Blog
Always on my Growth Mind - Set: Blog March 2025
I have been thinking about growth mindset a lot lately. I can still vividly remember the second time I heard about it.
Thats right - the second time. The first time I heard about it was when my children were in primary school (they are late teens now) and I though it was something that was just applicable to kids. I didn’t give it another thought at the time.
The second time I heard about growth mindset however, I was participating in a leadership development workshop, and I just couldn’t get over how simply changing your mindset could have such a profound impact on outcomes… and therefore results. The really brilliant thing is that you don’t just have to limit the application to your work life, it has the power to transform across many other dimensions of your life as well.
Setting up my own business, having a growth mindset and maintaining it even through difficult times has been key to keeping going and always taking the next step. I’ve been using the power of yet to push myself out of my comfort zone - as you might have seen, I have moved from being too scared to post videos on LinkedIn…… yet, to having a couple of videos under my belt, plus adding videos to all of my Fiverr gigs!
For me the key is to be self aware enough to catch myself when my mindset has become fixed, and create a simple plan of actions I can take to move myself closer to my overall goal of a successful change management & organisational development consultancy.
I’m also using the concept of growth mindset to achieve some of the outcomes I want in my personal life. With Mothers Day approaching I recall a disappointing previous year where my youngest presented me with a hastily written note on a piece of loo paper! Given they are still teens, I’m taking matters into my own hands and setting clear expectations with them for an actual card - made of paper as a minimum (homemade welcomed). By providing a bit of guidance and taking ownership for my own happiness outcome, hopefully I won’t be disappointed - watch this space!
Common Change Management Mistakes: Blog February 2025
Over my career I have seen a lot of projects involving change - here are some of the most common reasons I have seen for a change to fail. All can be avoided or rectified with a good structured change management plan.
Under communication. ‘I’ve sent an e mail’ - well done you! How many people do you think will actually read it? People are busy, not everyone has access to or is on top of their e mails. Think about who you want to target, the best way to get a message across to them and use several forms of communication (face to face, briefings, newsletters, drop ins, roadshows etc) - more is defiantly more - you can rarely over communicate a change, better to hear the same message across few times than not at all.
Complex messaging. Here is a good time to use an elevator speech. Get all the team on the same page - and aligned to one simple message - what the change is, why we are doing it and, ideally what the benefits are.
Not listening to concerns. That is, really listening to the people who are impacted by the change - not just paying lip service. If a restructure won’t work because you’re unaware you are taking away key resources better to know now than 5 years down the line when there’s a huge unfillable hole.
Insufficient resource. Its another project of many, another priority. The fluffy people stuff is nice to have but time-consuming and can be skipped. All well and good until its go live day and no-one is aware of what they need to do differently and you can’t get customer orders out of the door.
No change is actually needed. Assumptions made about a process or a behaviour, no data or business case review up front. A lot of time can be wasted on the wrong thing if you fail to plan your change up front.
Not aligning with stakeholders… and the day before go live John from Regulatory says no.. this can be avoided by understanding who your stakeholders are and ensuring you understand their needs.
Failing to sustain. ‘We used to do it like that 5 years ago… yeah, then Karen left and it all went back to how it was’. Make sure there is a plan in place to prevent slipping back to the old way once the project team has moved on.
Failure to measure. All the project actions have been completed but there’s no metric in place to measure the before and after.
Not understanding all the impacts. It tempting to just crack on with a project without fully planning and working cross functionally to determine all the areas which will be impacted. Working in this way means you will probably miss something - and it could be critical.
Change fatigue. Changes in personnel, new leadership, new products, new production lines, new business processes, all sucking up resources and changing the business. Sometimes the right thing to do is to hold off another change or really plan and prioritise your projects to get the best results.
Change not adopted. The old pens were still available and no-one was assigned to order the new ones. By making it easier to adopt the new behaviour than the old one you can make change adoption easy - old pens in the bin and new ones distributed to everyone :)