Cultivate a Culture of Growth Within Your Organization
Episode 474 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Mary C. Murphy
How can you foster a growth mindset to transform your company culture?
The concept of a growth mindset is an often-discussed topic these days, with the majority of the conversation exploring the development and impact of this approach to learning on the individual level. While pursuing her PhD, however, my guest today became curious about how teams and organizations are impacted by a growth mindset and how its cultivation can affect workplace culture and company prosperity.
Mary C. Murphy is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. She is the protege of Carol Dweck, who first coined the term “growth mindset” through her original research. Alongside this maven of mindset, Mary began to explore how cultures of growth create better places of work and learning—for the employees and students, as well as for an organization’s overall success. Her new book, Cultures of Growth, leverages this research to help companies shift their workplace cultures for the better.
Mary and I explore the trick for diagnosing your current company culture, how cultures of growth impact companies, and how anyone—from the new employee to the executive—can take steps to start transforming their organization with growth in mind.
What is a culture of genius?
Identifying which mindset your company culture embodies—a culture of growth (growth mindset) or a culture of genius (fixed mindset)—is the first step in exploring the potential for change.
A fixed mindset culture, what Mary calls a culture of genius, places all its decision-making and action-planning on the current star performer. “It’s about who is the smartest in the room,” Mary explains. Whoever is considered to have the most inherent capability carries all the decision-making power. As a result of this focus on performance as perception, everyone buys into the belief that some people are innate geniuses and others “just can’t cut it.”
What’s more, the decision-making process and the decisions made vary widely because the genius of the moment can change in an instant with one “wrong step.” When a new Smartest Person overtakes the previous one, corporate strategies are realigned based on this person’s ideas, upending the previous progress. The research shows that this about-face approach doesn’t contribute to the long-term success of high-performing teams—quite the opposite, in fact.
What is a culture of growth?
In a company with a culture of growth, the decision-making process stems from the belief that everyone on the team can develop and contribute to the problems and initiatives in the queue. Furthermore, a culture of growth puts support in place that enables everyone to develop their full potential.
As we see from cultures of genius, identifying specific people as inherently smarter or more capable means that the perspective rapidly changes as soon as their performance slips or their idea doesn’t pan out. In a growth mindset, innovation and good ideas can stem from every mind, and this fosters the acceptance of experimentation and risk-taking, as well as the inevitable mistakes that come with such bold exploration.
Rather than covering up mistakes and highlighting only the successes of an individual or team project, missteps are discussed right beside wins—the mindset attributes the success of the current project to the learning that stems from successes and failures. Likewise, studying the pros and cons better informs the best steps forward for future projects. This dissemination of all takeaways, “good” and “bad,” means the individual, the team, and the company as a whole have the opportunity to learn and grow.
Research shows that culture of growth environments are the most rigorous. They are dedicated to the ongoing collection and examination of data. Because they are always re-confirming that the project is in line with the goal, these companies catch tangents early and can pivot when they need to without the entire structure crumbling beneath them.
Avoiding the Evaluative Situation mindset trigger as a leader
Everyone in a company is a culture creator, regardless of their power, authority, or prestige within the organization. The data across industries and regions shows that we all shape our surroundings, and perpetuating a shift in culture is undoubtedly a group effort.
We can all encourage cultures of growth by viewing all interactions through the lens of learning—how can I grow and develop with each task, and how can I foster this growth and development in my team?
Mary’s research has uncovered a collection of mindset triggers—circumstances that can push anyone across the mindset continuum from growth to fixed and leave them feeling like progressing isn’t possible. Teams, and leaders in particular, can take steps to avoid triggering employees and coworkers, keeping everyone on that growth trajectory as much as possible.
One of these triggers is “evaluative situations.” Many of us are already primed to tumble into a fixed mindset when we know we’re going to receive feedback on something. From a leadership perspective, adjusting how feedback is delivered can make a big difference. Often, a performance review provides a general acknowledgment of what an employee did well and where they can improve. Mary points out that it’s important for leaders to get iterative in both instances—learning exactly which processes or practices led to the label of “exceeds expectations” is just as important as understanding those that led to “room for improvement.”
Fostering a growth mindset as an employee
Even if you don’t oversee a team, any new assignment is an opportunity to cultivate a growth mindset. So many of us default to a response like “Nope, no questions; I’ve got this” when our boss delegates a new task, but Mary encourages everyone to fight that urge!
Instead, make it clear to your supervisor and team members that you will be bringing questions to them over the course of the project. Establish the goals and audience of the project early on, and explain that your follow-ups will help ensure the project remains in alignment.
The connection between diversity, equity, and growth mindset
Organizations with cultures of growth see benefits to employee engagement, retention, innovation, and finances—but that’s not the end of the story. Mary’s research also shows that a growth mindset helps diversity and equity flourish.
