Pointseven Growth Mindset
Growth Culture
HOW TO
Develop a growth culture
In performance-based work cultures, people have a tendency to shy away from failure, while in growth cultures, it’s celebrated as an opportunity to learn and become more prepared for the ever-changing future. Pointseven therefore embrace Growth culture as a mindset on how we build our agency and our work to deliver sustainable and exponential growth to our clients.
THE CULTURE
From the start
In our fast-paced and digitized world, a business simply can’t act like it would twenty years ago and expect the same success. Traditional work processes are far too rigid for the speed at which innovation happens. But it doesn’t stop there. Even our underlying approach to work as individuals, team members and leaders needs a radical transformation.
In order to talk about Growth culture, we first need to reflect on its predecessor — the Performance culture. Born in a time when companies could successfully grow, decade after decade, simply by scaling the exact same thing, this approach to work made sense. Because since everyone in the company worked with a clear blueprint, it was only right if the employee who outperformed her colleagues got to climb the ladder.
So, what’s so different today? The answer is an exponential increase in innovation, which forces companies to stay light on their feet, and perhaps perform a bold pivot or two in order to stay relevant. This new reality is daunting for most organizations, but especially for those stuck in a Performance culture, in which no employee or manager dares to risk their precious performance statistics for the sake of learning and innovation — the very things that the company needs to survive in the long term.
Now, let’s compare that to a Growth mindset. It also values performance, but leaves room for more markers of success than numbers alone. Without the weight of being judged only by statistics, people are free to own their weaknesses and actively improve on them, rather than sweeping them under the carpet. It results in a culture in which people spend less energy on defending themselves, and more energy on actually creating value.
THE CORNERSTONES
The four cornerstones of Growth culture
- A sense of safety, rather than shame, that allows both leaders and employees to own mistakes, concerns and weaknesses.
- A focus on continuous learning and development, based on curiosity and not self-defense.
- A will to experiment and grow as individuals and as a company, without the fear of having potential failures impact your personal wellbeing and place within the team.
- A free flow of honest feedback at all levels within the organization, based on a genuine desire to help each other improve.
THE PURPOSE
Nudging our clients toward a Growth mindset is our responsibility
As growth marketing agencies are a relatively novel business, we were automatically born into a Growth culture. And the fact that we have direct contact with those in powerful leadership positions enables us to offer Growth from two perspectives. Our primary purpose will always be to help businesses reach their long- and short term business and brand targets. But there’s also an opportunity to help traditional businesses truly adapt to our own approach to work — and build a Growth culture in their cooperation with us. This way, we will together cope better with today’s game-changing innovations — such as automation and artificial intelligence — and the many others that tomorrow undoubtedly has in store for us.