Leading Change: Process or Mindset?

Abstract

Mindsets have entered the discussion on organizational change and its leadership, illustrated as different orientations by which change leaders see and engage with change efforts. Common conceptualizations illustrate two mindsets, aligned with different change processes. The planned mindset for when change is a planned, managed and controlled process, and the emergent mindset when futures are unknown, outcomes are adaptive, and leaders foster environments where new possibilities evolve. A limitation of this bifurcation is that modern, complex, change contexts require concurrent application of both perspectives; for example, planned processes for strategic decision-making and emergent processes for discovering new solutions. This convergence suggests the possibility of an underlying, single, mindset guiding a change leader when choosing between these two perspectives. Separately, well-established knowledge presented by organizational psychologists presents the fixed and growth mindsets. Testing the influence of these two mindsets on change outcomes, we observe 63 cases of organizational change, finding that leaders who singly exhibit a growth mindset lead exponentially more successful change outcomes. Further, these same leaders were far more likely to concurrently apply planned and emergent change processes. As such, we propose the growth mindset as a better conceptualization of the desired mindset for change leaders. Further, we propose a new leadership development approach for change leaders – mindset priming.