Leveraging Grit and Growth Mindset to Drive Team Success
Your Participation is Appreciated
Thank you for agreeing to act as a Gritty Teams Project workshop facilitator and for helping us spread the word about the importance of grit and a growth mindset in a team environment. This discussion guide will help you lead participants through an engaging and illuminating conversation about how these powerful traits might be applied in a professional setting.
About the Scenarios
We have prepared ten different scenarios for you to choose from. As the facilitator, you can have your group read them at the session, or ahead of time, and then discuss them. We do not expect that you will need to use them all. Two or four should be more than sufficient depending on the length of the program you are planning to offer.
Each scenario is drawn from the experiences of Grit Project committee members and friends, and it is important that they ring true for you and your group. When choosing which scenarios to use, we suggest that you pick ones that you think your audience will best identify with. We have tried to offer a broad range of scenarios that address experiences that lawyers at all levels—from law students to junior associates to senior associates and even partners—may have had or are likely to have at some point in their careers.
The scenarios are designed to set up a situation with no immediate or obvious answers; they do not show you how the scenario ends or what ultimately happens. The idea is to set the stage for the participants to think through how they might use grit and a growth mindset on a team, to help them deal with the issues the protagonists in each scenario are confronted with.
There are a couple of reasons we have chosen to approach the scenarios in this way:
- There are no easy answers, and to suggest that any of these situations can be solved quickly or easily is to deny how difficult they are and would be overstating the way in which grit and mindset can be used. Grit and growth mindset are not “quick fixes” to the problems lawyers face, but rather tools that can be used to help navigate complex challenges and still manage to help them keep their heads above water
- Research suggests that reflecting on these traits and then trying to apply them to real life scenarios—in other words, really taking the time to engage with these concepts—leads to the most effective, lasting team-building.
Discussion Questions
At the end of each scenario you will see a list of discussion questions. You can use these discussion questions in a few different ways. The first option is to ask the participants to read them and try to answer them in small groups and then select one or two people who wish to report back to the larger group. From there, you can facilitate a larger group discussion. The second option is for you to pose them to the group at-large and jump right into a full group discussion. The best use of the discussion questions depends on the size and structure of your group and what you think will work best for you. With groups of less than 10, a good group discussion is certainly possible, but with larger groups, we recommend splitting into smaller groups so that everyone has an opportunity to meaningfully participate.