Traditional mindsets don't function well in digitalized environments—thinking is lagging, linear, and limited. How expansively do you explore new ideas? Do your team's attitudes and approaches meet the challenges your business faces?

“Change your mindset, and you change the game.” — ​Carol Dweck​, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

It's vital to drive growth through curiosity in highly digitalized businesses. Updated strategies alone are insufficient. Modern work requires leaders and teams to think expansively, operate faster, work flexibly, and adjust frequently.

Workers are reeling as they try to absorb the changes and keep up:

Perceived threats, resistance, stress, and fear use up people's energy and time, and ​restrict information processing​. Shift to a new mental operating system with curiosity at the core so everyone can open up to change, engage with new inputs, and develop opportunities to scale and achieve sustainable progress.

“Curiosity is the engine of achievement”– ​Sir Ken Robinson​, global authority on creativity, human potential, and education. Acclaimed ​author​ of books including "The Element" and "Creative Schools".

Curiosity is transformative, opening up attitudes, enabling people to absorb more information, learn faster, and pivot. Infuse curiosity so your team can:

• Think with more open minds about new opportunities and challenges.
• Develop solutions that you facilitate and support rather than control.
• Connect with and respond to customers’ and colleagues’ perspectives.
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To drive broad exploration of your clients', business's, and coworkers' issues and lay the foundation of other essential organizational shifts, intentionally cultivate one or more of these interrelated curiosity-based orientations:
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• GROWTH MINDSET: Abilities, skills, and intelligence are not fixed and can be developed with persistence, learning, and effective feedback. Companies can shape their culture, leadership, talent development, and innovation practices. Based on ​Carol Dweck’s research​.
• SERVANT-LEADER MINDSET: Leaders focus on supporting their teams, removing blockers, enabling growth, putting collective outcomes ahead of personal status. Rooted in the work on Servant Leadership by ​Robert Greenleaf​, a former top executive at AT&T then MIT, HBS lecturer.
• HUMAN-CENTRIC MINDSET: Leaders recognize people as primary value drivers using new tools, enabling innovation. They prioritize trust, empathy, belonging, psychological safety, and wellbeing. Much research and coverage, including as the focus of my latest book, ​Empathy Works​.

This first of the five transformation areas is critical to lay the foundations for ongoing change, giving people the mental capacity to adapt, and keep adapting, without burning out. These mindsets facilitate intentional transition to modern work encouraging learning, flexibility, and empathy.

GROWTH MINDSET

This mindset harnesses curiosity for innovation and growth while enabling adaptability to change. Leaders are well-versed in the benefits:

• Future Success: 89% of senior leaders agree that future business success will depend on leaders who embody a growth mindset.
• Profitability & Performance: 88% of executives believe a growth mindset is important for organizational success; 64% report higher productivity, 58% cite more employee engagement
• Retention by Learning: 52% of employees would quit for a company offering more learning and development [​Better Business Forum​].

• Fear of failure stops people from stepping out of their comfort zone.
• Negative feedback and criticism are difficult for many employees.
• Resistance to change and new ideas can hinders new thinking.

• 90% of executives agree leaders must set the example.
• 87% stress the need for continuous learning company-wide.
• 84% believe normalizing failure through discussion is critical.

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."– ​Sir Ken Robinson​, authority on creativity, author.

SERVANT-LEADER MINDSET

Leaders shift to facilitating and enabling their teams, giving people more autonomy, helping them work together, and actively supporting career growth:

• Creativity & Resilience: Servant-leaders decentralize decision-making, giving teams more autonomy to respond to pressure. Servant-leadership increases creativity and psychological resilience–improving company sustainability [​Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 2021]​
• Trust through Transparency: Creating a high-trust environment is a high priority founding every relationship and team. Transparency builds trust so servant leaders keep their teams informed and nurture openness, integrity, and honesty [​Business Leadership Today​]
• Cross-functional collaboration: Leaders encourage knowledge-sharing and collaboration in decision-making. They foster cross-functional understanding and community with open communication and mutual support to create cohesive teams [​Reworked​].
• Attention for Retention: 45% of voluntary leavers say managers/other leaders didn't discuss job satisfaction, performance or their future with the company in three months before they left. Only 29% talked about their future/career with them; only 18% talked about how to be effective in their job, just 17% discussed how to get them to stay [​Gallup​].

• Cultural Resistance - Traditional firms valuing command-and-control leadership can misinterpret this mindset as weak, soft, subservient.
• Loss of Authority - Perception that servant-leaders lack decisiveness or authority undermining upwards influence or managing with confidence.
• Structural Misalignment - Rigid, high-power hierarchies can clash with servant-leadership's collaborative ethos, requiring gradual introduction.

• Training & Development - Structured coaching helps acquisition of skills core to servant-leadership, e.g. active listening, conflict-resolution.
• Feedback & Reflection - Regular feedback loops and self-reflection build awareness to identify gaps while transitioning to new behaviors.
• Recognize & Reward - Formal incentives and development opportunities validate and support those practicing servant-leadership.

