You may have all the skills required and may put in all the hard work you can muster, but you will fail to translate that into great performance and career success unless you pay attention to mindsets.
There are a number of mindsets that are relevant to Career Success, and one of the moe important ones is the Ownership Mindset.
What exactly is the Ownership Mindset and how does it help you perform better and enjoy greater career success?
The Ownership Mindset, as the name suggests, is about taking ownership for your work - and for your outcomes. It is about asserting that you are in charge of your own life, your own results, your career decisions and the success you enjoy.
To better understand this, it is useful to contrast it with its opposite - the Victim Mindset. In a Victim mindset, people do not take responsibility for their lives and for their results - for them everything, especially something that doesn't go well, is on account of somebody else. They blame other people, circumstances, fate - anything but themselves.
For instance, let's say you did not as well as you expected on a significant project, and it turns out that the reason you were not successful was that the market conditions, or economic situation changed. If you adopt a victim mindset, it is fairly easy to explain away your failure - the economy did us in, or the market let us down. In other words, you are blameless, and the fault lies elsewhere.
If on the other hand, you adopted the ownership mindset, you would say something like - "I did not expect the market conditions to change significantly, and therefore the project was vulnerable. If I had anticipated these economic shifts, I would have done things differently."
At first glance, it seems you are saying the same thing in both instances.
However, there is a big difference.
When you are in the Victim Mindset, your priority is to shift the blame - to prove that you did not make any mistakes. This might seem like the smart thing to do, except that people don't quite buy your logic. Employers expect you to deliver even when things don't go quite as you expected. And secondly, perhaps more importantly, you don't learn anything - since you don't see any shortcomings in yourself, you don't think you need to do anything differently in future.
When you are in the Ownership Mindset, your priority is to learn from any shortcomings - and see how you can do better next time. While the results may not please your stakeholders, they know you have done your best, and that you wont repeat the same mistake again.
So the Ownership Mindset helps you learn new things - grow your skills. It helps you Perform better.
Also, when you take responsibility and ownership for outcomes, you build trust with and confidence in your stakeholders. This strengthens your relationships and also the impression that others hold about you.
Thus, the Ownership Mindset positively impacts all the three drivers of career success - Performance, Partnerships and Perception.
One important point to note - it would be wrong to label someone as being an "Owner" or of being a "Victim". Both are within us, and it is really a question of what mindset we adopt in a given situation, or even most of the time.
What this means is that if you are someone that frequently finds yourself playing the victim, you can change - you need to be intentional about adopting the Ownership Mindset as much as you can.
And if you are someone that displays the Ownership Mindset predominantly, Congratulations! Great things will happen. However don't let your guard down. remember the Victim is pretty much alive inside you as well - and you need to make sure you don't fall prey to his tricks.
What mindset do you find yourself adopting in most situations?