The Importance of a Growth Mindset - when things go Wrong

We are often so focused on what comes next that we forget to recognise how far we've already come; but celebrating progress isn't complacency, it is part of creating a growth mindset, both for ourselves and for the people we lead.

One of the things I have noticed over the years, both in my own businesses and when coaching founders, is how quickly we move the goalposts. We set ourselves a target. We reach it and almost immediately, we are thinking about the next one. We sign up our first few clients; we reach £100k turnover, we grow our team but this creates another problem to solve. There is always something else to do. That can make it very difficult to appreciate just how far we have come.

I know from my own experience the importance of celebrating your wins, and how closely this is connected to having a growth mindset because a growth mindset isn't simply about believing you can improve; it is about recognising the learning, progress and growth that happens along the way.

We are often better at spotting the failures - that didn't work like difficult clients, recruitment mistakes or the months when sales were below budget. I have made plenty of mistakes in my career. I've taken risks that didn't work out and experienced major setbacks including the 2008 financial crisis when the phones stopped ringing overnight and we had to make 50% of our team redundant.

These experiences were challenging and very stressful but looking back, they were all part of the education. They taught me to adapt, to ask better questions, to understand my numbers, to be more careful about who I trusted and to recover when things didn’t go according to plan. And recover we did. The business started to grow again and reached £8m turnover with a team of 25. The most important thing I learnt was that a setback isn't necessarily a failure. Sometimes it is simply information.

But what about the things that went right?

This is where I think we can all be guilty. We achieve something significant and tell ourselves: "Yes, but I've still got so much more to do." I have certainly done this myself. Prior to co-founding my first business which grew to £8m, I built an international business unit from scratch that grew to $10m and then went back to university and completed an MBA, having dropped out from my undergraduate degree at 19.

There were plenty of moments along the way when I was proud of what I had achieved; but if I'm honest, I was often already thinking about the next challenge. I see exactly the same thing with founders I coach. They achieve something they have been working towards for months, sometimes years. and rather than taking a moment to acknowledge it, they say: "Yes, but now I need to..."

We can become so focused on growth that we forget to notice that we are growing. Celebrating isn't complacency. Celebrating your wins doesn't mean becoming complacent, it doesn't mean sitting back and deciding you've made it and it certainly doesn't mean ignoring the things that still need to improve. Quite the opposite.

Taking time to recognise progress can give you the energy and perspective to tackle the next challenge. Imagine climbing a mountain and never looking back. You keep your eyes firmly fixed on the summit, concentrating only on how far you still have to go. You might eventually get there, but you will have missed the view. Business can be like that. We become so obsessed with the destination that we fail to appreciate the distance we've already travelled.

A Growth Mindset Works Both Ways

When I talk about growth mindset with founders, I don't want it to become another piece of business jargon. For me, it is much more practical than that. It means being able to look at something that hasn't worked and ask: What can I learn from this? But it also means looking at something that has worked and asking: What did I do well here and what does this tell me about what is possible?

This is incredibly powerful because your successes contain information too. If you won a major client, what made that possible? If your team delivered without you, what changed? If you increased your prices and clients accepted them, what did that teach you? Those aren't just things to celebrate. They are evidence. Evidence that you are capable of doing something you perhaps weren't capable of doing a year ago.

And it doesn't stop with the founder. There is another reason I think celebrating wins matters. It is what happens to the team. As a leader, you are constantly showing your people what matters through what you notice, what you praise and what you celebrate. If the only things you celebrate are hitting the sales target, winning the big client or getting everything right, your team can quickly learn that mistakes are something to avoid. And when people are worried about getting things wrong, they are less likely to take risks, suggest new ideas or tell you when something isn't working.

That can create a very different culture from the one you intended. A growth culture creates space for people to say: "I've tried this and it didn't work, but I think I know why." or "We didn't get the result we wanted, but we've learned something that will help us next time." Those are things worth celebrating too.

Sometimes the Win is the Learning

When you are growing a business, not everything goes according to plan. In fact, if you are trying new things, it shouldn't. The important question isn't whether something went perfectly, it is what happened next. Did someone take responsibility, identify what went wrong and come up with an alternative? Did they share the learning with the rest of the team and did you change the process so the same problem didn't happen again?

That is growth and sometimes the best "win" in a team isn't the outcome you originally wanted. It is someone having the confidence to identify a problem and come forward with a solution. This gives your team permission to think. One of the biggest shifts a founder can make as their business grows is moving from being the person who has all the answers to being the person who creates an environment where other people can find them. That requires trust.

If every mistake is criticised and every decision is second-guessed, people will naturally bring fewer ideas to you. They will wait for instructions, they will play safe and eventually, you become the bottleneck. But when people know that thoughtful experimentation is encouraged, and that a mistake followed by learning is treated differently from simply ignoring a problem, something changes.

People start to take ownership, they start solving problems before bringing them to you and they start sharing ideas and learning from each other. That is when you begin to build a team that can genuinely grow with the business.

The Leader Sets the Tone

For me, this is one of the most important responsibilities of a founder. You don't create culture by writing a set of values on the wall. You create it through what you consistently model and reinforce. We are naturally drawn to the next milestone., the next revenue target. the next client, the next employee, the next stage of growth; but perhaps we need to get better at looking backwards too because growth isn't only about where you're going.

It's about recognising how far you've already come, understanding what got you there, and using that learning to decide what comes next. And sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is stop, look back, celebrate the win and then ask: What can we learn from it?

About the Author

Sarah is a business founder, MBA graduate and coach who has built and scaled businesses to over £8 million in revenue with teams of up to 25.. She now helps ambitious founders gain clarity, build motivated teams and create businesses that support the life they want to lead.

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