Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Cultivating a Growth Mindset @ Sistema.bio


Cultivating a Growth Mindset @ Sistema.bio

Is it possible to foresee what you could accomplish with a few years of passion, toil, and training? The answer is “Yes”.  It isn’t some hypothetical situation, dependent on any manner of factors from genes to environment. It’s a mindset. And it’s the one you cultivate every day at Sistema.bio.

Sistema.bio India is a social enterprise that provides smallholder dairy farmers with anaerobic digestion (Biogas) technology, service and financing that allows them to increase agricultural productivity and net income, while improving the environmental sustainability of their farms.

Sistema.bio has been trying to overcome the challenges for development of biogas potential in India. Despite the advancement of anaerobic digestion technology, the rural India suffers from drawbacks such as low methane yields, incomplete bioconversion, process instability and economic non-viability largely due to wrong implementation designs and poor service networks. Additionally, lack of end user productive applications is a major challenge to large scale adoption.


While evaluating Sistema.bio as my next career option in Jan 2019, I came across this young super energetic guy, Alex Eaton who had a voracious appetite for learning, constantly seeking out the kind of input that he can metabolize into constructive plan and with a mindset to building a Biogas sales model via public-private partnerships, took me no time to accept the offer. My journey to build a growth mindset in this company started at this very moment.

In some time, I understood the challenge and quickly realised that a new approach would be needed to address the market needs. Meeting my sales colleagues, I also felt the need to re-build a spirited sales team which can overcome market hurdles and achieve desired goals.

I’ve witnessed people in my previous organisations, who have this one consuming goal of proving themselves, in their careers, and in their relationships. Such people have “Fixed Mindsets” and they negatively impact growth plans.

Here at Sistema.bio, when I started observing things as mutable, the situation gave me a way to a larger picture. The consequences of my belief that intelligence and personality can be developed rather than being immutably engrained traits, showed me the path to start working with my sales leaders on cultivating their mindset for growth

A “growth mindset,” as I call it, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a tendency to believe that we can grow. A growth mindset thrives on challenge and sees failure “not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.”

Our mindset stems from our own set of powerful beliefs. Thankfully, beliefs can be changed when they no longer serve us to achieve our goals. This practically happened within Sistema.bio Team India when the route-to-market was redefined, and more focus was given to public-private partnerships than existing Direct-to-Home approach. A large portion of my team members had to challenge their beliefs, while some of them continued investing their energies in looking smart, many of them took the route of learning and developing to embrace new challenges.

I took support of Sistema.bio leadership and applied SIX methods to nurture growth mindset of my sales team and make them see “a world of new possibilities”

1.    Create a New Compelling Belief – “The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life” are the famous words of C.S. Dweck. We started the year 2020, with a new compelling belief about Sistema.bio growth potential in India and how sales and marketing teams can achieve this potential with their talents and skills.

2.    View Failure as a path to growth – I always believed that, failure is the time to apply extra effort to significantly improve your results. The fear from failure is something which needs to go out if you have built a growth mindset. During open sessions with Sistema.bio sales leaders, failures were told to be a part of their journey to achieve their goals.

3.    Catapult your Self-Awareness – Sistema.bio promotes a culture of transparent feedbacks & reviews. This helped sales team in realizing their gifts and talents and simultaneously comprehend their strengths & Weaknesses

4.    Convert yourself into an Inquisitive Learner – Unlearning is the best way to optimize and change yourself. I cultivated a culture of asking more questions in Sistema.bio and being more curious about everything we see.

5.    Learn to hear your fixed mindset “voice.” – Every month in sales review managers were told to hear their inner voices. They were told that once they know they have a fixed mindset; they need to anticipate its voice in advance. They need to question themselves “Can I do this?”, “What if I fail?”, “Can I listen to criticism?” It’s the voice that undermines so much of what we do; the inner critic that judges us and our work.

6.    Cultivate a sense of purpose. – Always keep a greater sense of purpose. The Big picture of Sistema.bio India sales potential was repeated in every sales meeting to continue igniting growth mindset. Sales managers may feel low at times, but when you discuss the sense of purpose of their existence in the system – the benefits they are providing to smallholder dairy farmers and environment as a whole, brings a positive mood change and they often comeback with renewed spirit.

