Notes and highlights for
Carol Dweck. Mindset – Updated Edition: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential (Kindle Locations 1816-1817). Hachette UK. Kindle Edition.
Chapter 5.
BUSINESS: MINDSET AND LEADERSHIP
CEO Disease
CEOs face this choice all the time.: should they confront their shortcomings or should they create a world where they have none?
CEOs face another dilemma. They can choose short-term strategies that boost the company’s stock and make themselves look like heroes. Or they can work for long-term improvement—risking Wall Street’s disapproval as they lay the foundation for the health and growth of the company over the longer haul.
When Do You Feel Smart: When You’re Flawless or When You’re Learning?
We asked people, ranging from grade schoolers to young adults, “When do you feel smart?” The differences were striking. People with the fixed mindset said: “It’s when I don’t make any mistakes.” “When I finish something fast and it’s perfect.” “When something is easy for me, but other people can’t do it.” It’s about being perfect right now. But people with the growth mindset said: “When it’s really hard, and I try really hard, and I can do something I couldn’t do before.” Or “[When] I work on something a long time and I start to figure it out.” For them it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s about learning something over time.
Enron and the Talent Mindset
In 2001 came the announcement that shocked the corporate world. Enron—the corporate poster child, the company of the future—had gone belly-up. What happened?
Enron recruited big talent, mostly people with fancy degrees, which is not in itself so bad. It paid them big money, which is not that terrible. But by putting complete faith in talent, Enron did a fatal thing: It created a culture that worshiped talent, thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented.
People with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.
When people live in an environment that esteems them for their innate talent, they have grave difficulty when their image is threatened: “They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie.” Obviously, a company that cannot self-correct cannot thrive.
Organizations That Grow
What distinguished the thriving companies from the others? There were several important factors, as Collins reports in his book, Good to Great, but one that was absolutely key was the type of leader who in every case led the company into greatness.
They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers—that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.
The hallmarks: They’re not constantly trying to prove they’re better than others. For example, they don’t highlight the pecking order with themselves at the top, they don’t claim credit for other people’s contributions, and they don’t undermine others to feel powerful. Instead, they are constantly trying to improve. They surround themselves with the most able people they can find, they look squarely at their own mistakes and deficiencies, and they ask frankly what skills they and the company will need in the future.
Leadership and the Fixed Mindset
Fixed-mindset leaders, like fixed-mindset people in general, live in a world where some people are superior and some are inferior. They must repeatedly affirm that they are superior, and the company is simply a platform for this.
“After all, what better testament to your own personal greatness than that the place falls apart after you leave?”
These great geniuses don’t want great teams, either. Fixed-mindset people want to be the only big fish so that when they compare themselves to those around them, they can feel a cut above the rest.
Corporate Training: Are Managers Born or Made?
Millions of dollars and thousands of hours are spent each year trying to teach leaders and managers how to coach their employees and give them effective feedback. Yet much of this training is ineffective, and many leaders and managers remain poor coaches. Is that because this can’t be trained? No, that’s not the reason. Research sheds light on why corporate training often fails.
Many managers do not believe in personal change. These fixed-mindset managers simply look for existing talent—they judge employees as competent or incompetent at the start and that’s that. They do relatively little developmental coaching and when employees do improve, they may fail to take notice, remaining stuck in their initial impression. What’s more (like managers at Enron), they are far less likely to seek or accept critical feedback from their employees. Why bother to coach employees if they can’t change and why get feedback from them if you can’t change?
Managers with a growth mindset think it’s nice to have talent, but that’s just the starting point. These managers are more committed to their employees’ development, and to their own.
Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers.
Our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles.
We need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring.
Without a belief in human development, many corporate training programs become exercises of limited value.
Are Leaders Born or Made?
Create an organization that prizes the development of ability—and watch the leaders emerge.
Organizational Mindsets
An organization might embody a fixed mindset, conveying that employees either “have it” or they don’t: We called this a “culture of genius.” Or it might embody more of a growth mindset, conveying that people can grow and improve with effort, good strategies, and good mentoring: We call this a “culture of development.”
To determine a company’s mindset, we asked a diverse sample of employees at each organization how much they agreed with statements like these: When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they can’t really do much to change it (fixed mindset). This company values natural intelligence and business talent more than any other characteristics (also fixed mindset). This company genuinely values the personal development and growth of its employees (growth mindset).
We then compiled the responses and they revealed something important: There was a strong consensus within each company about whether the company had fixed- or growth-mindset beliefs and values.
People who work in growth-mindset organizations have far more trust in their company and a much greater sense of empowerment, ownership, and commitment. For example, when employees were asked to rate statements such as “People are trustworthy in this organization,” those in growth-mindset companies expressed far higher agreement. Right in line with this, employees in growth-mindset companies also reported that they were much more committed to their company and more willing to go the extra mile
It’s actually the employees in the growth-mindset companies who say that their organization supports (reasonable) risk-taking, innovation, and creativity.
Supervisors in growth-mindset companies saw their team members as having far greater management potential than did supervisors in fixed-mindset companies. They saw future leaders in the making.
The fixed-mindset companies presumably searched for the talent, hired the talent, and rewarded the talent—but now they were looking around and saying, “Where’s the talent?” The talent wasn’t flourishing.