Great Business Performance Starts With The Right Mindset
The following is adapted from Thrive by Andrew Freedman and Paul Elliott, PhD.
Part of the impetus in starting our management consulting firm SHIFT was our fascination with human performance.
Specifically, we wanted to understand and help employers harness the power of why some people could achieve and sustain high levels of performance, while others’ performance rose and fell.
We began by focusing on sales organizations because their performance often had the most visible and significant impact on overall business performance.
In our studies, we found that, while business results and processes were very important elements in establishing solid performance, those two factors alone did not produce high levels of output on a consistent basis. Something was missing.
Across industries, we saw the majority of businesses focus relentlessly on process and results, only to flounder because something was missing. Over time, we came to realize that MINDSET was the missing piece of the puzzle.
Before businesses can focus on “how” and “what” (process and results), they need to start with their “why.” In other words, your mindset affects how you implement and apply your processes, which in turn affects your results.
Creating Sustainable Results
When your mindset is negative or coming from a place of what is lacking, your results won’t last.
Let’s take a look at an example with which we all can identify: New Year’s resolutions. Every year, one of the most common resolutions (or desired results) is to “lose weight.”
Individuals who aspire to lose weight can leverage various processes to attain that outcome. Regardless of the chosen processes, people don’t usually stick with weight-loss resolutions. They gain and lose weight repeatedly. Weight is like finance in an unhealthy way: when you gain it back, it usually comes with interest (in this case, that’s a bad thing!), and there’s a reason why all of this happens.
Focusing only on results and processes is not a long-term solution — results may be attained, but they aren’t sustainable. Even many of the winners on shows like The Biggest Loser regain the weight they’ve lost. The difficulty sustaining change has been proven time and again, whether the goal is weight loss, quitting smoking, or implementing new ways of driving sales and operational processes.
The missing element is MINDSET.
By far, the people who are able to lose weight and keep the weight off are the ones who have a long-term, sustainable mindset regarding their health. Not only do they understand why certain foods are healthy or unhealthy, and why their workouts are important, but also, and more importantly, they have a deeply-rooted understanding of why losing the weight is absolutely not negotiable for them. They have a clear purpose in their quest.
The approach to creating a vision, goals, strategies and tactics to achieve sustained business success is the same as with losing weight. If you can find your “why” before you begin, your initiatives and business performance will have incredible staying power.
Empowering (And Disempowering) Beliefs
Now that you know mindset is important, how do you begin to shape it?
Mindset is shaped by beliefs, and beliefs stem from two things: past experience and future choice.
Past experiences can be useful in a productive way, or can create unhealthy barriers to success. People tend to believe something to be true because they have had experience with it before. For example, someone who has tried and failed at exercise in the past may believe that she will not be successful in the future. In this case, when she decides to try again, she will join a club or purchase equipment that is less expensive, so that when she fails again (and she believes she will), at least it won’t also come with great financial consequence. This disempowering, or “fixed”, way of thinking and behaving becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. .
A more empowering belief, or a “growth mindset,” would be to choose a different future for yourself: “I’m going to succeed at exercising this time because I want to be alive to see my kids get married and have their own children.This is a non-negotiable priority for me, so I’m going to make choices in my life that increase the likelihood of my success.”
Case Study: A Confident Salesman
One example of an empowering belief in action comes from one client’s salesperson we met who had never done sales in his current industry. He had no experience that indicated he would or could thrive in his role. Even so, during his interview, he told the hiring manager that he was going to be their number one salesperson.
He got the job and aligned his beliefs and behaviors to that of a high-performing salesperson: he studied other high-performing salespeople, adopted some of their good habits, asked customers what they valued in the relationships with those sales professionals, and read many of the same trade publications the top performers were reading. Ultimately, he became a successful member of the team.
This example we mentioned above perfectly illustrates the path that mindset can take you down: the employee chose to adopt an empowering belief that led to a positive mindset; from this mindset, he created a process that brought results. He took ownership of developing the skills and knowledge needed to build his capacity and draw job fit influences to increase his likelihood of success.
Ultimately, the mindset you choose enables you to create your process, which gets you to the results you envisioned, creating a winning equation.
For more advice on business transformation, you can find Thrive on Amazon.
Andrew Freedman is a lifelong advocate for maximizing human potential and creating positive change, personally and professionally. For over 25 years, he’s been a driving force in designing strategies that provide leaders a foundation to translate individual, team, and organizational talent into tangible business growth. As Managing Partner of SHIFT Consulting, he’s helped countless companies across diverse industries flourish through vibrant company cultures and a high performance mindset. Additionally, through his work as an affiliate faculty member of the University of Baltimore, Andrew’s continued goal is to use his insatiable passion for human performance to inspire new generations of business leaders with the art and science of creating and executing successful, people-focused business strategies.
Paul is President, Founder, and Chief Performance Architect at Exemplary Performance LLC. Designing high-performance work systems is Paul’s passion. Working across sectors (financial services, high technology, telecommunications, etc.) and functions (sales, product development, customer service, operations, management, etc.), Paul leverages his experience with Fortune 500 organizations to help clients achieve exceptional results by optimizing the performance of teams and individuals.
