After writing an e-book titled Six Elements of Leadership Mindset with my colleague Terri Schell earlier this year, I gave a couple of presentations on the topic of leadership mindset—one for Training Industry’s Leader Talk series on Modern Leadership Development and another for HRCI’s Alchemizing HR (I was the second HRCI speaker, so my presentation starts at 1 hour, 3 minutes) webinar series.
In these presentations, I made the case that mindset can make or break leaders. Your leadership mindset describes your attitudes, beliefs, and expectations that serve as the foundation of who you are, how you lead, and how you interact with others. Your leadership mindset shapes how you see, interpret, and react to situations in the workplace. As the product of your values, preferences, experiences, and environment, leadership mindset is deeply personal. It can shift and evolve based on where you are in your workplace and career and the business context around you.
Leadership mindset impacts every aspect of how you show up—and how you succeed or fail—at work.
Yet despite the incredibly high degree of influence that mindset has on a leader’s ability to thrive, we end up spending much more time and money developing leadership skills than leadership mindset.
I believe this needs to change.
As we begin to contemplate the approach of 2022, it’s hard not to feel daunted. As leaders, we are facing a myriad of workplace and organizational culture challenges. Dispersed teams and hybrid work will continue to impede our ability to effectively communicate and collaborate. The stress caused by COVID and the resulting burnout have exacerbated the talent shortage and our ability to retain our best employees. Worker demands for flexibility are pushing us to reexamine outdated policies and challenging us to address work-life alignment issues.
Burnout is at an all-time high (check out this Indeed study), and well-being is at the top of the wish list for many employees this year.
As leaders, we have a choice. We can put our head in the sand and pretend that these seismic shifts aren’t impacting our team or our organization. Or we can face these challenges with a leadership mindset and all the superpowers that come with it. Our comprehensive research identified that successful leaders have adopted these six leadership mindsets:
- Growth Orientation
- Resiliency
- Drive
- A Focus on the Future
- Accountability
- Inclusiveness
Over the next few weeks, I challenge you to spend some contemplative time and energy developing your leadership mindset for 2022. Research shows that having a healthy mindset directly impacts our stress level and ultimately our health and wellness.
And consider how you plan to develop the mindset of your organization’s leaders over the next year. To support you in this endeavor, I am providing this complimentary e-Book, which describes each mindset and provides coaching questions and an action planning worksheet to help you build new awareness and insights. It could make all the difference in how you respond to the challenges ahead.
