In this blog series we are exploring the components that come together to create Sustainable Performance. Using the Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework as reference, we will explore how elements come together and have a causal effect that builds into healthy work cultures that enable performance and productivity in organisations.

As a reminder, we define Sustainable Performance in the workplace as “the ability of an organisation, team, or individual to consistently achieve high levels of productivity, effectiveness, and well-being over the long term, without compromising future performance or the health of its people.”

In part 1, we started our journey by looking at Building Foundations of Wellbeing. Then in part 2, we built on these foundations and looked at how to create personal ownership, build social connections which allows us to form high performing teams. Last time, in part 3, we then saw that creating a culture of open feedback, combined with psychological safety, allows us to have successful challenging conversations that correct poor behaviour or output to enhance future performance levels.

In this fourth blog of the series, we continue on the Journey to Sustainable Performance by looking at how to create a culture of continuous growth, by building on elements of our journey so far, and seeing how a culture of a growth mindset also builds resilience and mental toughness in our people in a virtuous circle.

Why do we need a growth mindset in our work cultures? A growth mindset is crucial for organisations who want to perform in the world today as it fosters the ability to adapt quickly in the moment and it encourages your people to think of new ways of approaching and doing activities which creates innovation, keeping you ahead of your competitors and delivering increased effectiveness. Also, if your people believe that their skills can be developed through effort and learning, they are more likely to embrace new challenges, seek feedback and persist through setbacks. A growth mindset, combined with resilience, reduces the fear of failure and encourages problem solving and collaboration across the organisation. This leads to higher engagement. Higher engagement leads to greater commitment and productivity and will reduce staff attrition – all leading to higher performance over time in your organisation.

The Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework has two components that cover this area.

1)  Mental Toughness

2)  Growth Mindset

Let’s breakdown each area and understand the drivers of human behaviour in the workplace for each and therefore what we can do to instil this in our work cultures on our Journey to Sustainable Performance.

Mental Toughness

In the year 2000, the American Psychological Association decided to open a new area of research from work that had been emerging in recent years. They called this Positive Psychology. We think of this as mainstream now but the majority of the twentieth century was about how to study and “fix” psychological problems, whereas positive psychology is about the proactive ways we can prepare for life events so future negative impact can be minimalised. This is where “resilience” and “mental toughness” come in to Sustainable Performance. If we can promote and practice the behaviours of resilience and mental toughness in our organisations then we are proactively preparing our people for the setback, bumps and potholes that come along in our work. This will then help to minimise the impact of unexpected or traumatic events and our organisations will remain at higher levels of productivity and performance as we will not become as distracted by them. This is why resilience and mental toughness is so important in a modern workplace with the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) of the world today.

Resilience can be defined as a person’s “flexibility in response to changing situational demands, and the ability to bounce back from negative emotional experiences” (Tugade et al, 2004). This bouncing back suggests that resilience happens in the moment. In fact, resilience is both a capacity and an active process. In other words, as we go through life, we can build our level of resilience and become more mentally tough, but also there are certain things we can do “in the moment of trauma” to minimise the impact on us, our work and others.

Building a capacity of resilience is about quality reflection after a traumatic incident. If we can do quality reflection of the events that led up to the critical moment, how we acted and what happened, we can understand what behaviours we can then amplify in the future and repeat and which behaviours we might want to lessen and to try something else out. This process is accelerated by talking to others who might have had a similar experience and learning from them. One great way of doing this in the workplace is by having end of project review meetings. However, these are only effective if we have a high level of psychological safety in the meeting. This is essential if team members are going to be honest and share their real feelings of non-achievement and their perception of not being in control or failing. Often though, we perceive we are short of time and do not do these reflective meetings as we rush into the next project. Ensuring these meetings happen, and that they are properly facilitated in a safe way, will boost the resilience capacity of your people.

Resilience as an active process is how we deal with unexpected events and trauma in the moment. This is what Tugade et al. called “bouncing back.” There are many aspects of positive psychology that are at play here. Two key ones are the trait of optimism and the ability to reframe.