We have a prototype of the successful person, the “genius.” We see, over and over, that white men are unconsciously associated with this ideal. In a fixed mindset culture, this preconceived notion is at the fore as we seek out the next genius. Anyone who doesn’t conform is overlooked.
In cultures of growth, though, the belief that good ideas can come from anywhere means everyone is considered for success. When “who has traveled the greatest distance in their work” is the metric by which promise is measured, those who have had to surmount systemic challenges driven by race, ethnicity, gender, and so on are the learners, the adapters, the ones whose past growth highlights their potential for future success.
Now, what about you? Do you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset? How are you working to build or improve cultures of growth in your workplace and personally? Share your thoughts on Mary’s fascinating work in our Courage Community on Facebook, or join us in our group on LinkedIn.
Related links from today’s episode:
Mary’s book “Cultures of Growth”
Take the Mindset Triggers Assessment
Take the Mindset Culture Assessment
Episode 452, Women and the Fight for a Fair Economy
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Learn to lead like a boss with LEVEL UP:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 474. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today we're diving into how to create a culture of growth.
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And really, a growth mindset on your team within organizations today is especially relevant for leaders and managers of any kind, but really all of us who contribute to the culture that we're a part of in our families, in our households, in our communities, and, of course, on our teams at work.
Joining me to break all this down is Mary C. Murphy, the Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, founding director of the Summer Institute on Diversity at the center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences department at Stanford University, and founder and CEO of The Equity Accelerator, a research and consulting organization that works with schools and companies to create more equitable learning and working environments through social and behavioral science.
But what you really need to know about Mary is that she's the protege of Carol Dweck, the OG mindset scholar who first published a paper in 1988 detailing the difference between having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, which is really the jumping off point for Mary and her entire scholarly career. Mary is the author of more than 100 publications and in 2019 was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. government.
She's also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and her research has been profiled in the New York Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, NPR, and many others. She had so much to share and such relatable stories that I think we can all take with us as we think about cultivating not only our own growth mindset so that we can be tolerant of risk taking and failing forward, but how we can actually instill that mindset in those around us.
Mary, thanks so much for being here today.
MARY: Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here.
EMILIE: So tell me a little bit about your career, your background, and what led you to publish Cultures Of Growth: How The New Science Of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, And Organizations. Quite a hefty book, I might add. It's in my hands right now. It's a good read. Your footnotes are this long, right? Yeah.
MARY: Yes, exactly. I was gonna say it's mostly footnotes from all the research. Well, you know, the journey to publishing Cultures Of Growth has been, I would say, a pretty long one, starting from graduate school days, where I'll tell you, sort of the Cultures Of Growth origin story. I was a graduate student at Stanford, and Carol Dweck, who came up with the idea of the fixed and growth mindset. She had just arrived from Columbia University to Stanford. And what's traditional in the PhD program at Stanford is that every PhD student kind of gets up in front of their faculty members and gives a talk about the research they've been doing in the last year.
And so I was attending one of these talks of a friend of mine. He was in his fourth year of PhD, and all of a sudden, in the middle of his talk, without raising his hand, of course, it was a he, in this case, without raising his hand, a faculty member blurts out, you know, well, it's so clear the fatal flaw in all of this work is XYZ. And he goes on, and my friend turns to him. We all turn to him kind of in horror. And my friend turns over and starts to try to engage the person. But then I on the other side of the room, a different faculty member yells out, no, the fatal fly is an XYZ, it's ABC.
And suddenly, these two faculty members are fighting amongst each other to show who's the smartest in the room, who can take down this idea the quickest with the most, like, fatal comment. And I think we've all been in seminars like this or in meetings like this where everyone's competing to see who's smarter and who's smartest in the room. And, you know, I saw this, and I was struck not only about how it affected my friend in the moment, he's the expert on his work, and suddenly he was kind of frozen in the moment, right? He kind of choked.
And two weeks later, I'm in a different seminar with a different set of faculty, and they're treating the student talks completely differently. They're still finding the problems in the work of the student. But instead of trying to compete to see who's the smartest and who can take down the idea the quickest, they're now chatting with each other about how and competing with each other about how to improve the idea the most. They say, oh, this person should include this new scale or include this new population of people to look at or, you know, do this work in a different context.
And suddenly, the students were able to engage in the brainstorming with the faculty members. They were able to stay present in the moment, and they left motivated with a whole bunch of real strategies that they could take, you know, to implement. And I took this idea. I saw these two environments, and it really felt like, to me, they had mindset at the core of them. One was this fixed mindset. Prove and perform. You're only as good as your last performance kind of environment. And the other one was much more about learning, growth, and development, that we're going to do this together. We're going to break it up to build it up. Break it down to build it up.
