Growth Mindset and Emotional Intelligence: The Essential Elements of Leadership
In the fast-paced, complicated, and sometimes chaotic day-to-day life in long-term care facilities, having a growth mindset and emotional intelligence are key ways that leaders can build teams that communicate and work together well.
A Growth Mindset is about seeing challenges as opportunities for growth and mistakes as opportunities for learning. Long-term care is an ever-evolving field, requiring us to adapt to new challenges and developments. A growth mindset focuses teams on continuous learning and improvement, allowing them to embrace change, learn from it, and find innovative solutions to provide the best care possible.
Emotional intelligence is about self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Becoming more self-aware by recognizing our own emotions leads to better self-regulation. And this allows us to be more present with staff, residents, or family members, making us better teammates, who are able to create an environment for excellent teamwork and communication.
How to start? These three things can help focus and regulate:
1. Praise the Effort, Not the Person: People perform better when their efforts are recognized. Focusing on effort as opposed to labels or accomplishments, reinforces a growth mindset. The LiveWell Method tool Compliment Card that is used during a Huddle is an excellent way to practice this.
In fact, Growth Mindset is such a powerful concept, it was featured on a recent podcast by world-class Stanford researcher, Andrew Huberman.
2. Self-Reflection and Education: Emotional intelligence assessments help people to identify their own strengths and triggers so that they can more quickly self-regulate in emotionally difficult situations.
Learning Collaborative member, John Burns, comments on self-regulating in stressful work situations.
3. Box Breathing. Researchers have found that the simple exercise of breathing in for 4 counts, holding for 4 counts, breathing out for 4 counts and holding for 4 counts over a two minute interval changes our physiology by calming us down, enabling us to focus. That’s why Cecilia Owsley of Guardian Angel Homes starts the first four LiveWell sessions with Box Breathing. And she uses it every day in tough situations and conversations.
LiveWell Coach and Guardian Angel Homes COO, Cecilia Owsley, reviews the breathing technique known as Box Breathing in this video.
Why should you join a learning cohort and do LiveWell?
Because it helps you create the kind of communities where staff and residents thrive together. Where literally everyone works in sync to innovate care, nurture dignity, build community, and honor elders. It is possible. We can do this if we focus on five core principles:
ENGAGE: LiveWell offers practices and tools that include everyone, which helps staff and residents build an equitable and inclusive community. Every person knows that they belong and are a valuable part of making their community a better place to live and work.
EMPOWER: These same practices and tools improve teamwork and communication, making it easy for people to take meaningful action in order to improve the care and safety of residents and staff.
EXPLORE: Curiosity about new ideas, technologies, and ways of living and working is key to becoming an innovative learning organization.
EXCEL: LiveWell-trained teams know what excellent care looks like, use their strengths to model excellent teamwork and communication, and are skilled in best practices of tracking measuring, root cause analysis, and tests of change.
EVOLVE: Over time, organizations that are committed to excellence and a growth mindset find learning opportunities everywhere. They develop a culture that sustains continuous improvement, nurtures innovation, and above all ensures that everyone belongs.
LiveWell also helps retain staff and build community. Communities that do LiveWell have a 60% decrease in staff turnover. LiveWell also improves the quality of life for staff AND residents. Residents have fewer falls and fewer medication errors, while staff experience fewer workplace injuries.
LiveWell communities also reduce their costs: reduced falls and increased staff retention help communities save an average of $135,900 annually.
Stay Cool and Have Fun this Summer!
— Barbara, Steve, Andy, Marcus, Cecilia, Whitney, Ann, Miles, and Judy