Growth mindset could be seen as one of those corporate ‘on-trend’ words like empathy or emotional intelligence. It denotes a valuable concept that has lost its impact with recent overuse. However, it’s worth remembering how important it is to modern business.

As Stanford Professor Carol Dweck, who coined the term, found in the early 2000s, employees in a growth mindset company are 49% likelier to say the company fosters innovation and 47% likelier to say their colleagues are trustworthy.

Yet too often it’s considered a personal driver that helps you “race to the top”, with many business leaders neglecting the real impact it can have. Rather than merely focusing inwards on a personal level, they need to encourage their entire team to adopt it.

But how do you disseminate an individual growth mindset? How do you actively nurture it within your team – and shift from a personal, private growth attitude to one of ‘growth collaboration’ that can encourage creativity and impact results across a business in a tangible and measurable way?

Exercising the muscle

Start by strengthening your personal outlook and attitude. Cultivating a growth mindset is like exercising a muscle, it requires effort and training. It needs to be flexed continuously, so it must be a conscious choice. Early on in my career, I distinctly remember a senior creative ripping up some of my ideas in front of me. But rather than wallowing in the rejection, I took that setback and turned the challenge into inspiration, channelling the negative energy into an award-winning campaign for the NSPCC.

Over the years working agency side as well as in-house at large corporations, there have been many such instances I have learnt from – both good and bad. In the creative industries, people are often wired towards a growth mindset; it’s within our DNA to not be afraid of failure, while leaders in more corporate environments, driven by KPIs, can often be more wary of potential risk. But everyone can train the growth mindset muscle, no matter what type of business they are in.

That training starts with mirroring the good things you’ve observed in other people and defining how to inject your own personality and character into how you speak, interact and show up each day. You need to actively view everything as a test, a unique learning opportunity and choose the good points you want to emulate. You genuinely need to decide on who you want to be in order to define how you’d like to be perceived.

Check your language

It’s so easy to get drawn into a negative mindset – especially when you’re pressed for time or faced with immediate challenges. It’s easy to slip into a language of ‘that’s not going to happen’ and ‘yes, but’. Make sure you think and challenge yourself before you speak and turn a ‘yes, but’ into a ‘what if’.

Train yourself to challenge phrases of negativity when you hear them or to call out when the temperature of a conversation is starting to swing towards the negative. Start reframing negative comments into positivity – and again, the more you lean into this, the more it becomes second nature.

Often, what we think and listen to (essentially our inner voice) can be skewed through life experiences, past failures or words of discouragement. Growth mindset is about learning from mistakes, listening to diverse opinions and discovering different methodologies for tackling complex issues. Sometimes we just need a change of routine, environment and using different models and strategies to mix things up.

For example, I often use the famous set of Oblique Strategies card set by Brian Eno when I hit a creative block or mental brick wall. Or on recent projects, I have introduced a more inclusive approach to working – encouraging different stakeholders to work more collaboratively, rather than handling projects in a silo. If you can encourage people to come together on a project journey, it will build a richer outcome.

Create a nurturing environment

If you want to turn an individual growth mindset into ‘growth collaboration’, one that can expand through an organisation; you need to create an environment that allows it to proliferate. A growth mindset can become envisioning and inspiring, but you need the right setting to turn the drive for a growth mindset into a collective mutual responsibility.

You have to actively foster time for genuine conversations, for getting together for the sake of it, or just hanging out (rather than ticking off work-related points). Spending time with people enables us to get to know the individuals, what motivates them, what interests them, and what some barriers or pain points could be.

It can be done every day on a small scale – as simple as an ad hoc message to really check in with how someone is doing; but can also include a more formal occasion or event. Sometimes teams need to come together without a formal agenda. For time-stretched people this can seem like an additional task. If you’re working at 100 miles an hour, the tendency is to withdraw, pop in the earphones and focus. But in the long term, growing such genuine conversations is not only beneficial for the business but for the overall culture and team spirit.

Strong team dynamics are forged by characters, quirks, and often diverse personalities that exist within them. With a group of different characters comes a diverse set of ideas and perspectives. There is the adage that the best leaders lead by example. But it’s better to lead by being your true self, inspiring individuals through every interaction.

Infectious, curious, and inspirational modelled behaviour encourages infectious, curious and inspirational teams who want to run through brick walls for the project, the team and ultimately the business.

Alex Normanton is Global Brand Experience Lead at Reckitt.