And I took this down the hallway to Carol, who had just arrived, Carol Dweck. And I knocked on her door and I said, Carol, I know everyone has thought about mindset for the last 35 years as a quality inside our mind. What's your mindset? How does it affect you? What's my mindset? How does it affect me? But has anyone ever thought about mindset as a quality of groups, of teams, of organizations? What would it look like if you had a mindset as a cultural feature in these environments, and how would it affect people there? And she looked at me and she was like, Mary, no one has ever thought about mindset in that way, but we should do it together.
And that was 15 years ago. And so what you hold in your hand right there in Cultures Of Growth is kind of the culmination of our work in schools and companies and our research, our published research over how these mindset cultures shape us.
EMILIE: Amazing. I love that so much. And for those who haven't heard me geek out recently about Carol Dweck's legacy in the space, [LAUGHTER] let me give you my sort of background, right? I grew up in a fixed trait household where, a fixed mindset household where still to this day, now that I have a two year old, I have to remind my mother, please don't call him smart. Please don't tell him he's smart, right?
But we kind of grew up in this culture was all about being smart and being a high achiever. And I, as the eldest daughter of, you know, in my six person household, was like, got it, assignment, understood, you know, and I was the straight A, brown nosing...
MARY: I will become this. Yes.
EMILIE: …and I think you call them in your book, like the, I know, kid. I know, I know. Like with your hand in the air. That was me. That's still me. I'm still obnoxious to some people in that way, probably in the same way that those critiques were flying into your poor friend's presentation. But that was the culture I grew up in.
When I got my hands on Mindset. I call Carol Dweck the OG of all mindset work. Really? Because every coach out there, everyone who's talking about the power of your mind over it's like it all goes back to Carol's research, right? And I read that book, I gave it to my parents, I bought them a copy. I was like, this is going to change your life because it's changing mine. That's not always how things work, as it turns out. But it's caused quite some powerful conversations.
And I got my hands on that book right before I launched, Bossed Up when I made a hard right turn in my career, took some big risks and had an appetite for failure that I really needed at the time with the right mindset to help me grow through that failure. Now we are eleven and a half years later, you know, having this conversation.
So it's been so transformative for me personally. But you're right in creating even just a household as I'm in the midst of doing right now, you know, with my partner, who's a trained architect, who talks about “crits”, as in critiques being a big part of his upbringing in schooling. You know, we've talked a lot about how to create a culture of growth in our own household. And of course, as a manager of a team, like in my own company.
And so I'm so excited by your work in this arena, and I can't wait to sink our teeth in. So how do you first start? By deciding or deducing what kind of an environment you're operating within, whether it's in your team or your company overall?
MARY: Yeah, well, you know, because we think of mindset culture as really a cultural feature of our families, our communities, our workplaces, our team environments. What we do is we go in and we look at the cultural artifacts that are there in that group. What are we saying and doing with each other? What are the typical interactions? What are practices and policies? How do we open meetings and close meetings? What are the conversations we're having around the kitchen table right? When we're having dinner together? Are we just focusing on the winds of the day? Are we also talking about our favorite mistakes? Right?
And, you know, what are we actually communicating through the leadership messages, whether those be what parents are saying or what supervisors and leaders are saying in the environment? And how do we really shape those interactions to have the growth mindset more at heart to be about learning growth and development, rather than proving and performing, look to your left, look to your right. Only a couple of you will remain at the end of this quarter or after the quarterly review.
You know, we're looking at these kinds of messages because, you know, there's this real fight within organizational behavior. What is culture? Is it what we say we value in our mission statements on the website that, or is it really embedded in these day to day interactions, the way that we operate on the ground? And I come down firmly on the side of. It's how we experience it in real life on the ground. And so that's where we look at, to look at whether we're in more of a culture of genius, this fixed mindset culture, or a culture of growth.
EMILIE: Right. I think it's great that you've given them both pretty positive names. Right? We're not here to say, like, I just think there's some industries, including the ones that my husband operates in, where he says, look, if you're off by a millimeter in my line of work, this is a big problem. Like, this is a big problem. And there's a lot of folks who have high pressure environments where technical expertise is prized above creating a culture where experimentation is valued. Right?
And so describe for me to get us started here, like, what is the difference between a culture of genius and a culture of growth compared to just the internal mindset around growth and fixed rate? What are the hallmarks of those two cultures?
MARY: Yeah. So in a fixed mindset culture, what I call a culture of genius, because it really is like that first seminar I described, right? Who's the smartest in the room? Who are the geniuses in the environment? In these kinds of fixed mindset cultures, the focus is really going to be on star performers. It's going to be focused on who are the people that we all tend to agree seem to just have more inherent capacity or capabilities, smarter, more able. Right? And then all of the resources and all of the decision making power are kind of surrounding these individuals.
