Why Growth Mindset is not the panacea you think it is

What mindset would I recommend if you wish to achieve success and greatness? A growth mindset.

Is there evidence of a growth mindset in the famous published studies of greatness? No.

When organizations promote growth mindset programs, does that produce performance improvements? Mostly No.

Growth Mindset has become a business obsession for a number of right reasons. A growth mindset is when you believe you can become better if you simply try. Opposed to the growth mindset is the fixed mindset, where you believe your intelligence and most of your abilities are fixed forever and are not changeable. When Carol Dweck, the originator of the concept of growth mindset, investigated why some students persist in trying difficult problems whereas others give up, she found that children who had a growth mindset persisted longer, corrected more errors, and welcomed feedback.

Praising children for their efforts induced a growth mindset, and praising their abilities induced a fixed mindset. When induced a growth mindset, children focus on learning goals; when induced a fixed mindset, they focus on performance goals (that is, they want to show off, rather than learn).

Remember, a growth mindset is about your belief that your intelligence is malleable; it does not say intelligence is actually malleable. However, believing that it is subject to improvement can result in people persisting in hard learning tasks, trying out novel challenges, learning from failures, treating failures as learning opportunities, and so on. Carol Dweck and colleagues have documented the effects of a growth mindset on performance in both children and adults. People with a growth mindset are open to feedback; those with a fixed mindset treat feedback as an insult to their egos.

Many organizations have joined the growth mindset bandwagon and managers and consultants exhort people to adopt a growth mindset. As a demonstration of embracing this mindset, employees are also expected to learn new material regularly.

A fixed mindset is more contagious than a growth mindset. If you believe in a fixed mindset, your children are more likely to pick it up. This is true of adults, too. If the manager believes in a fixed mindset, the direct reports are more likely to embrace it, too.

And the manager may consciously believe that she is a growth mindset champion and may even take pains to promote the same in her conversations. However, her actions may contradict her words.

If you ask your people to develop a growth mindset but you convey your lack of belief in their ability to grow through your body language, facial expressions, and communication styles, it is easy for your employees to pick this from you. In fact, the tendency for managers to indulge in behaviors that are exactly opposite of what will nurture a growth mindset is pervasive in organizations.

Ask yourself:

1.???? Has your manager demonstrated that they are open to receiving critical feedback?

2.???? Have they ever changed their decisions based on such feedback?

3.???? Have they asked for your input and carefully evaluated them before arriving at a decision?

4.???? Do they believe that they are fast decision-makers and stand by their decisions, whatever may happen?

5.???? Do the organization entrust the task of decision-making to the bosses?

6.???? Does your manager always ask you “not to come to me with problems, come with solutions” and then ask you to implement the solution that you proposed (even if that may be the silliest of solutions)?

7.???? Does your manager encourage risk-taking?

8.???? Does your manager encourage individual achievements rather than collaboration?

9.???? Do your systems punish failures?

10.? What happens after you have embraced a ‘growth mindset’ and learned something new/ did something challenging? Did the organization actually grow you by promoting you or rewarding you in such a way that your growth mindset gets affirmed?

11.? Has your manager displayed vulnerability by publicly sharing instances of decisions gone wrong, errors committed and corrections made, or he comes across as an all-knowing, infallible superhuman?

12.? Does your manager share her feelings and fears publicly, or they are an emotionless alpha personality?

13.? Does your manager come across as a humble leader eager to learn or as a narcissist who only wants to hear “Yes, sir!”?

In each of the above, you know which behaviors encourage a growth mindset and which do not (1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 encourage a growth mindset).

Not just that. When organizations import people from outside rather than promote people from within, it helps reinforce behaviors as opposed to a growth mindset. And performance feedback processes are the nails in the coffin of a growth mindset: appraisals often look for deficiencies, not for improvement. Most feedback is on the person’s character traits (you lack initiative, drive, and so on). When feedback is about the person's character and not about performance, research shows that a fixed mindset sets in. Talking of performance appraisals, studies show that people who talk more are more likely to be considered as leadership material and are more likely to be promoted. Does not exactly align with a growth mindset enabling behavior.

Can you see why a growth mindset cannot grow in organizations? And there are far too many ways in which a growth mindset can be stalled, and a fixed mindset can be allowed to grow.

In a Harvard Business Review article, Carol Dweck points out what goes wrong with implementing a growth mindset. If managers don’t encourage appropriate risk-taking, reward lessons learned despite setbacks, support collaboration rather than individual achievements, and commit to the growth of every employee, both in words and deeds, a growth mindset cannot be cultivated.

In another HBR article, organizational researchers Heidi Grant, Mary Slaughter, and Andrea Derler add that unless the purpose of the work is seen as growing the required skills and management rewards the employees for developing those skills, a growth mindset cannot be nurtured. In how many organizations can you find a direct mapping between performance and skills and a reward for growing those skills? In fact, a growth mindset defeating behavior starts with recruitment itself. Studies show that hiring that depends mostly on interviews is highly deficient and does not create the best fit for the role. That’s for another article!

In schools, teachers’ mindsets can influence whether children acquire a growth mindset or not, according to a study. A study of 15,000 students found that only when teachers recognize their potential and schools have cultures embracing challenges can a growth mindset create performance effects. Many studies cite students talking about how teachers have influenced their life outcomes- for the better or worse.

