What is Outward Mindset

The essence of Outward Mindset

Background
Many organizations struggle with the same problems. Low employee engagement, conflict between people and teams,
underperformance, etc. And many attempts to change this fall short. Why? Because we treat the symptoms without addressing the cause.

When you really want to have an impact - on yourself, your team or your organization - the first step is to look at your "mindset".

Internal mindset
An internal mindset is often the main cause of conflicts within an
organization. It prevents people from remaining focused on the organizational results. In fact, it does the exact opposite; an internal mindset keeps people focused on themselves and their
individual "goals". This creates problems such as less good teamwork, silos, conflicts between employees and between teams, etc.

Our mindset influences how we look at situations and how we interact with each other, so mindset has an effect on the behavior and culture within an organization. And the culture of an organization influences the results of the company.

How does this work?
Suppose we have a company with about 130 employees. Say the culture in this company is that people are motivated only to "please" their CEO. There are many mid-level silos and managers who only look at their own goals. Everyone seems to be working for themselves and the effectiveness is poor. This has led to low levels of creativity, innovation and confidence. The owner of the company is constantly complaining about the lack of independent thinking and vision among his managers and the endless conflicts in the organization.

So what does an Internal Mindset have to do with these conflicts? This is easiest to explain through an example. The Operations manager of this company, let's call him 'John', is harassed by the marketing manager, who we'll call 'Samuel', and his approach to doing things. Due to the way Samuel does things, John sees Samuel as a loner, not a team player and quite unfriendly. As a result, John avoids Samuel, provides minimal assistance to him, and complains to others about his way of working. It should come as no surprise, then, that Samuel finds John hard to work with, stubborn and unwilling to meet the needs of others.

If this is how Samuel sees John, would it invite him to be less of a loner, more of a team player, and friendlier to John? Of course not. In fact, he's likely to do the exact opposite and show more behavior that bothers John. This means that this pattern will spiral down. John and Samuel can only see how he is right and how the other is making his life difficult. They are both trapped and can only concentrate on how their work is “right and good”. As a result, matters that can be resolved in minutes with a simple phone call can take days to resolve, only after a series of emails and in most cases with the intervention of the owner himself. Imagine the costs of this.

Do you recognize this example?
Are there long-term silos in the company where you work, does the collaboration not run smoothly, or do you have a problem with certain
colleagues? Then it is interesting to take a look at the External Mindset method. Request a free keynote presentation (in English or Dutch) and fill in the contact form on thi site.

Also visit www.arbinger.com for more information on the External Mindset model and research.