Now, I will say that a lot of times people think these cultures of genius are more rigorous or are more, you know, precise and high performing. In fact, our research shows just the opposite in these fixed mindset cultures, because they're so focused on who the genius is, who's the smartest in the room, and putting all of our resources around those individuals. What we see is that the decision making happening in these environments around these teams, really fluctuates wildly based on who the genius is at the moment and what they think in the moment and whatever their gut is telling you. And so you see teams realigning their strategy over and over based on what the genius in residence might say that day.
And the opposite of this fixed mindset culture is the culture of growth and that culture. How do we know what does that look like it really has that growth mindset at the heart of it? It believes that given the right supports, regardless of where people are in their own capabilities and intelligence levels at the moment, that the belief is that everyone can develop and contribute, and there are supports put in place to enable everyone to grow, develop, and contribute. And for any learning from mistakes, to actually be, learned from, and kind of gather what the juice is in those mistakes and then to share that widely. So it's not just the one team that benefits, but the whole organization.
And what we see in these environments is that these environments are the most rigorous. They are collecting data over and over to see whether the effort they're putting forward as individuals is actually moving them toward the goal. And they're much more precise with regards to knowing where they stand and knowing what steps they need to take to improve and to get better. And so when we say, you know, there could be these trade offs around rigor or precision and the fixed growth mindset, we actually find that the most rigorous and the most precise organizational cultures are these cultures of growth compared to the culture of genius.
EMILIE: That's so interesting, because I recently sat down with June Carbone, one of the co-authors of a new book around the winner take all economy. And this sort of, like, short sightedness that's taken over corporate America, particularly since the eighties, that is like high performance at all cost, performance as a perception management focus, right? And then rock stars only, right a players only seeing people as either good or bad, they can either cut it or they can't. I could name a bunch of companies right off the top of my head where I know people who work there, where it's like the folks in that culture have bought into this belief that I'm a star player, I can do no wrong, and that, you know, if you're not a rock star like me, you can't be here.
And not everyone can learn and grow and improve, and therefore, we cut corners, mistakes get hidden. Bad news ages instead of coming into the light. And it doesn't become that kind of a learning organization that you're describing, where we all learn from mistakes that inevitably happen because we're all human beings, and then we get smarter collectively as a result. So, yeah, I think that's such a hard mentality to push back on, but that's sort of Carol's work, right? It's like, how to individually change it.
How do we, as leaders in the workplace, kind of nudge people towards growth in terms of what can we do, what can we control? If you've got. Especially if you have, like, high achieving, brown-nosing, goody two shoes like me. Right? [LAUGHTER] Who then you get on your staff? This is me 15 years ago. Let me be clear. This is not me so much anymore. But when you get someone like that on your staff, how, as a leader, can you help them kind of lean into the growth mentality and create that culture that you want to see?
MARY: Yeah, I want to be really clear that I'm not saying that we're just victims of our environments. I actually believe in what the data seem to suggest across many studies, with hundreds of leaders and thousands of employees across many industries. What we see over and over again is that we are all culture creators. Regardless of our role, regardless if we have positional power in a team or in an organization, we are all culture creators, meaning we are going to shape our surroundings. And shifting an entire culture is a group effort. We each play a role.
And the key of what leaders can do in particular is to really look at everything through the lens of learning. It's to see how can I grow and develop in each task and in each interaction. And a really important thing to do, both as individual contributors, but also as leaders, is to know thyself, know what your mindset triggers are. We know there's four mindset triggers that have really robust evidence across situations. They're very common and popular triggers that we see. Know what your triggers are, and then know what the triggers are on your team.
So that when you are giving feedback, asking someone to take a stretch assignment, when you are praising other folks on the team, you're not moving everyone else into their fixed mindset, where they say, wow, she's so successful, I guess that means I can never measure up. Right? We have the power as leaders to really create these micro cultures on our teams, in our divisions, and then in our whole organization of genius or of growth. And so figuring out the triggers for ourselves and for others is a really good place to start to really then figure out what are the situations I'm going to have to attend to most when it comes to creating these environments.
EMILIE: Excellent. Let's talk about the first trigger here, because I do think this one is the most common, and that is, evaluative situation. So when we, when we're talking about the difference between what we say we care about in a company versus what we do, you know, the boots on the ground, I think, okay, who's getting a good performance review? Regardless of if we say we believe in risk taking and we believe in experimentation, if you then get your worst ever performance review. When you experiment and make a mistake, it doesn't really match up. Right? So, how should we be thinking about evaluative situations as a trigger?