?

Researchers have painstakingly studied how some people seem to achieve exceptional performance. In a range of fields- music, mathematics, tennis, swimming, other sports and scientific research or innovation- elite performance does not depend on natural talent. Studies of the most successful in many fields done by Benjamin Bloom showed that it wasn’t innate talent that propelled the children to greatness, it was simply an interest in the field inspired by encouragement from their teachers. The teachers sparked their interests by simply labeling them as talented, and this led to motivated practice. Did the children have a growth mindset? No one knows. It wasn’t necessary.

Research by Anders Ericsson found that elite performers were driven by an interest sparked by their teachers and then were supported by family members in providing them with an environment that kept them engaged and challenged. Ericsson called this ‘deliberate practice’ as opposed to the normal practice, where you simply repeat what you do well. In deliberate practice, one goes on upgrading one's skills by continually seeking ever-challenging goals. Ericsson, too, did not record any evidence of a growth mindset (although he talks about a deliberate practice mindset).

Of course, this is not to say that a growth mindset is not required or it is bad for you. Far from it. I am only trying to show that an environment supportive of your growth efforts matters a lot. And your teachers, family members, and managers have a significant role to play in determining whether you achieve greatness or not.

In 1965, in one of psychology’s classic experiments, Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal together with Lenore Jacobson, principal of an elementary school, conducted an experiment with the children of the school. In this experiment, some of the children from kindergarten to fifth grade took a test of intelligence consisting of verbal and reasoning skills; the teachers were told it was a test to predict academic outcomes. After the tests, the experimenters shared with the teachers a list of students who were expected to show academic blooming. This list contained around 20% of the tested students.

All the children were retested after 8 months. The 20% of the children identified as potential candidates for gaining academically, showed remarkable improvement in the second test, with an average gain of 12 points compared to 8 for the others. The effect was more pronounced in grades 1 and 2.

However, the surprising fact was that 20% of children whose names were given to the teachers as potential bloomers had not performed well in the first test compared to other students. They were simply picked at random by Rosenthal. They were testing if teachers’ expectations of student achievement made any difference to students’ actual achievement. It indeed made a significant difference.

Rosenthal and Jacobson named this effect the ‘Pygmalion effect’ following the Greek myth, in which a sculptor named Pygmalion carves out a beautiful statue of a woman (called Galatea) only to fall intensely in love with it and wishes for a bride just like the statue. Legend has it that his wish was granted by the gods when the statue came to life one day. Pygmalion effects are also called expectancy effects and these effects are part of what is considered as ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’.

There were controversies regarding the validity of the tests used and the results; however Pygmalion effect has been found almost everywhere. A review of studies over 14 years by Stephen Raudenbush confirmed the effect of teacher’s expectancy on a wide variety of student outcomes. Another relatively recent review of over 35 years of research by Jussim and Harber concluded that teacher expectations clearly influence student outcomes at least sometimes. They added that among stigmatized groups, the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies can be powerful. Many other reviews confirm these effects on students.

Dov Eden demonstrated Pygmalion effects in his experiments with the Israel Army (IDF) and other organizations. Studies by organizational researcher Brian McNatt found these effects in a wide range of organizations. In all these cases, employees randomly assigned as high potentials bloomed. If you are a people manager or a teacher, your expectations can have powerful effects on the performance of the people you manage or teach. Expecting others to succeed has powerful motivational consequences. Many managers unintentionally treat their subordinates in a way that reflects poor expectations, which in turn leads to poor performance. Studies by both Benjamin Bloom and Anders Ericsson stress the importance of expectations of others about you.

Setting expectations is not the same as giving too high stretch targets; as studies show, this will be self-defeating. It is about believing in the person's capability and converting this belief into a set of tangible actions that strengthen the employee and their resources.

If you are a leader of a team, believing that your members are capable of high performance will help them internalize this message and produce what is called the ‘Galatea’ effect (remember the name of the Pygmalion statue was ‘Galatea’)- performance effects due to internalized self-efficacy beliefs. Do you convey your faith in others in the way you communicate with them? If not, please recheck your communication style and modify it. While this is a huge favor to them, it is actually a huge favor to yourself. When others working with you succeed, you succeed, too.

?

The theory of growth mindset is not without its share of problems, and some research teams who wanted to replicate the findings of Carol Dweck and the team about improvement in student performance due to growth mindset have reported very weak correlations. This, Dweck has reportedly argued that, is due to ineffective implementation of her methods.

However, even if the performance enhancement is mild, it is encouraging. When a large group of teenagers were told in less than an hour of interaction that brains are malleable like a muscle and grow strong with rigorous learning experiences, their GPAs improved, as per a 2019 report. A study of accountants showed that those who believed they could achieve what they set out to achieve later achieved better performance outcomes. Thus, it may be beneficial to believe that you can improve if you put in your best efforts. This helps you build a learning mentality—you learn from your experiences, both successes and failures. You eschew a fixed mentality—that’s doom-thinking.

But let us be clear. Exhorting your employees to embrace a growth mindset without changing the tangible mechanisms in your organization and leadership behaviors that scream your inherent mistrust in your employees and their ability to grow will be futile.

This is an excerpt from a chapter in my book, The Last Skill: The Science of Achieving Success and a Fulfilling Life with Skills that Matter.