At a Q&A session of a keynote speech, a participant once asked me what matters more for a career: skill or mindset. While we surely need both, I believe mindset is more important than skill when it comes to long-term success. Sure, skill matters, but only so much. Over the long run, people with the right mindset can outperform those who started with better skills.
For example, when players under the radar suddenly win championships and trophies. Overnight success usually comes from years in the making. In business as well, mindset beats skill. If you have skill but lack perspective, chances are you will not turn your dreams into a reality.
Four mindsets shift the tide
Mindset is more than having belief in oneself, which is a prerequisite. The four distinct mindset shifts paramount for success are the joy of missing out or JOMO, speed, abundance, and growth. These four mindsets will help you foster collaboration and commitment to building toward success.
FOMO, the fear of missing out, drives us into spending our most valuable asset—our attention—on things that don’t matter. The antidote to FOMO is JOMO—the joy of missing out. Defining priorities helps us make the decisions that matter. Knowing where not to spend your time is extremely liberating. It frees us from the urge to follow other people’s expectations or strategies. Instead, we create our own paths and success stories.
Speed is a mindset opposite to that of perfectionism. A question I often get is ‘How long does it take to design a perfect strategy’? Well, I don’t know, because I never did. We can tweak a strategy forever, seemingly improving it further before saying it’s ready. What we are doing is standing in the way of implementation, learning, and success. We want to look for good enough, not for perfect. Keeping an open attitude to adjust course while we are implementing will yield more significant results than refining a strategy to the illusion of perfection but failing to deploy it.
How abundance and growth outperform smart cookies
Why think in scarcity mode when we can think in abundance? Abundance is about recognizing opportunities and exploring possibilities. It’s about curiosity and daring to dream. An abundant mind will bring about new perspectives, thoughts, and discussions that we may never have had before, which is crucial for breaking the mold and finding new ways to create value. While JOMO helps us say no to a lot of things, an abundance mindset keeps us open-minded so that we don’t say no prematurely.
Designing a strategy using a growth mindset is superior to that of a fixed mindset. Instead of thinking in absolutes, we think based on a desire to learn. A growth mindset allows us to find new ways of doing things. If we can internalize growth, we’ll be able to take different paths, and learn additional skills. We ask the right questions, such as “What am I missing?” or “How could I use this negative experience and turn it into something positive?”
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Build confident humility and a challenge network
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant describes two concepts that help bring these four mindsets to life: challenge networks and confident humility. A challenge network is a team around us that consists of people who can disagree agreeably, giving brutally honest feedback without being personal or aggressive. The purpose of a challenge network is to question assumptions, overcome blind spots, and counterbalance potential weaknesses in our thinking. Go for speed in execution and learning and use your challenge network to adjust direction.
Confident humility is “having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem. That gives us enough doubt to re-examine our old knowledge and enough confidence to pursue new insights.” The sweet spot of confidence is when we believe in ourselves and simultaneously doubt that we have all the right tools in place.
Is your team the issue, or is it you?
Adopting these mindsets throughout a business requires consciousness and commitment. Think about your team for a moment: how trustful is the collaboration among the team members? Are team meetings draining, or are you leaving them energized? Are they a waste of time, or do they motivate you? Is the collaboration characterized by mutual trust, or are discussions more about who is right or wrong, or fighting about resources? Do you hold healthy, productive conflict in your challenge network, or are you stubbornly blind to rethinking your ways? Are you caught up in relationship conflicts, or focused on solving a task?
Quarreling teams can hardly design powerful strategy. Dysfunctional teams usually consist of unconscious leaders, at least partly. Conscious leaders don’t engage in negative conflict, stay silent when they should speak up, or avoid accountability. Conscious leadership is an enabler of success. Without consciousness, teams cannot dig deep enough, and strategy will invariably fail to deliver the expected results. If we don’t search deep enough, the resulting strategy can easily be debunked as a superficial construct.
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Check whether you’re above or below the line
Imagine consciousness as a state of mind that puts us either above or below an imaginary line. Above the line, we appear open, curious, and committed to learning. It is where we ask questions unarguably and listen deeply. As a result, we foster creativity, innovation, connection, and collaboration. Below the line, we are defensive, closed, and want to be right.
There is no way we can create strategy and identity below the line. By contrast, functioning teams—invariably consisting of more conscious leaders—take strategy by storm. Therefore, before you even think about engaging a team in a strategy process, assess how functioning the team is and how conscious everyone is.
We often misjudge how dysfunctional teams really are. Far too often, I have nudged executives to address dysfunctional behavior among their team members early in the process, just to see them ignore the issue. Their reactions ranged from “I can’t see any issue” to “Everything will be fine in the end.” Trust me, it won’t—especially not if the unconscious mind of the leader is the issue.
Alex Brueckmann is author of “The Strategy Legacy: How to Future-Proof a Business and Leave Your Mark.”
