Why a Growth Mindset in Leadership Means Staying Open to Unexpected Outcomes

Lindsay Sheldrake
Sep 24, 2024
4 min read

Welcome to "Diary of a Leader" - Real Stories, Leadership Lessons, and Personal Growth

Lindsay Sheldrake - Embracing Unexpected Outcomes in Leadership — Diary of a Leader - Staying open to the unexpected.

Ah, leadership! The thrilling, heart-racing journey of ups, downs, and all the delightful chaos in between.

Welcome to "Diary of a Leader," where I peel back the curtain on the good, the bad, and the downright awkward moments of being a leader.

And today, I’m serving up a lesson that is part one of a two part lesson:

Sometimes the most important leadership lessons come when you let go of your plan and stay open to the unexpected.

The wake-up call

Earlier this year, I joined a program focused on leadership, health, and well-being. I wasn't actively leading a team at the time, but I wanted to keep those leadership muscles strong even without the daily workout. I'd also had experiences in the past where team members came to me overwhelmed, stressed, close to burnout, and I didn't feel fully equipped to guide those conversations.

The program seemed like the obvious fit: get better at supporting my team through stress, pick up a few wellness strategies along the way. Simple enough.

Not entirely.

What I expected versus what I got

I walked in with a clear goal: learn how to better support a team through stress. A solid plan. What I walked away with was something completely different, and more useful than what I'd gone looking for.

Growth doesn't always follow the roadmap you laid out for it. The program took me somewhere I hadn't expected, and it made clear my original objective wasn't the whole story.

What I learned instead was that leadership is more than tools and technique. It's being willing to let go of a preconceived idea of what you're supposed to get from an experience, and staying open even when it takes you somewhere else entirely. The same thing happens in conversations, meetings, performance reviews: you think you know the outcome going in, but the real growth often comes from a different route than the one you mapped.

As I like to say: you may not always get what you want, but you always get what you need.

Why a growth mindset in leadership matters

We come into situations with expectations shaped by our own experience and bias.

That's natural. But it limits what we're able to learn if we aren't open to where the experience actually takes us.

I thought I was going to focus on helping others through stress and burnout. What I found was deeper: the program pushed me to look at my own leadership style, my own well-being, and how my approach was shaping the people around me. It's the practical core of a growth mindset in leadership: staying flexible and present for whatever the experience turns out to be, instead of forcing it to match the goal you walked in with.

How to practice this

A few things that helped me put this into practice:

1. Let go of preconceived outcomes. Goals are useful. Rigid expectations aren't. The lesson you need is sometimes different from the one you planned for, so stay willing to change direction when new insight shows up.

2. Ask more questions, assume less. Get curious instead of assuming you already know what you need. Open-ended questions, asked of yourself or others, surface things you wouldn't have found otherwise.

3. Stay present in the moment. Leadership pulls your attention toward the next step constantly. Some of the best insight comes when you stop projecting forward and pay attention to what's actually happening right now.

4. Reflect regularly. Check in on what you expected versus what you actually learned. Regular reflection is what surfaces the unexpected lessons in the first place.

5. Get comfortable with discomfort. If you feel out of your depth, that's often a sign you're somewhere worth being: past the edge of what you already knew, which is exactly where growth happens.

What this means for you

If you find yourself walking into a situation with a fixed idea of what you're supposed to get out of it, ask whether that fixed idea is helping you or limiting you. The real growth might be somewhere you haven't planned for yet.

If you're noticing this pattern show up specifically in how you lead the person carrying a lot of your operational load, that's exactly the territory the Trusted Operator Academy is built for.

Growth mindset in leadership: common questions

What does it mean to have a growth mindset in leadership? A growth mindset in leadership means treating outcomes as information rather than failure, and staying willing to learn something different from what you originally set out to learn. It's the opposite of walking into a situation with a fixed idea of what you're supposed to get from it.

How is staying open to outcomes different from having no plan? Staying open doesn't mean skipping the plan. It means holding the plan loosely enough to recognize when the real lesson is different from the one you expected, instead of forcing the experience to match your original goal.

Why does flexibility matter for leaders specifically? Leaders set the tone for how a team responds to the unexpected. A leader who treats a deviation from plan as a crisis teaches their team to fear surprises. A leader who treats it as information teaches their team to adapt.

Catch you next time, fellow leaders-in-training.