Enabling Growth Mindset For Continual Learning At Threshold Level

As the job market has drastically evolved, witnessed, and adopted the new ways of working, the importance of a growth mindset has come into an even clearer focus. Leaders are consciously making large-scale efforts acknowledging the fact that one's talent can be fuelled and can be consistently developed beyond hierarchies.

An essential element of the growth mindset is being willing and to be able to try, attempt, and fail. It sounds daunting which makes people hesitant to step into new things.

On a collective level, business leaders, HR managers, team supervisors are being trained and groomed to develop a mechanism that normalises, encourages, and motivates employees to learn and build on skills even under adverse circumstances. Companies and top-level leaders should focus on fostering and institutionalising a growth mindset across hierarchies. To scale the contribution to the business in employees' best capabilities, the company has to establish parameters in a concretised way i.e. process, cost, delivery, operations, safety, and morale (PCDOSM), experts pointed out.

One of the panellists recalled and emphasised an instance where Professor Klaus Schwab, Founding Director, World Economic Forum had been asked about the competencies that will be in high demand in the future, to which Klaus pointed-out growth mindset, problem-solving, design thinking, analytics as critical competencies.

Assess Capability Gaps To Synchronise Learning Design

Is there a dedicated process to assess capabilities? Of course, the answer is no. From an organisation's standpoint, various challenges arise and employees are expected to put forth effective solutions in order to grow. Constructive skills including organic ideating, critical thinking and problem solving are high-in-demand to be able to measure the learning requirements and also to map the impact on the business.

Sudhir Warier, Head L&D - JioFiber, Reliance Jio Infocomm concisely put forth his inputs stating a three-step approach to promote growth mindset during the virtual roundtable discussion organised by BW Businessworld in association with Harappa, moderated by session chair Ruhail Amin, Executive Editor, BW Businessworld. The three-step approach he mentioned was;

1.      To check the attitude, aptitude, and ambition of the candidate at the recruitment level

2.      A framework must offer room for employees to discover themselves and their entrepreneurial zeal

3.      To promote growth, companies must have a process of continual learning and peer learning

To perpetuate a continuum of learning, cognitive and behavioural skill-building, learning and development leaders are expected to adopt a bent of mind where they can build a transparent and encouraging ecosystem of learning. "Data analysis plays a highly critical role in taking the right education ultimately to be able to make potential talent capable of driving behavioural change internally and add to the business growth," asserts Sidharth Verma, Director Enterprise Partnerships, Harappa while discussing the rising significance of AI, machine learning, and other data-driven systems.

Allow Room For 'Mistakeability' In Learning Frameworks

"Recently, over the last 2 years I have observed that most of the progressive companies are enabling a healthy and collaborative environment which encourages employees, especially new hires to make mistakes and to be able to learn from them,” states Nilanjan Kar, Chief Revenue Officer, Harappa.

Harappa is founded by Pramath Sinha, a five-quarter newbie in the ed-tech space. It is a unique learning platform that offers high-impact programs that help drive transformative career success. These programs focus on highly personalised learning, at scale. Harappa's upskilling journeys foster must-have Thrive skills - an essential set of social, cognitive and behavioural skills to enable individuals to continuously succeed at every stage of their career. Key points from the presentation shared by CRO, Harappa in order to share some industry data points and revelations;

1. To get the training and learning, corporates are showing interest in the areas like catalysing change, fostering trust, learning agility, persuasive conversations and more
2. Linear learning models are fading, hence, organisations expect high power learning classes enabled through different mediums
3. Harappa offers a variety of learning covering topics like women leadership, building managerial excellence, developing a high-impact talent pool and much more

When asked about maintaining trust in the Phygital era, to which Harappa's Nilanjan Kar replied and said, "Leaders shall demonstrate and exhibit trust and relationship building and then everything shall work in a top-down approach."

Nurturing Competencies Leading To Creative Solutioning

HR leaders suggested manifesting a culture of 'learning on the go'. In the performance management system, keeping 75 per cent of key result areas (KRAs) for routine duties and the rest 25 per cent for special projects that are different from daily executions, helps in stimulating innovation and are an exclusive value additive to the business.

Acknowledging the observations presented by co-panellists and agreeing with the same, Arup Gupta, CHRO, Businesses at Reliance Infrastructure started pointing out the basic pillar of learning that is 'curiosity'. Additionally, Gupta said, "Curiosity is intrinsic and adding another 'C for Challenges' which are extrinsic, both create comprehensive opportunities to learn."

Emphasising empathy and becoming listeners to employees, Shobha Cecil, GM HR, Hamleys (Reliance Brands Limited) said, "We are coaching our managers, team and supervisors need to be transparent in communication and offer non-personalised feedback that can be highly value additive for employees' individual growth." Additionally, Hamleys Cecil mentions, "To be high potential, obviously one has to be high on performance scale but along with that one must have the agility to respond to the changes swiftly, must be mature and emotionally balanced and can perform under volatile circumstances."

A key responsibility of L&D leaders is to develop employees to support organisational growth. Investing in nurturing a growth mindset either on an individual level or from a collective organisational standpoint is of paramount importance to fulfil this responsibility. Experts refer to performance as readiness in functional expertise as well as willingness to demonstrate value additive actions, building on the potential to get to the next level.

Learning programs must meet the requirements and scope areas for team leaders and HR managers regarding generating collaboration and assimilating learning within teams. Analysing the behaviour of the top performers might help understand the areas of learning required to be able to bridge the existing skill gap. To fuel and tap opportunities that help develop a growth mindset is needed across the band of employees to build their potential to take on future roles.