MARY: Yeah. So evaluative situations are these situations, we've all been in them. We're probably in them multiple times a day where, you know, you are doing something that you know will be evaluated in the future by someone else. So I'm preparing a presentation, I'm writing a report. I'm introducing a new idea to my team. These are all evaluative situations where I know once I finish the thing I'm working on, the idea, the report, the presentation, others are going to interact with it, and I'm likely to get some feedback. Whether that be positive or negative is to be decided. But I'm anticipating those evaluations from other people.
We know that for many people, evaluative situations is their fixed mindset trigger. It moves them straight over the mindset continuum into their fixed mindset. And the reason it does that is because the goal in our fixed mindset is to look smart at all costs. And so when we are in evaluative situations, we take on that goal to look smart at all costs, and that ends up shaping how we do our work.
So, for example, if I'm making a presentation, I might not describe any of the challenges that we had along the way of executing this idea. I just want it to look flawless and perfect. I also might not leave any time for Q&A at the end because I really don't want anyone asking me questions or trying to say whether or not my idea is a good one. And so you see people doing things differently when they're moved and triggered into their fixed mindset by these evaluative situations.
In the growth mindset, the goal is to learn at all costs. And so I might include some of the challenges not only that we had historically, but that we anticipate coming along in the future, so that whoever's reading this or whoever is contributing to the brainstorming around the presentation of these ideas, that we can get some good ideas from the audience about how we might be able to anticipate these challenges and then work around them so they don't actually become barriers over time. I might leave a lot of time for Q&A at the end of the presentation because I really want to hear people's responses, because that's going to help me improve the ideas even further.
So you can see how just one evaluative situation, the same situation, can trigger us along that mindset continuum to either our fixed mindset or our growth mindset.
EMILIE: Totally. So funny. You're reminding me of a recent interaction I had with someone who's much more senior to me. I had piloted a new program and chronicled all the feedback I got from various stakeholders along the way. And then I set up a time to discuss post launch. And this is a year long program, so just a month into the program, post launch, hey, let's reconvene and review all the feedback so we can launch better next time. And nobody asked me to set this meeting up, right? This was something I volunteered for because I want to be a learning organization, right?
And I was kind of struck by the tone, the tenor and tone of this much more senior leader who I had this meeting with, who, right off the bat, was like, I gotta. I gotta apologize. I know I could have been doing better here. And, you know, first it was very, like, preemptive apology, and then it was defensive, and I was like, what are we talking about here? Like, I don't need an apology. I don't need you to be defensive. Let's get into the nitty gritty. And he was so uncomfortable with pausing and looking back and really unpacking the feedback we got. And I was like, what does this mean? How could we turn this into flawless next time? And we got mostly great feedback, but I really wanted to like, pause and zoom in. And he was so, like, uncomfortable.
MARY: Yes. This is something we see often where it's so difficult to separate the self from the feedback, and so it becomes sort of a decision on myself. How good am I? How bad am I, right? Rather than this is, you know, they didn't even know who you were likely behind the launch. Right? The individuals who all the team that was all involved in this.
Instead, it was about their experience. It was about the things that they found excellent about it and the things they felt could be improved. And it's about that process. And so trying to take it out from the outcome into the process, trying to take it out from the people into the problem and separating those pieces is really, really important for helping us to be able to move to our growth mindset. And, you know, it can be dangerous when leaders can't do this for themselves because they set the tone and then they are the role model for other people on their team, that this is the right way or the valued way or the expected way to be able to respond when we get critical feedback.
EMILIE: Right. And when you say evaluative situations, you're using that term so broadly. It can include something as casual as that kind of a conversation or formal performance review. And it's like if we are all culture creators running with the evaluative process example, how do we leverage our power if we are an individual contributor versus someone with more formal authority? And does that look different or is it similar?
MARY: Yeah. So I actually think there's a lot of power, particularly for this evaluative situation trigger when we are individual contributors. So when we've been asked to do something that we know is going to be evaluated by others right off the bat, we can meet with our supervisor, we can meet with whatever team that we're supposed to be working with, and we can kind of set the expectations. Listen, I want to do this the best possible quality. I want us to be able to figure out what are our goals in this presentation or in this report? What is it? Who's our audience? What are we really trying to do here? What's the message we're trying to communicate? And you put yourself in learner mode by bringing these questions early to the team or to your supervisor and sort of saying, okay, I'm in this learning mode. I want to soak up all I can before I even get started to understand where we're going and what the goal is and what effective effort is going to look like as I develop this project or this presentation or this report that I'm working on.