Today, many of my sales managers are on a journey to cultivate their “growth mindsets” and believe their potential can be harnessed via learning from others, having a good strategy and being diligent. This re-energized sales team, is now working directly with more than 25 farmer organizations, cooperatives and impact firms that provide Sistema.bio access to farmers and help validate our work around bio-digesters.

With a growth mindset, employees focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are. They work hard to learn more and eventually get smarter. My advice to all colleagues here is “to acknowledge yourself as someone who possesses a growth mentality and be proud to let it guide you throughout your career”.

Adopting a growth mindset is not just essential in your career, it’s critical. I am happy to discuss more on this subject and happy to receive your comments on atul@sistema.bio

To read more about Sistema.bio, visit www.sistema.bio/blog

 

Monday, November 25, 2013

International Mountain Day Quiz 2013

Message from FAO, United Nations:


Covering around 27 percent of the earth's land surface, mountains play a critical role in moving the world towards sustainable economic growth.
International Mountain Day (11-Dec) is an opportunity to create awareness about the importance of mountains to life, to highlight the opportunities and constraints in mountain development and to build partnerships that will bring positive change to the world’s mountains and highlands.

Picture Quiz Rules

betterkids.info is organsing a Quiz contest for kids studying in Grades 3 till Grade 8. This contest is open till 11 Dec 2013. 

Answer the Questions as a separate mail by using following format:
Answer 1:____________________
Answer 2:_____________________



Answer 10:_________________________
Complete all the answers. Incomplete entries would be disqualified. The decision of betterkids.info in final and binding. 

Please send in your entries / answers to betterkids.info@gmail.com on or before 11-Dec-2013.

Question 1: Identify the Mountain (click the picture to zoom)
Hint: a trip to this mountain gives you the trip to the 5 great mountains


Question 2: Identify the Mountain (click the picture to zoom)
Hint: The 4 sides steep, rising above the surrounding glaciers, says the four corners of the world i.e North, South, East and West.

Question 3: Identify the Mountain(click the picture to zoom)
Hint: It is associated with sunrise, birth, and re-birth, and is often regarded the foremost of some Group of mountains.

Question 4: Identify the Mountain (click the picture to zoom)
Hint: The mount has numerous deep ravines and a lot of regularly shaped peaks. Its is popular in Europe.

Question 5: Identify the Mountain (click the picture to zoom)

Hint: This cylindrical peak with near-vertical sides has served as a guiding landmark for travellers for thousands of years. 



Question 6: Identify the Mountain(click the picture to zoom)

Hint: There used to be a border checkpoint at the summit. The country is famous for car production and technology.


Question 7: Identify the Mountain(click the picture to zoom)

Hint: Newest addition to UNESCO's Global Geopark Network 

Question 8: Identify the Mountain(click the picture to zoom)

Hint: It lies near the source of some of the longest rivers in Asia

Question 9: Identify the Mountain(click the picture to zoom)
Hint: Four presidents are featured on the mountain



Question 10: Write 3 lines on the topic given below 

How Mountains are Key to a Sustainable Future?


Line1:__________________________________________________
Line 2:_____________________________________________
Line 3:___________________________________



Submit your entries by sending the answers on a simple mail to betterkids.info@gmail.com

Example of entry

To
betterkids.info
Name of Student:
Grade:
School:

Answer 1:
Answer 2:



Answer 10:



Thanks and Wishing you Happy Mountains Day on 11 Dec 2013.

Friday, August 9, 2013

What we aim through Geography Learning Centre ??

1. We aim to develop knowledge and understanding of local, regional and global ecosystem and their interrelationships.

2. We aim to encourage an understanding and appreciation of the variety of natural and human conditions on the Earth

3. We aim to develop empathy with people from diverse environments and an understanding of human interdependence

4. We aim to develop the ability to use a range of communicative methods, especially those concerned with map reading.

5. We aim to encourage the development of a sense of place and spatial awareness

6. We aim to encourage the development of caring attitudes and responsible behaviour towards our environment.