Fostering a Growth Mindset To Create Inclusion and Collaboration at GoDaddy

Originally published on GoDaddy Resource Library

By Kristy Lilas, Head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging at GoDaddy

At GoDaddy, we believe in the power of a growth mindset to help us anticipate and meet the evolving needs of millions of entrepreneurs every day. Fostering a growth mindset is a driver of creativity and innovation in areas like product and business development by enabling a more inclusive and collaborative workplace.

For our employees to feel empowered to contribute, grow and have their unique perspectives valued, we established a company culture rooted in continuous learning for growth.

A growth mindset is crucial for collaboration and inclusion

Creating an environment where everyone feels they can contribute and succeed takes effort from everyone and requires people to believe they can learn new things and change their perspectives.

A growth mindset—a persistent dedication to learn, reflect and adapt—helps remove internal barriers that may be holding us back from truly understanding and valuing the variety of viewpoints of those around us and creating relationships that build effective, inclusive teams.

Here are three ways that fostering a growth mindset among employees can help support a business’ goals.

1. Valuing different perspectives for true innovation

A growth mindset encourages us to confront assumptions or stereotypes we may hold about people or ideas that create resistance and stunt collaboration and trust. At GoDaddy, we ask everyone to engage using the 3Cs - curiosity, compassion, and courage. By actively listening and learning more about each other, what we’re thinking, and why we think that way, we open ourselves up to new perspectives.

2. Supporting employees and customers by enabling equal opportunities for success

For a workplace to be most effective and authentically inclusive, we need to adopt processes that support everyone’s growth, regardless of who they are or what their background is. With a growth mindset, we’re more willing to explore different ideas and solutions.

This includes doing so with the understanding that not everyone’s journey is the same. If we believe we already know everything there is to know without taking deliberate steps to learn more about those around us, we’re missing out on key opportunities to better support everyone our business serves.

3. Building a courageous culture of learning and experimentation

A growth mindset promotes psychological safety by encouraging a supportive and accountable feedback loop. And when everyone feels their voice is considered and valued, we nurture an environment where people can thrive, and ideas can flourish.

This type of environment allows us to have a culture largely driven by experimentation, where we’re encouraged to form a hypothesis to test new ideas and not shy away from failure. We ask teams to experiment with different initiatives and share what they’ve learned—whether they succeeded or not. This helps build resilience and perseverance both in our work and with each other.

At GoDaddy, we think cultivating a growth mindset in our people is so important because it helps power both our individual and team success.

Take our latest AI solution, GoDaddy Airo^TM. Having a growth mindset enabled our team’s ability to put the scientific method to work to find ways to leverage these new technologies for our customers. It required research, learning, ideation, debate, experimentation, testing—and among all of that, many little failures to arrive at this very big success.

Everyone had to commit to themselves and each other that they would be dedicated to learning and open to a variety of different ideas and approaches to create something of value for our customers. That is growth mindset hard at work.

Bold aspirations must be balanced with accountability

As we nurture this growth mindset, it is important to recognize the need to set clear expectations. Overemphasis on being open to any and all ideas without guardrails or explanation can lead to a lack of clarity at best, and potentially exclusive behaviors at worst.

When leaders are too quick to ask for change and adjustment—especially if combined with a lack of good change management resources—teams may churn, and performance metrics may get muddied. And if we develop such a deep commitment to a growth mindset that we make space for every opinion without question, including ones intending to cause harm, we may inadvertently allow damaging ideas to take hold.

We must encourage people to always consider the source of learning and its intentions when applying a growth mindset.

Committing to a continuous learning journey

Fostering a growth mindset isn’t a one-time effort but rather a continuous process that we strive for every day. As a company, it’s imperative that we’re constantly challenging ourselves and each other, leveraging our learning opportunities and pushing us to be better.

At GoDaddy, we’re committed to nurturing a culture of both growth and inclusion—because they empower each other, and consequently, our business.

Visit GoDaddy’s 2023 Sustainability Report to learn more about our inclusion efforts.

Empowering through Equity & Inclusion: A GoDaddy Series – At GoDaddy, our global solutions seamlessly connect to our worldwide community of entrepreneurs to serve our mission of empowering entrepreneurs everywhere, making opportunity more inclusive for all. Our people and culture reflect and celebrate that sense of diversity and inclusion in ideas, experiences and perspectives. But we know that’s not enough to build true equity and belonging in our communities. That’s why we prioritize integrating diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging principles into the core of how we work every day. This article is part of the Empowering through Equity & Inclusion thought leadership series that reflects on how organizations can strive for more equitable and inclusive workplaces – as well as communities.