Many leaders, as they start to deploy business intelligence solutions and bring their staff up to speed, go into it with limited expectations of their employees and the business overall. The assumption is their people only have so much analytical talent, and their company only has so many resources - therefore, there's a ceiling to how much they can achieve.
In truth, though, this is a narrow-minded way of looking at BI. Your people might appear now to have limited skills, but if you work hard and have an open mind, it's possible to improve upon those skill sets and help the entire company achieve more.
This is simply a matter of reframing the conversation and looking at the workforce in a different way. In short, what we're talking about is adopting a growth mindset.
The "fixed mindset" is the real problem
When you limit the expectations that you have for your organisation and its employees, you put a cap on your overall productivity. According to a May 2016 report from Gartner, this is what's known as a "fixed mindset" - if you go in believing that your people only have a certain amount of potential to use BI tools, that belief will become self-fulfilling.
The healthier way to approach any BI project is with a "growth mindset." Instead of believing that your people have a fixed amount of skill, look to help them improve and push the limits of what they can accomplish. Smart CIOs know to look for signs of a fixed mindset and actively combat them, urging their employees to do better.
This will require having an open work environment in which everyone is invited to share ideas. If managers ask a lot of questions about how their employees are improving, and employees are willing to answer openly, entire teams of personnel can work together on expanding their capabilities.
Managing growth in a volatile environment
One drawback to expanding your company's BI capabilities is that volatile environments are tougher to manage. When people are constantly pushing the envelope and trying to add new skills they didn't have before, you find yourself coordinating an unknown work environment with an entirely new approach to completing even the most basic tasks.
According to the American Management Association, one of the keys to managing in an environment like this is to always look for "blind spots" in your employees' development - areas where they should be highly skilled, but in reality, still need a little work. If you communicate openly about finding these blind spots and addressing them, people should be able to stay on-task and productive.
Workplaces with growth mindsets are dynamic, and it's often hard to get a real handle on them. Fortunately, maintaining a constant dialogue should help.
Hallmarks of the Growth Mindset
Generations of metrics, performance management systems, leadership practices and culture can thwart and even punish the use of a growth mindset. Here are some tips on how CIO's can foster a growth mindset in your team:
- Communicate how you value a growth versus a fixed mindset
- Keep an open mind and have high expectations of all employees
- Be mindful when assigning employees to projects - don't just pick your top 3 go-to employees, pick the fourth and see how performance improves
- Be willing to let go of control and be open to a change in direction that may involve risks
- Solicit ideas from everyone and don't be quick to jump to the solution
- Praise the willingness to try and fail sometimes - make the meaning of tackling a difficult challenge synonymous with learning.
A growth mindset enables an enterprise to thrive on challenge, use failure as a way to move forward and embrace continuous learning. CIOs must learn how to develop a growth mindset critical to building an innovative culture that will thrive in the era of digital business.