Being self-aware of your own balance of optimism, realism and pessimism is important to be mentally tough. If you are naturally a pessimistic person then there is a tendency to mentally multiply traumatic events to create narratives of despair if left unchecked. This is not saying that a naturally pessimistic person is a bad thing. If you are continually optimistic then sometimes you can be perceived as not taking a situation seriously enough or not understanding other people’s fears. Pessimistic people have reported that, by expecting the worst, any good result is happily appreciated.

One of the common ways to build resilience in the moment and to challenge optimism/pessimism levels is by using a reframing technique. Reframing is “a process of reconceptualizing a problem by seeing it from a different perspective.” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). It is about the ability to look at a traumatic problem from different ways to open up possibilities of solving it and therefore lessening the emotional impact it has by putting the “reframer” back in control of the situation. The are many models and frameworks out there that help people reframe in the moment. One of the originals was the ABC model by Albert Ellis in the 1950s to identified that rationality helps reduce the trauma. The ABS model is essentially a self-coaching technique to understand the “Activating” event that caused your reaction, the “Belief” you have about the event you encountered and the “Consequences” of holding that belief. The model was later expanded to ABCDE with D being how can you “Dispute” your belief and being aware of the “Effects” of that disputation.

Reframing is core to resilience and mental toughness. It should be a key learning subject within all organisations to support our people’s mental health in their daily work lives, and to support productivity in the organisation through lowering lost time to demotivation, worry and stress. And it supports a growth mindset…

Growth Mindset

Resilience supports a growth mindset primarily through the mental toughness of being able to accept failure and learning from it. A growth mindset cannot and will not exist without the ability to have confidence in “failing fast” with no psychologically unsafe practices. A growth mindset is learning without being asked. It is curiosity. The best learning happens from trial and error. If there is a fear of failure then your employees will not try new things and take a risk due to this fear. Only superficial learning happens. Think of the 70/20/10 rule from the Center for Creative Leadership where 90% of learning happens outside of formal learning. If this informal “trying out new things” stops then innovation slows and competitive advantage dwindles. Organisations who overtly promote a growth mindset attract the best talent. Gallup (2024) found that organisations that have made strategic investment in personal employee development had 11% higher profitability and were twice as likely to retain their people.

Many elements of a growth mindset pull from aspects we have encountered on our Journey to Sustainable Performance so far. Open feedback is the fuel that stokes the growth mindset engine. It is the data that we can use to identify new areas of self-development. Our line managers providing quality feedback through the confidence of being able to hold challenging conversations, means that the feedback which we are probably most blind to, and need the most, can be shared with us in a digestible way.

Persistence through a combination of resilience and motivation towards satisfying a need is essential. We learn the most through overcoming tough tasks and jobs. A belief that hard work and effort will result in bettering ourselves is important. This means that high levels of intrinsic motivation, motivation that we have inside us, is advantageous.

Line managers and senior leaders have a role in promoting a growth mindset. It is easy and quick to reward output and results, however rewarding the learning process, high levels of effort and problem-solving behaviours encourages and motivates people to self-direct their own growth. Other ways line managers and leaders can foster a growth mindset in their employees include:

  • Offering out projects and stretch assignments to kickstart a growth mindset in others.
  • Sharing success stories of teams that overcame setbacks – what did they learn and how did this benefit?
  • Celebrating innovative and collaborative ideas and actions
  • Overtly giving time and space for learning within working time
  • Acknowledging your own learning deficit, and role modelling your own development activity
  • Using a coaching and mentoring style as often as possible

In summary, building resilience in your people to create mental toughness paves the way for learning on the job, through reducing the fear of failure. Providing quality feedback and being able to have those tough, challenging conversations to give the most needed feedback, then gives the data needed to do things differently. Having the self-motivation and belief that personal growth is a key behaviour, encouraged by managers and leaders, results in growth mindsets. A growth mindset culture opens the door to innovation, collaboration opportunities and high performance by delivering more in a way that is new and exciting for your stakeholders.

Next time, in the fifth and final blog of the Journey to Sustainable Performance, we look at how this positive can-do culture translates into delivery of goals, execution of strategy, a sense of accountability and success for everyone.