For a change of pace, I’m going to ask you to engage in a short exercise that I learned on the first day of my coaching training at Columbia University. Look at the following list of words, then read them aloud slowly and clearly letting the impact of each word sink in as you proceed:
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- ● Open
- ● Curious
- ● Encouraging
- ● Patient
- ● Thoughtful
- ● Sympathetic
- ● Supportive
- ● Respectful
- ● Attentive
- ● Empathetic
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Think about how these words make you feel. When we do this exercise at our workshops, leaders consistently say they feel relaxed, safe, calm and trusting, to give a few examples.
Now, do the same thing with the following set of words:
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- ● Challenging
- ● Critical
- ● Impatient
- ● Condescending
- ● Inattentive
- ● Threatening
- ● Predisposed
- ● Binary
- ● Decisive
- ● Dismissive
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Here, leaders react the opposite. They say they feel tight, nervous, and threatened, to give a few examples. They acknowledge that some of the characteristics represented in the second list of words, such as decisiveness, are important, but nonetheless, these words can be scary.
These respective word lists reflect two different mindsets: the learner and the judger. When leaders are able to stay in a learner mindset they relax their teammates and subordinates, creating a supportive environment conducive to learning and innovation. When they are in a judger mindset, they create and cascade stress closing the minds of those around them to learning. At the extreme, a culture dominated by judgers is a bullying culture.
If you want a strong culture, rich in learning and innovation, move your leaders, starting with the C-Suite, to a learner mindset. According to experts, 70% of learning should be experiential learning. For this to happen, your workforce needs to be in a learner mindset. Have your leaders set the stage for this change by going through leader mindset training then modeling learner mindset behaviors for the broader organization.