And, you know, by setting that and putting yourself in that learner mindset, you can also suggest to them, I'm going to check in with you along the way. Is it okay if I ask you questions? I just want to be sure that I'm moving in the right direction. The time I'm putting on this is actually producing the thing that we all agree is the thing we want to see at the end. And so setting up that kind of mode early and then being able to check in actually shows yourself to be that and get in that learner mindset, in that growth mindset.
EMILIE: As opposed to the person who says, got it boss, no questions needed. I will figure this out on my own. Don't worry about a thing. And then they spin their wheels for three weeks and come back with the finished product that's, like, totally off course…
MARY: That may or may not meet the mark. Exactly right.
EMILIE: …yeah.
MARY: Exactly right. And that's the culture of genius. Right? It's like, don't ask any questions. You're smart or you're not. How good you are at this is how good you are at everything. So you better not make any mistakes.
And so, you know, it really does silence us from an individual contributor perspective. It will silence people where they won't feel comfortable asking questions, they won't feel comfortable testing out different ideas, and they certainly won't feel comfortable innovating or being creative in the way that they approach the problems or the report or the presentation they've been assigned to do. Because if you make a mistake in that creativity or in that innovation, again, it's going to be taken as a sign that you don't have it. And in the culture of genius, it's only the people who have it that are really seen as valuable in those environments.
EMILIE: It kind of becomes a self perpetuating thing, too. Right? Because you start to dim your own creativity, and you start to make that calculation of, you know, what, risk does not outweigh the reward. So I'm going to play it safe, whether that's a conscious choice or not. And you start to atrophy those skills to be creative. You start to lose it. Right?
MARY: That's right. And from a leader perspective, you know, leaders, I will often hear, I work with a lot of leaders, and I will hear them say, you know, my team's just not bringing me great ideas. My team's just not bringing me, like, new, creative, innovative ideas. They're just kind of doing the same thing that we've always been doing, and I find myself getting really frustrated about it.
And then I say, let's take a look at the mindset culture on these smaller local teams that you have and in your one on one interactions. What's the mindset culture you've set up with the people that you are supervising to sort of see whether or not they feel safe to try new things, put up new ideas, right? Come to you with some idea that they might want to brainstorm rather than something that's flawless and already perfectly in place.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. It's a good reminder that when we want to complain about our culture, if you're in a position of leadership, we got to start, by the way…
MARY: You got to look in the mirror. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE: …yeah, no, you're spot on. You're reminding me of a great episode I did years ago with Sheila Heen. I think she's at the Harvard business school, all about finding the feedback you need and how anyone at any level of a hierarchy can take it upon themselves to ask proactively or retroactively for the feedback that will help you grow, because it's not coming. It's not always on its way, you know, unless you hit the boss jackpot, so no one really is in charge of your growth like you are. And so whatever your seniority is, it's like taking that ownership is vulnerable, but so key.
MARY: Yeah. And you know what? This applies both when it is critical feedback, but also when there's success. So, I think this is a place where we actually overlook a lot. So, when we praise people, what do we usually say? We say things like,...
EMILIE: You're a genius.
MARY: …you're a genius. Good job. Way to go. You know, that was terrific.
EMILIE: This is very top of mind in toddler parent circles, for sure.
MARY: Yes, this is what we say. Good job. Way to go. You're terrific. And what do people who hear that feedback, what do they actually learn about what they did well or what you want them to repeat or what you think they could improve even further, right. From this excellent performance? They learn almost nothing from that now. It makes us feel good. Right. It does help our self esteem team.
And I'm all about right having us feel good in these moments. But I also want us to, even in the positive situations, even when praise is merited, how do we actually learn what we did well so we can repeat that and we can grow from it. And not only have it be to the individual who you're praising, but to the people around them, too, so that they can see that what's being praised isn't just magic. It's not just because there's something innate inside the person that made them perform at the very top of their game that day. Right. It was actually a team effort, or here are the steps that this person took to prepare. And let's make sure we all take these steps to prepare next time when we're in this position. So finding the ways to praise through the lens of the growth mindset as well as to critique through the lens of the growth mindset is really going to create those stronger cultures of growth.
EMILIE: Totally. Totally. And, like, there's nothing more frustrating than hearing from a senior leader that they really liked something and then walking away from that and realizing, I have no idea what they liked about it.
MARY: Exactly. How do I do that again? And actually we see over and over there's been studies with kids as little as six years old. When they get this positive praise without knowing what exactly they did well, it actually creates a fragility in them that they don't want to actually do those things again because they're afraid that they might not be able to replicate. They don't know what to replicate in the moment, to show themselves to be as good, or as smart the next time. And so you see them actually shirking away from the things they were just praised to do. And that's having the opposite impact. Right? Of what we want when we're, when we're praising people.
