience. Managers and other professional practitioners can as such reflect on ways of making their organizations and companies more successful.

Gibbs 1988 Reflective Model

Gibbs 1988 reflective practice model was developed in 1988 by learning researcher Graham Gibbs as a form of structured debriefing process to facilitate reflection. According to Gibbs (1988) the model consists of six key stages including: Description of Action, expression of feelings with regards to the action, Evaluation, Analysis, conclusion as well as formulation of an action plan.

Source Gibbs (1988)

According to the Gibbs 1988 model Managers in different organizations and companies could develop reflective practices that involve debriefing themselves and others whose opinions they deem significant through following the six steps. Description of various activities and endeavors of the company could include a general recap of a day’s activities or a critical description of decisions and factors contributing to a major company occurrence. Afterwards the manager reflects on their own feelings with regards to these occurrences after which they can then rationally evaluate the occurrences through highlighting the positive and negative aspects of the activity. These are then analyzed with the intended eventual goals and decisions highlighting whether they were achieved or not and what could be the reasons towards their achievement and lack of achievement. This analysis enables the manager to highlight various aspects of things that could be done differently to improve outcome or success and then developing a plan for undertaking them more efficiently.

Growth Mindset

While using any of these models can effectively enable the development of skills of reflective professional practices by managers thereby enabling them to maintain a constant awareness of the company’s progress and process towards the achievement of their set goals and objectives, being a reflective practitioner is merely not enough to impact success in the company and does not necessarily make managers effective at work and in doing their jobs. Businessballs (2019) point out four best practice guidelines within reflective practice for impacting high performance of the company and overall congruency to include: Developing personal skills for reflection and objective review and effective feedback, engaging in unbiased third party feedback from co managers of supervisors within the company, development of an evolving framework for management of customer, organization and employees needs effectively and most importantly placing a high value on learning and developing solutions. This highlight the most effective aspect of reflective professional practice to include being able to learn from the various experiences and develop unique solutions for various problems which require a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. According to Dweck (2016) a growth mindset considers that intelligence can be developed, this leads to the desire to learn from various experiences overtime so as to effectively develop intelligence for effective performance. This is opposed to a fixed mindset that perceives intelligence as static and as such leads to the desire to look smart rather than learn new knowledge. Managers with a fixed mindset often think of themselves as the most intelligent and as such have no desire to learn but rather look smart, the lack of desire to learn impacts lesser reflective practices which leads to the development of tendencies such as avoiding challenges, giving up on obstacles and avoiding negative constructive criticism. This leads to them seeing effort as fruitless and feeling threatened by the success of others (Popova,2017 ) on the other hand managers with a growth mindset can be able to effectively maximize on the reflective professional practice given their already predisposed desire to embrace challenges, persist in the face of obstacles, learn from criticism, failures and challenges, see effort as the path to mastery and find lessons and inspiration in the success of other companies (Dweck, 2016). As such managers not only need to be reflective professional practitioners in order to be effective at work they also need to have a growth mindset so as t effectively be efficient in carrying out their duties for the eventual success of the company or organization

Implications

Eventually, only a significantly smaller number of organizations and companies ever actually achieve their desired goals and objectives successful while also gaining profitability and financial success overtime. Dweck (2007) points out that as a result of a fixed mind and lack of effective reflective professional practice most managers often plateau early and fail to achieve their full potential. As such in my working experience to avoid such implications and failure to succeed: maintaining a growth mindset that is willing and ready to learn is at the core of my objectives of management. Frequent reflective practices, not only for me but also my employees as a means of updating and keeping them in check with the company and organizations objectives and goals also include some of the strategies I have adopted and intend to continue adopting for increased levels of learning and growth not only for me but for the whole company personnel. Eventually evaluating performance with regards to the intended goals and objectives as guided by the companies mission and vision statement should be inculcated within the organization culture to further foster the desire and need for growth among the personnel significantly propelling the company to success.

Part 2

Management competencies

Over the course of my internship and learning, I have developed several management competencies for which I apply on my own management practices. Critically for starters, I value learning and growth within any organization and department I am in charge of and as such self growth and development involve among the major competencies that I focus on to enable effective success. In being able to facilitate my reflective professional practice at work, among the competencies I have invested in includes effective communication, effective self growth and development, effective team building, delegation and problem solving all these include among the top competencies for successful managers according to a wide range of scholars including: (Cripe, 2002; SHRM, 2008; Lotich 2019 and Training Magazine, 2014)

Communication (10/10)

Communication is among the major competencies and highlights my major strength in management. Not only does effective communication ensure all individuals within the department or organization are well informed, it also enables an effective reflection process for all the personnel as well as the group reflection process which enables collective thinking, innovation and creativity enabling growth within the company. For example effective communication on and off duty makes the debriefing of the personnel significantly easier and easers tension between department members thereby making the collective reflection process after major undertakings much easier. This also impacts effective team building which highlights another of my competencies

Effective Team Building (8/10)

Effective team building comes along with numerous benefits including increased cohesion of the team and personnel thereby impacting better communication and feedback between personnel and management all of which significantly contribute towards my reflective practices that impact eventual company and organization growth. Team building allows every personnel the chance to understand one another and for me as their leader to significantly understand them including their motivation and strengths thereby enabling better and more effective delegation processes.

Delegation (5/10)

Despite delegation being one of my competencies and my efforts to effectively learn about various employees and therefore impact my delegation process, I haven’t yet been able to develop an effective delegation strategy to allow maximization of the personnel potential. This represents one of the areas for development to further enable effective performance of my team and success.

Effective Self Growth and development (8/10)

The debriefing of all personnel in the reflective practice not only impact the development of feedback and information regarding the company’s progress that enables me to further chart a way forward towards success in my management endeavourers, it also impacts the personal reflection of every employee on their respective actions and tasks towards the achievement of the companies goals and objectives which significantly impacts their own self growth and further development of their personal careers. This impacts another of my strength and often makes the problem solving process much easier highlighting another of my major competencies as a manager.

Problem Solving (7.5/10)

Problem solving is ultimately the major purpose of management and leadership which subsequently leads to growth. Given my effective competencies in communication and team building as well as the laid out framework for effective self growth and development in reflective debriefing of all the personnel, the cohesion between the team in terms of work related issues is significantly enhanced. This impact the process of collective problem solving within a group professional reflection practice scheduled regularly thereby elevating chances of successful strategy development.

References

Crawford, L., Morris, P., Thomas, J. and Winter, M. (2006). Practitioner development: From trained technicians to reflective practitioners. International Journal of Project Management, 24(8), pp.722-733.

Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. London: Further Education Unit.

Moon J. (1999). Reflection in learning and professional development theory and practice, Kogan Page, London