There’s a huge amount of power in the individual mindset. It can cripple a person’s performance and life experience. It can carry you through the hardest of times. It can bring goal achievement within reach or leave dreams always beyond your grasp. It’s an incredibly potent thing. But it can be incredibly difficult to manage, and typically, mindset is viewed as something way beyond an employer’s responsibility—a personal issue your boss has no business intruding in. So, why is mindset manager the must-have corporate role for 2023?
Understanding the Power of Mindset in Business
At its basic level, mindset refers to the beliefs and attitudes people carry—how they view challenges, confront failures, and deal with criticism and whether they’re content with the status quo or actively seeking betterment, all of which can directly influence workplace performance. The difficulty is that without external intervention, most of us don’t even recognize that we carry mindset barriers and limiting beliefs. This matters in a corporate setting because if limited by mindset, even our very best performers will never achieve what they’re truly capable of, both personally and professionally.
With a change in mindset can come renewed engagement, resilience, passion, enjoyment, and positivity at an individual level. When you work on a team level, the results can be transformative for an entire business. Where positivity and the “can do” is held from the sales floor to the board, a business is empowered to find growth regardless of the obstacles it encounters.
The Rise of the Mindset Manager
And that’s why the introduction of the mindset manager is so vital for contemporary business. Tasked with supporting employees at all levels of a business to identify mindset blocks to productivity, personal development, or other issues, the mindset manager can guide individuals and teams toward finding workable solutions to help them be their best. And there are several approaches they can use to achieve this.
Build Employee Engagement
A lot hangs on employee engagement—productivity, loyalty, churn, and all the attendant costs. If team members can’t find any real interest in their work and have no overarching sense of personal value within the team, it can be hard for them to invest in their daily duties. Engagement plummets, and mindset follows suit.
Companies that invest in employee engagement inevitably see better results, and this can be managed in a variety of ways. Build a culture of open communication in which every employee has a voice and will be listened to, and ensure personal development opportunities are available to anyone who wants them.
Supporting Mental Well-Being
No one can be their best if they have to focus on fighting their demons. 14.7% of workers experience mental health problems in the workplace. Businesses that take steps to support employee emotional well-being, whether through access to counseling, mindfulness, physical fitness, or the provision of mindfulness apps, are already on their way to building a positive employee mindset.
Mindset Coaching
A relatively new discipline, mindset coaching can work on an individual or a team level, supporting employees as they seek to identify and overcome barriers. By demonstrating that your mindset can be changed—that you have control and that you don’t have to be a hostage to your own mental obstacles—you can provide the greatest gift to your employees and your business.
What Advantages Can Mindset Management Bring to a Business and its Employees?
Mindset change can work individually and collectively. As such, it can impact a business in a variety of ways.
Stress: Seventy-six percent of U.K. employees report moderate to high or high levels of stress. While some stress can be motivational, too much can be detrimental to both physical and emotional health. With the right mindset, the difficulties that often produce stress can be turned into challenges or even something that can be almost fun to overcome, removing the fear from the situation.
Resilience: Employee resilience has been a point of focus for businesses since the global talent shortage began. Mindset change can promote employee resilience, changing the way negativity is handled, enabling criticism to be viewed constructively, and empowering individuals to aim high.
Happiness: If you show someone how to deal with stress, how to use criticism constructively, and how to better manage their mental well-being and enjoy mindfulness, they’ll become happier and feel like they have more control over their life and work, which makes everything feel so much more rewarding.
Productivity: When a team is happy, stress-free, and resilient, they will automatically become more productive because they will have the emotional tools to problem-solve and handle the situations they are presented with.
Mindset management could easily be perceived as another PR ploy or something to demonstrate a business’s softer side. But when something delivers such tangible, measurable results, it’s unwise to ignore it. And a mindset manager could change your business for the better.
Lisa Collinson is Chief People Officer and U.K. Country Manager for TheNextWe. With a background in HR strategy development, implementation, and measurement, Collinson has more than 22 years’ experience in people leadership. An accredited coach and a popular speaker and presenter, she has worked across sectors throughout the United Kingdom and Europe and internationally, supporting businesses with change management, restructuring, and performance management, with an emphasis on behaviorism and why people act the way they do. Collinson is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, a member of the Institute of Training & Occupational Learning (MInstTOL), Applied Behavior Analysis-trained, an APMG Change Management Practitioner, and a member of the Institute of Leadership & Management (MInstLM).