So really attending to the specificity of that praise. What did someone do? Well, what can they repeat? What can they actually grow further to improve? All of this gives people a direction for their growth in the future.
EMILIE: Love it, is it worth mentioning the puzzle experiment that Dweck did it a million years ago now? Because are you familiar with the puzzles and the, like, second graders? I use this example in corporate workshops all the time.
MARY: Yes. Tell the story. I want you to tell the story. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE: Well, I was going to ask you because you probably know it better. Yeah. Why don't you give us a recap of, um. I can tell it at a high level, but I might get the details wrong. But what did that experiment show?
MARY: So there's been all of these different kinds of studies that have used a similar kind of methodology. And the one I want to talk about most is a more recent, it's like an updated one to the very classic.
So it was Carol and her student Kyla Hamovitz, and they published a paper about three years ago using that old paradigm. So, in these studies, what happens is that kids come into the research lab at Stanford, and they go into a, kind of room set up for kids, and there, there are these unsolvable puzzles. And the question is, how do kids really cope with the challenge of these unsolvable puzzles? They don't know they're unsolvable. And so some of them, you know, through the lens of their growth mindset, they will try new strategies. They will persist over time and others, through the lens of the fixed mindset.
If they're primed into their fixed mindset about how smart they are and how capable they are, you know, they get very frustrated. They start to panic. It starts to feel like this is something, um, that they're not doing well when they struggle with the puzzles. But what Kyla and Carol did in this updated study was they had parents present in the room while the kids were doing the unsolvable puzzles.
EMILIE: Did they have heart rate monitors hooked up to them like the Olympics? [LAUGHTER]
MARY: Yes, exactly right. And so they had video cameras in the room that the parents didn't. The parents probably assumed they were being recorded on some level. But basically the research question was, how do parents mindsets actually get transferred to their kids? Is it through what parents say they believe on questionnaires that they had just filled out about, do you have a growth mindset? Do you have a fixed mindset parent? Or is it more what they do, how they interact with their kid?
And so what they did was they brought the kid and the parent into the room. Unsolvable puzzle is at hand. And the kid starts to work on the puzzle, trying to get it to, you know, work out, and they're challenged, they're struggling. And what we saw was that the parents started to, especially those from their fixed mindset, started to wince, started to have all this kind of non-verbal behavior. They were uncomfortable. They took it from their kid. And they're like, here, let me get it. Let me do it for you. And so all of these behaviors versus those from the growth mindset were like, okay, try something new. Well, that doesn't seem to work. Hmm. That's tricky. What else should we do next?
And really sort of started to help the kid interpret their frustration through the lens of learning. How can we figure this out? What can we try next? How can we pivot in this moment? And what they found later over time, when they studied those kids was they found that it was the non-verbals and the verbal interactions, the way that we actually, what we said and did with those kids that predicted the kids mindsets over time, not what the parent reported on a self report, you know, questionnaire about their beliefs.
So it's our behavior, not necessarily our beliefs. And a lot of times our behavior and our beliefs don't line up. So what's going to matter in the moment? It actually matters much more what we do, what we say. And that was like the update to me of the puzzle problem and how parents actually can help create the environment where that response, that positive response to those unsolvable puzzles can actually help kids develop their growth mindset over time.
EMILIE: Yeah, I mean, I'm over here taking notes myself. [LAUGHTER] So pressing for me because, especially as someone who knows, I grew up in a fixed rate mindset and I've really been working on it. It's like the ultimate challenge is the next generation is here. And like, how do I think I'm parenting versus how I'm parenting?
But you can see how that translates into the workplace, too. I had a friend who worked for someone who, it wasn't even the verbal feedback that she would get. It was the nonverbal feedback she would get as she was starting to pitch a new idea. She told me that her manager at the time would just start shaking her head left and right, saying no, you know, and non verbally, kind of mid sentence. Shooting a new idea down is like, all you really need to say. There's no psychological safety here.
MARY: Take a step back. There's nothing here.
EMILIE: So interesting. And you know what, Mary? There's another question that's coming to mind. When I think about all the women I worked with over the past eleven and a half years here, it feels like, whether we call it imposter syndrome or, you know, look at it through the lens of equity and inequality, especially in male dominated industries, this perfection, perfect perform and please culture, or even looking at the differences between little girls and little boys in the academic system we have, it feels like women get pretty damn good at the fixed mindset thing. And having a growth mindset can be really challenging for women in the workplace. Are there gendered nuances in how you conceive of these cultural differences?
MARY: Yeah, we have done a lot of research on this question, and what we find over and over again is that these cultures of genius are particularly challenging for women and people of color. Now, why would that be? If you look at the idea, or even you put the word genius into Google, and you look at Google images, who do you think? What faces come up? What would you say?
