Getting fit for growth: The leadership mindsets and behaviors that matter

For CEOs and top executives everywhere, growing profitably is the ultimate fitness goal. It’s a long-term athletic pursuit that drives significant value, with high-growth companies experiencing 50 percent higher TSR than their peers. Profitable growers reap even greater rewards.

That said, achieving and sustaining growth is tough work. Previous McKinsey research found that only one in ten companies maintained above-GDP growth and remained in the S&P 500 over 30 years.  Growth demands courage, dedication, and discipline.

McKinsey’s new survey research has found that while many leaders believe they’ve adopted and implemented productive mindsets for growth, these attitudes and ambitions don’t always translate into the behaviors and actions necessary to drive growth.

The journey to growth is a marathon, not a sprint: it often requires more than 18 months to see results. To get there, leaders need more than just ambition and business savvy; they need a holistic approach with courage and resilience at the core. Getting fit for growth means converting mindsets into actions to drive toward targets. Leaders should be intentional in making decisions that reflect five critical growth mindsets.

1. Invest in growth, even in turbulent times.  Investing in growth starts with thinking about, then acting upon, an organization’s long-term growth goals. Survey results reveal gaps between executives’ growth ambitions and their ability to translate them into practices and results.   Through-cycle outperformers—leaders who outperform through the ups and downs of an economic cycle by prioritizing long-term growth over short-term initiatives—tend to produce higher revenue growth than their peers.  Leaders’ focus areas should include the following:  Spending more time on long-term growth initiatives.  Allocating resources to long-term growth initiatives.  And communicating externally and internally that growth is a North Star. 
2. Be audacious on growth.  Acting audaciously means thinking creatively, taking risks, and mobilizing resources quickly across a portfolio of growth bets and pathways. This includes a willingness to explore unconventional avenues with potential for growth. However, when it comes to committing resources to bold actions, the reality looks different.  Leaders of outperforming companies set themselves apart in the following ways:  Experimenting with bold risks to support innovative ideas.  Favoring speedy action over perfection.   
3. Listen to your customers—for real.  Improving customer experience creates stacked wins for higher returns, faster growth, and lower costs.  Leaders of outperforming companies put the customer at the center by achieving the following:  Figuring out what customers want next. Deploying gen AI to respond to customers.  Ensuring customer insights are consistently translated into new growth initiatives.
4. Rally a dream team for growth.  Talent is essential for growth. Engaged employees fuel innovation, productivity, success of functional capabilities, and customer loyalty. By focusing on talent, companies can achieve a competitive advantage and cultivate an organization with a growth mindset.  Leaders focus on talent to fuel growth by making the following moves:  Elevating and redeploying top performers.  Rewarding failure when done fast and cheaply.  Pursuing unconventional sources for talent. 
5. Derisk growth by executing with excellence.  Executives need a robust operating rhythm—one that clearly manages growth activities, communicates growth strategies, and ensures accountability—to succeed against their growth goals.  Derisking growth also requires executives to harness the right technology from the early planning stages all the way through to execution. The potential of AI and gen AI is, by now, widely viewed by executives as an important growth enabler.   Successful growth transformers take the following actions:  They recognize risks and challenges and course-correct with agility.  They remove roadblocks.  They enable decision-making and assign real accountability.