Growth Mindset - Useful or Not?

If you use the term Growth Mindset when talking to many in the Education Sector now, you tend to get that ‘sucking on lemons’ face. Discuss it in sport (elite and grassroots) and you tend to get keen interest and discussion. When I mention (and train on) the term to those working in the corporate and professional services sectors, some are still unfamiliar with it, whilst many are vocal disciples. So it got me thinking…..what’s going on here, and why?

In this blog, I’m going to attempt to revisit the essence of growth mindset, and argue for its continued relevance and power. Both at the individual level, and as a mindset and approach that your organisational culture should encourage and enable.

What?

There is a huge body of research around growth mindset, but the concept is not new - just the terminology and evidence base.

How many of you reading this blog can ride a bicycle? And how many of you were born able to ride a bike? So how did you learn? By trying, by falling, getting back up, by getting feedback from the person helping you, and no doubt from sheer determination.

This at its essence is what I believe is meant by a growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset). American psychologist and educationalist Carol Dweck first coined these terms, and the term growth mindset reflects a belief that our abilities and talents can be cultivated and developed through factors such as hard work, persistence, and good coaching/teaching. The initial pieces of research centred heavily on use of language driving a different mindset in children, leading to vastly improved outcomes. Where students were praised for their ‘hard work’ rather than their ‘intelligence’ or for being ‘smart’ the impact on their willingness to push themselves, work hard, try new things, get things wrong etc was so significant that it led to improved performance over a period of time.

(with some help from Training Ugly)

Corporate World

Let’s look at the corporate world first. Many companies have embraced the growth mindset concept. Microsoft and Google actively refer to themselves as growth mindset companies, and I know that Google’s internal training programmes focus on it to a major extent. They work hard to ensure their people understand and develop a growth mindset. But of course for an organisation to leverage this, they have to support this at a cultural level. Which is where this fascinating piece from Jeff Bezos’ 2018 SEC filing comes in: “A word about corporate cultures: for better or worse, they are enduring, stable and hard to change. They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage. You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you are discovering it, uncovering it - not creating it. It is created slowly over time by the people and by events - by the stories of past success and failure that become a deep part of the company lore. If it’s a distinctive culture, it will fit certain people like a custom-made glove. The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select. Someone energized by competitive zeal may select and be happy in one culture, while someone who loves to pioneer and invest may choose another. The world, thankfully, is full of many high-performing, highly distinctive corporate cultures. We never claim that our approach is the right one - just that it’s ours - and over the last two decades, we’ve collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach energizing and meaningful. One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organisations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.”

What’s the opposite then? What happens where your organisation and its culture engender a fixed mindset? Enron is a brilliant example here. There have been lots of studies carried out on why Enron failed, but one factor agreed on by many is that it was talent obsessed. They only recruited ‘the best’ and so everyone there was ‘amazing’. But imagine being labelled as such. And what happens when you start making inevitable mistakes? Well you certainly can’t share them, let alone learn from them, because we are all ‘talented’ so we don’t make mistakes. So they get brushed under the carpet, and eventually add up to one massive corporate failure.

What about Sport?

I’m a decent tennis player, who can have a go on a squash court as well. For a couple of years I played in a weekly squash session with some Dads from school. Amongst this group were partners from professional services firms, listed company CEOs, and SME owners. We all played each other. What struck me was how everyone exhibited the facets of growth mindset every week. Everyone believed they could improve. We all put in focused effort. We challenged ourselves by looking forward to playing those better than us. Often we made mistakes but did our best to learn from them, and whilst feedback was immediate (lose or win) we also asked each other questions about our play, and our development.

What about a group of 12 year olds, learning the drag flick in hockey? They will work hard to learn the skill, receiving feedback as they go along. It will be a challenge, but the coach has introduced the session in the right way, and facilitated an environment where trying, getting it wrong, and trying again, is encouraged. They are not scared of trying, of making mistakes, and they want to work hard to improve.

At elite level sport the mantra 'the score will take care of itself’ is used a lot. I believe this is growth mindset at its best - focus on the controllables (your mindset), focus on doing the right things, believe that you can continually develop and improve, and the result will take care of itself.

Education

Finally, a word on Education. One myth to quickly debunk is that growth mindset means ‘work hard at everything.’ This is a criticism that is often levelled at proponents of the concept, often joined up with wariness and criticism over Angela Duckworth’s work on grit. I believe this is misplaced. Growth mindset isn’t saying that children should continue to work hard at everything - they don’t have the time, and it will involve misplaced energy. Instead the concept should be used to remind children that nothing comes without intelligently directed hard work, and that where you match your talents, your interests and your motivations with a growth mindset, you can achieve amazing things. Motivation comes out as a key factor from the work on growth mindset, as I believe does language. The original pieces of research showed how powerful the use of language can be in driving a growth mindset, and this example (very popular in growth mindset training) sums it up best: instead of saying “I can’t do ‘x”, say “I can’t do ‘x’ yet.”

I hope this piece helps those of you reading to continue to work at building your growth mindset, and to reflect on whether your organisation’s culture (which as leader you help shape) supports it. Having worked with clients on this across sectors, probably my favourite experience involved a group of Partners at a top 100 Law Firm. I introduced the concept in our first training session. I got quite a bit of challenge on the concept, both during that first session, and at the start of the second session, a lot of them having gone away and done some research. There was certainly quite a bit of resistance to what I think many of them saw as an idealistic concept. At the end of the six month programme, one of the Partners who had pushed back the most came up to me and asked for a quiet word. When she told me that the concept had finally ‘landed’ about half way through the Programme, and had made a huge difference not just to her approach at work, but also to how she interacted with her children, I broke out into a huge smile. It made my week.