Leading with a Beginner's Mindset

Ever wonder how maintaining a beginner's mindset can transform your leadership journey? In this episode, we promise you'll learn how embracing openness, curiosity, and a lack of preconceptions can not only enrich your professional growth but also strengthen your leadership abilities.  Sharing my personal experiences from the Association for Talent Development conference, we highlight the incredible value of humility, creativity, and innovation that comes from starting fresh.

Taking deliberate steps to practice a beginner's mindset, especially when you're accustomed to showcasing your expertise, can be challenging but immensely rewarding. Encouraging this mindset within your teams, particularly among newer members, can foster a dynamic and innovative environment. This episode delves into how a beginner's mindset promotes resilience and adaptability, allowing us to see failures as learning opportunities rather than setbacks. Don't miss this episode on cultivating a mindset that can lead to significant transformation in your career and leadership approach.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Do you remember what it felt like to learn something new, to try out a new skill, the first time you rode a bike, or the first time you tried to coach someone, or the first time you gave some developmental feedback to someone and it didn't go well? Do you remember those times? That's what we're going to talk about today is actually leaning into that on purpose. I know why would we want to do that, but this concept is called the beginner's mindset, and this episode will tell you why that's important and how to do it. So today I want to talk about a beginner's mindset, and this has been in my brain for a while now, because in my leadership classes I tend to do some activities around power bases, and what I mean by that is French and Raven have developed, many decades ago, power bases. What are sources of power that give us the ability, as leaders, to influence others and I've done podcasts about this. But, for example, legitimate power means you have a title or position, which typically goes along with reward and coercive powers. We have the ability to reward people and also hold them accountable, but also expert power, reverent power and connection and information power when I do activities that help people understand what power they have. Sometimes we also have a really good discussion about abuse of power, because all of those power bases can be used for good or evil right. If I think about positional power, kind of like, if you're a parent, have you ever said to your child, do it because I'm your mom and I said so, or do it because I'm your dad and I said so, that is essentially an abuse of legitimate power. It's using your title to tell someone they have to do something. So with each of the power bases comes abuse. And I find it endlessly fascinating when we talk about expert power, because this is the one that gets people really riled up, because most people have seen an abuse of expert power, where people hoard information they don't want to share it. They kind of speak in a way that others don't understand them, or they make technical information very complex so that others actually can't understand it, or blah, blah, blah. And I can imagine that you know or you have experienced someone abusing their expert power. Now, with that said, I don't think people intentionally do that, but they're probably in some way trying to preserve their status and the power that they have around the information they know. With that as a backdrop.

Speaker 1: 2:42

The opposite of abusing expert power is cultivating a beginner's mindset, and cultivating a beginner's mindset means that we are going to be in the mindset of being open, curious, and there is a lack of preconceptions that we have about information or about knowledge. And this is very difficult to do because the more expertise one has, presumably the more, of course, competent you want to appear, and in leadership classes we talk about this a lot, that competence is important, but warmth is also equally important. So power in terms of expertise is, and competence is important as you're leading, so is warmth, and so is humility and so is approachability. Having sometimes a beginner's mindset and cultivating that to learn other people's point of view has some huge benefits, and that's what I want to talk about today. Because when we drop into a beginner's mindset and I just recently got back from the Association for Talent Development or ATD conference a few weeks ago, and I went there last year and again 9,000 people and you're just immersed for days and days in learning, and I definitely dropped into a beginner's mindset for anything that I did with regard to leadership, because I certainly know that I don't know everything there is to know an openness to other people's perspectives on leadership or leadership development or best practices or pitfalls. So I definitely went into it with that kind of mindset. What is the benefit to you of cultivating this kind of approach? Number one I think what it shows is humility and an openness to learning, and when we believe that we're at a certain level of either expertise or experience, sometimes we feel like, well, what really is there left for me to learn? Hold more knowledge. I look at that bucket and I think it's endless, because how can I ever know everything there is to know about a topic without examining all of the possibilities or the new information that comes out or new research that comes out, especially when it comes to leadership and behaviors and mindsets and all those things? They're ever evolving and people are finding and discovering new ways to operate and new best practices.

Speaker 1: 5:30

I think also what the beginner's mindset cultivates is a sense of creativity and innovation, because when we're willing to step back from what we know and look at something different, we can break free of our experience and the things that we've always done and the way we've always done it. Because I do know this for a fact that in classes that I have with people, the majority of people hate when someone says, no, we've tried that, we've done it, it won't work, that won't work here or something in that vein, which is not about creativity and innovation. It's about staying stagnant, staying stuck and also believing that because you've tried something in the past, that it's not going to work again without looking at what might you do differently. So when you think about creativity and innovation, a beginner's mindset allows us to think unconventionally and we can break through some of those things. We can think a little bit more outside the box. I think also what this creates.

Speaker 1: 6:33

This kind of willingness to be in a beginner mindset also promotes a lot of resilience and adaptability, because if we look at doing something and it doesn't work out the first time, we don't have to think, oh my gosh, that was terrible, that was horrible, that was a mistake, that was a failure. Rather, we can look at it as hey, I'm still in the mode of learning, I'm learning something new. Think about the children, think about the babies. And the babies when they get up and walk and they start to walk for the first time and they fall down, they don't say I clearly do not know how to walk. They keep getting up and falling down and getting up. They don't see it as some major flaw in their character or self-esteem or confidence. They just keep getting up till they can walk. And then, of course, once they walk, you want them to stop walking and stop running, because then you've got to follow them and who knows what trouble they're going to get into.

