Why a positive mindset matters to performance and how to create it with your team

When it comes to performance, mindset is absolutely crucial. Ultimately, how a person thinks determines what it is that they do, and what they do or don’t do determines the results that they get. And if a leader is wanting to improve performance or improve a result, it’s not good enough just to want a better result; you’ve got to create a shift in one of two things:

1. Skill: teach them something that they weren’t doing before, that they can apply, that works better than what they were doing before.

2. Will (or mindset): create a spike in motivation that means they want to do something differently or try something new. If you do that, you can get real cut through to results.

A bold sign reading ‘Understanding’ in front of a waterfront

When we talk about the psychology of performance and the psychology of success, there’s always a certain amount of skill required to do a job; but when it comes to potential success, mindset is up to four to five times more important than skillset to realise it.

For example, you could have someone who works for you that’s the most highly skilled individual you’ve ever seen, but if you ask them to do something that they fundamentally disagree with as a person, they're just not going to do it.

On the flip side, you could have someone brand new to your organisation who’s very also new to their role, but if they join with the right attitude, the right desire, the right will, the right mindset, they often soak up skills like a sponge and get very, very good, very, very quickly.

A coach and a team member in a conversation

Mindset is the gate opener to building skill, and probably the thing that impacts a person’s performance results the most.

The biggest difference between skillset and mindset is that skills take time to build, and usually build progressively. If you’re a leader and you’re looking after a team, there’s a process in building skill and capability that you’d hope will result in a steady uplift in skill across your team. Mindset, on the other hand, fluctuates. You can have times where the mindset of your team is really supporting you and you can have times where the mindset is not really supporting the direction that you're wanting to go – it’s more transient than skillset.

Good leadership or good coaching is often about keeping that mindset at its optimum for as long as you possibly can. And if you can do that, that’s the difference between the very best leaders whose team’s performance is consistently high and the leaders that are more subject to team performance fluctuations.

Before looking too far into how to create a positive mindset with your team, it’s important to note that the first step starts with you, the leader or the coach. You need to have a mindset that’s supporting the performance you want to drive.

When you’re looking to translate this positive mindset to your people, there are four key things that can help you:

1. Understand what makes your people tick.
   Work out what’s important to your people, what their values are, what their beliefs are, and if you can align values and beliefs that people already have behind a common goal or vision or direction that you have as a leader, you can get extremely high levels of motivation and discretionary effort.
   

2. Look at what your team has responded to historically.
   Maybe you ran a competition once and everyone got really excited, involved and performance lifted.
   Look at things that have worked in the past and think about how you can repeat or leverage those activities.
   

3. Coach your people to detach emotionally from the result that they get and become more interested in the process that they execute.
   You’ll find that mindset can be greatly affected by good or bad results that people get, and if they worry too much about the results, then a then a bad result can create a negative mindset. Encourage more of a focus on the behaviours that your team demonstrate or the process that they execute, and how these align to the strategy they’re delivering on, versus an attachment to the results they get in the moment. Take care of the the behaviours and process, keep your mindset positive, and the results will look after themselves.
   

4. Lastly, ensure you’re doing regular ‘state’ checks.
   If you think about how most of us were working just a few years ago, mostly people would be in the same physical place as their leader. For those of you that were working this way, checking in on your people was easy – you could walk around your workplace and get a good read on the mood of your team.
   This is harder in a hybrid or remote working environment; meaning you as a leader need to be more deliberate about checking in. An essential part of addressing mindset is knowing what state your people are in, and ‘state’ checks not only help you monitor this, they also contribute to a positive feeling across the team.

This post is an excerpt of key insights from our last coaching webinar on ‘mindset’ as shared by Mike Dunn, Director and Senior Consultant at GRIST. You can watch the full webinar here or see our next post on how to coach to mindset using ACDC here.