Getting Unstuck - Developing Success Mindsets
“Leadership is not just about doing the right things. It’s about being a certain type of person – being somebody that others want to follow. Mindsets are the foundation of our being. They’re the mental lenses that we wear that shape how we view the world. And how we view the world shapes how we think, how we learn and how we behave. And so, if we want to become somebody that others want to follow, we need to shift more towards having positive mindsets.”
Today on Getting Unstuck
Today were are fortunate to sit down virtually with Ryan Gottfredson PhD.. Ryan is a cutting-edge leadership consultant, author, trainer, and researcher who helps improve organizations, leaders, teams, and employees by improving their mindsets. Ryan is currently a leadership and management professor at the Mihaylo College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton (CSUF). He is the author of Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership.
One of the themes of our book is that during a complex change, school leaders need to shift themselves to take less of a traditional top-down, command and control style and instead promote more of a shared leadership approach. Having the right mindset is clearly going to be an enabler of that shift.
Ryan’s research has uncovered three additional mindsets to the growth / fixed of which most people are aware.
The Essential Point
Author Bill George wrote in Discover Your True North that “The hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself.” (p.7) Add to that maxim the idea that you cannot effectively lead others until you know how to lead yourself effectively, and you have to confront an essential truth: knowing yourself and managing yourself appropriately are critical to demonstrating effective leadership. And understanding our mindsets is going to be key to building that self-awareness and the appropriate behaviors that follow.
“I hope that educational leaders can can use it to shape their organizations so that they can navigate the future more successfully. Because I think in order for us to do so, we're going to have to have the positive mindsets, as opposed to the negative mindsets.” – Ryan Gottfredson
Listen for:
How an understanding of mindsets enriches the study of leadership behavior.
Why it’s important to separate out the four sets of mindsets in Ryan’s framework as opposed to lumping them altogether.
How we can retrain ourselves to have more positive mindsets.
Why the “inward” / “outward” mindset might be the most important one when leading people.
How mindset and emotional intelligence intersect.
“When something goes wrong are we pointing our finger out the window at other people, or are we first looking in the mirror and ourselves? I think the latter is the epitome of somebody with an outward mindset because they believe that others are doing their best. If they’re not performing up to the level that we would like, then we must first look at ourselves and ask ‘Why am I not bringing this out in other people?’”
Could a book on how to effectively lead change in schools be more timely?
We’re pleased to announce …
…that our book Shifting: How School Leaders Can Create a Culture of Change is now available from Corwin Press or Amazon. If you purchase from Amazon, please consider leaving us a rating and review. Thank you!
From our publisher:
In Shifting, educators and leadership experts Kirsten Richert, Jeff Ikler and Margaret Zacchei empower educational change leaders to proactively and coherently navigate complex change in schools to achieve the desired outcomes.
Using a three-part framework—Assess, Ready, Change—this book leads educators to examine a school’s imperatives and readiness for change, identity the tools and abilities required to manifest change, and take action by defining the roles and processes necessary to effectively implement both sweeping change and smaller day-to-day adjustments.