HUMAN-CENTRIC MINDSET

Leaders showing authenticity, empathy, and flexibility, who intentionally put people at the center of strategy, leadership, and transformation, benefit from:

• Transformation Success - Companies in 23 countries who put humans at the center of their transformation efforts are 2.6x more likely to succeed than those that don't. Probability of transformation success also increases to 70% [​EY​].
• Engagement - 37% more employees say they are engaged when they have a human-centric leader, and highly-engaged employees boost team performance by 27%. [​Gartner​].
• Performance - Companies excelling in people development AND financial performance are 4x as likely as peers to outperform financially ["A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human" article, ​McKinsey 2025​]
• Adaptability - Increasing employees’ confidence, sense of well-being, and resilience to stress, leaders can help people adapt more easily and even improve people’s relationship with work [​HBR​].

• New Behaviors - 60% of leaders report exhibiting empathy and compassion adds stress to their role [​HBR​].
• Over-indexing - Too much emphasis on psychological safety can hamper voicing of ideas and disagreements [​HBR​].
• Change Fatigue - Leaders need support and patience to unlearn old habits and invest in self-reflective and empathetic behaviors.

• Modeling by Leadership - Consistent role modeling—such as transparency and listening—are key to shift mindsets long-term.
• Start Small & Scale - Pilots or team trials can demonstrate quick wins to illustrate benefits and then be expanded and practiced broadly.
• Cycles & Iterations - Open discussion accelerates unlearning and improvements and quickly eliminates unproductive behaviors.

Shift mindsets to reduce employee stress and facilitate ongoing change.

Take foundational steps to foster a company culture and work environment that openly addresses and recognizes essential shifts in progress. Mindsets will shift unevenly as people adapt and evolve their thinking at their own pace:

1. CREATE THE CONDITIONS: Psychological safety first — Make it safe to ask questions, admit mistakes, and try new things. Model the mindset — Demonstrate curiosity, humility, and vulnerability at the top. Reward learning behaviors — Publicly celebrate experiments, insights, and collaboration.
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2. STRUCTURED INTERVENTIONS:· Learning sprints — Two-week cycles where teams try a new skill or process and debrief openly. Reverse mentoring — Pair junior employees with senior leaders to exchange perspectives. Storytelling forums — Leaders and peers share personal stories of growth, service, and people-first decisions.
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3. MEASUREMENT & REINFORCEMENT: Embed mindset indicators — enable ongoing leadership evaluations and promotion criteria. Run pulse checks — quarterly assessments of trust, belonging, and a learning culture. Introduce team health metrics — develop a performance indicator to track well-being alongside revenue and outcomes.

Curiosity is a catalyst that helps validate new mindsets' benefits as they drive operational experiences. Use rituals, reward questions, and model vulnerability to establish new habits:

Growth Mindset Practices:

• Self-audit limiting beliefs — Identify where you default to “I can’t” or “I’m not good at X” and reframe into "what don't I know yet?"
• Run small experiments — Start with low-risk trials that build comfort as iterations allow for familiarity and improvements with refinement.
• Seek stretch feedback — Ask for input that challenges, push for stretch goals with feedback coaching and failures becoming learning moments.

Servant-Leader Practices:

• Weekly unblock session — Ask your team “What’s slowing you down?” agree ways you can support their progress and act swiftly to help.
• Share the mic — Encourage others to present, give your team more visibility and voice in meetings and ways to contribute cross-company.
• Measure success through others — Track achievement of your team member’s goals, identifying how you can improve your support.

Human-centric Practices:

• Empathy mapping — Regularly consider the perspectives, needs, and challenges of all stakeholders to better inform collaboration.
• Inclusive decision-making — Ensure diverse viewpoints are contributing and wide-ranging ideas debated before finalizing key moves.
• Wellbeing check-ins — Include frequent brief wellbeing discussions in one-on-ones destigmatizing mental health and highlighting resources.

📘 ​Servant Leadership​, Robert Greenleaf - the nature of legitimate power.

🗞️ ​Take a Human-centric Approach to Avoid AI's Leadership Traps​, McK.

📹 ​Developing a Growth Mindset​, Carol Dweck - Open up possibilities.

🎶 ​I Can See Clearly Now​, Johnny Nash - More transparency, more clarity.

By making curiosity matter, you’re not just shifting mindsets—you’re creating a living system where learning, empathy, and adaptability compound over time. The payoff is faster decision-making, stronger collaboration, and teams ready to accept and adapt to whatever’s next.

Sharing customized insights, I can accelerate your growth and enhance your leadership of these shifts so your business can grow effectively. ​Click here to book a 30-minute session.​

Next week, I'll address Flexible Frameworks, the second critical shift.

Until next time!

Sophie

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P.S. Is your team fulfilling their potential? Try my new course Empowering High-Performing Teams to build new capabilities before September starts.