Speaker 1: 7:32

But think about that Can we stick with that kind of opportunity for growth and learning and resilience that we can bounce back from setbacks? Can we do that? I want to do more of that Absolutely, and I think by having a beginner's mindset it allows us to improve our relationships with our team because we're not putting these walls in place. We adopt more of a curious, more humble attitude. We're more receptive to what other people think and we can accept and honor that just as much as we can honor and accept our own experience and that what they have to bring to the table could be different and a different way of thinking could be really awesome.

Speaker 1: 8:17

I was talking to someone today in a coaching session and she was talking about her lack of experience as problematic to her confidence and I was saying, oh my gosh, are you kidding me? I think your newness in your experience in your career actually is a huge strength, because you bring objectivity to the table, you bring that curiosity to the table, you bring an outside perspective to the table in which you are cultivating a beginner's mindset, because you're in a beginner mode in your career, and I think that can be hugely advantageous. But what that means is those of us with a lot of experience have to value and appreciate that kind of perspective. A beginner's mindset, I think, is something that we can really drop into to strengthen our effectiveness and also strengthen our results. But how do you do it? And number one, how do we do it? Is we have to embrace curiosity and that willingness right and think about this, think about curiosity levels in kids versus adults, because when we're children and when we're in that developmental stage, we have that innate curiosity.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Children are naturally curious, of course, from birth. All they want to do is explore and understand their surroundings, right, and then the cognitive development their brain is absorbing, and so they're in a constant state of learning and discovery. They explore things which you know for any of you who have children, that endless question why? Why? Because they want to understand the world, and the super cool part about this is that playing is a crucial part of how children explore. That's how they learn is through play. Kids have vivid imaginations, a high level of creativity and thinking outside the box. They also have less fear of making mistakes, so of course they're going to explore new things. They don't worry about taking a hit to their self-esteem or looking necessarily bad. Now, I'm not saying some children aren't grown to that, but think about that.

Speaker 1: 10:29

As adults, we worry about that a lot Like oh my gosh. So all the things that we're taught to appear competent and knowledgeable get in the way of us being sometimes curious and open. Our responsibilities and maybe some aversion to that kind of openness or to risk, and we get more specialized over time in what we know. So we lean into that because that's how we're getting rewarded. For adults, if we want to bridge the gap to being more curious, we have to foster that. We have to think about how, how are we going to be curious? When are we going to be curious? What does that look like? What does it mean and how do we fully embrace curiosity? Asking questions, challenging assumptions and exploring new perspectives all can help, which will ensure that when you're in team meetings, you're creating an environment where innovation can flourish because you're asking the questions and you're open to it yourself.

Speaker 1: 11:32

This also means we have to listen very deeply right that active listening and I know we talk about active listening all the time because people are always saying I'm not a good listener and I totally get it, because we're overwhelmed with stimulus and input and everyone is vying for our attention. So being mindful is very, very difficult. You have to drop into mindfulness and practice the listening to understand what other people's points of view are, as well as embracing failure, just like little kids who will fail and get up and try again, and try again, and try again. We have to see failure or mistakes, and I would even put failure in quotation marks. But those are opportunities for growth and learning. Now, when something doesn't go as we planned, it doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. It just means that we just learned something new and a way maybe to do it differently. No shame, no blame, and I think if we can reframe failure as a part of learning, it's going to foster a lot of resilience and creativity within us and within our team.

Speaker 1: 12:40

How do we stay humble, how do we stay open and how do we continue to encourage that kind of reflection. I think we do it as a deliberate practice. I think we go into certain parts of our day when we want to drop into curiosity, when we want to drop into a beginner's mindset. It's hard to embrace that all the time, especially if you're not familiar with that concept or you think, uh no, I'm used to demonstrating my competence and expertise. That's what people know me for. If I all of a sudden drop into a beginner's mindset, they're going to be like what is up with them. But it doesn't have to be the case. We can use this very intentionally and we can think about when we want to practice. When do we want to drop into that beginner's mindset? When is it important to show up that way? I really thought about that a lot at the conference I went to a few weeks ago, particularly because I was spending thousands of dollars in my own growth and development and I thought I better be open to what I'm learning here. I'm going to be open, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to go to some sessions where I may be a little bit out of my comfort zone, but my thirst for knowledge was definitely quenched and there were a lot of things that I was open to and that I learned. That will add to my toolkit as I'm going forward. So I was thrilled and I saw that as a big success.

Speaker 1: 14:06

Practice cultivating a beginner's mindset and just see about the effect and also encourage your team to do the same, because you know the dynamics in a mixed team.

Speaker 1: 14:18

You know, if you have people in your group that have a lot of experience and some people that have very little experience, that sometimes the experienced ones are the more vocal. They're the ones that speak up, they're the ones who are more confident in their view and, ironically, that beginner's mindset and that curiosity factor is probably within your newer individuals. The people have less experience because they're less caught up in all of the tradition and the history and the experience level that, for some of us, tie us down to a certain point of view. Be mindful about that, consider it, observe it in the next week, see what opportunities you have to cultivate a beginner's mindset, and I would love to hear about your experience. Wouldn't it be great if there were more intentional leaders out there? If you like this podcast or find it helpful in any way, rate this podcast and share it with someone you know and love. We can build a universe of intentional leaders.