EMILIE: Definitely a whole bunch of white men.
MARY: Yes. Einstein, Newton, Bill Gates. Right? Maybe Elon Musk, even. But these are the images, the prototypes we have of who a genius is. And so in these cultures of genius, where we're just looking around to say who the next genius is that we should recruit into the organization, who should we evaluate positively? Who should we promote? We are looking at this cultural prototype that is very exclusive. Who does it leave behind? Women. People of color, people with disabilities. LGBTQIA+ individuals. Right?
These cultures of genius have such a narrow cultural prototype that they tend to leave out women at all stages, and people of color and anyone who's nothing conforming to that narrow cultural prototype around gender, race, class, educational status, and in the culture of growth, we see that the cultural prototype of success is very different. It's about who can learn the most. It's about, who actually has traveled the greatest distance in their work, so that we know that that distance traveled is going to predict the distance that they're going to go forward when we bring them into our company, and who actually has had to come across and work through a lot of systemic challenges, a lot of barriers, a lot of stereotypes around who we are. It's going to be the women.
It's going to be the people of color, people with disabilities, people who've had real challenges in their lives. Those are the ones who actually are the learners in the environment. Those are going to be the individuals who learn the most in many of these contexts. And so when we look at cultures of growth and cultures of genius, we see that cultures of genius are really homogenous, especially at the upper echelons of the leadership levels. And cultures of growth are much more diverse because everyone can be a learner, everyone can be developing, and who can do that most are the people who've had the most challenges in the past and who've been able to be successful through them. So those are the individuals who then are recruited, promoted, retained, evaluated positively in these cultures of growth environments. So they tend to just be flourishing with much more diversity, in addition.
EMILIE: Interesting. And I think it's so important to say that it's not like a culture of growth is just the better place to work, although perhaps it is, right? It's not just the more likely to be equitable and diverse workforce, but there's also pretty big bottom line connections that you make in terms of business outcomes, right?
So it's like, I keep coming back to my own unconscious sort of default in my head, which is this, like, culture of genius is where everything has to be right, because we're so, you know, high functioning. We don't have time for nice to haves, like, psychological safety would be nice if you want, you know, that. Or, you know, a more diverse workplace is a nice to have. No, you're saying that there's a very direct connection to the bottom line, good of the business, right?
MARY: Absolutely, absolutely. And this culture of genius, you know, look to your left, look to your right. What does that do when we're only looking for the smartest in the room? It makes people compete with each other internally. There's going to be backbiting. Oops, I forgot to put you on this calendar invite, a lot of information hoarding, right? In order to maintain your status quo in your advantage. And so we see people are not willing to take risks to make mistakes.
But in the culture of growth organization, collaboration is encouraged. Why? Because good ideas come from everywhere. In the culture of growth, right, collaboration is incentivized. Mistakes are normalized and destigmatized. Learning is mined from those mistakes and shared widely, and informed risk taking is encouraged and supported. Right? So which of these has the greater bottom line?
Over and over, in very large companies, as well as in very small startup, early stage organizations. Every time we've studied this we have found that the cultures of growth are much more likely to meet and exceed their fundraising or revenue goals in these environments. And they're more innovative and resilient in times of change, especially when it comes to market change in the environment. These cultures of growth are more resilient and they're more financially successful over the long haul.
EMILIE: Amazing. Mary, I could talk to you all day, but I have to let you go.
MARY: Thank you. This is so fun.
EMILIE: Where can my listeners learn more about you and get their hands on a copy of your book?
MARY: Yes, you can go to the book website. It's marycmurphy.com. and there I would actually recommend folks go in and take the Mindset Triggers Assessment. This is something you can take for yourself. You can also take it as a family, you can take it as a team.
And then there's also a Culture Cues Assessment or an audit. And you can then look at the environment and what are the cues in our environment that are making us more of a culture of genius or culture of growth? And then how do we build the culture of growth from there? Those are two kind of tangible things folks can do to get their own results and to start working in their own environments.
EMILIE: Amazing, Mary, thank you so much.
MARY: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This was terrific.
EMILIE: For links to all the resources Mary and I just talked about, head to bossedup.org/episode474. That's bossedup.org/episode474. And as always, you'll also find a synthesized blog post that summarizes the key points from today's conversation, as well as a fully written out transcript, if that's your jam.
I want to hear what you made of this conversation. Do you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset? Are you working on your mindset always? Just like I've been since first coming across Carol's work over a decade ago now. And what does it mean to instill a growth mindset as a cultural component of your team or in your household?
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Whether you resonated with the parenting aspect of this conversation or the leadership one, let's keep the conversation going. As always, weigh in via the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together let's lift as we climb.
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