Transcript for Innovation 2.0: Multiplying the Growth Mindset

Thank you, Shankar. It is such a pleasure to be here with you.

Yes, this is the idea that the most successful people at this elite high pressure institution, those people who can look like ducks, who can kind of glide gracefully across the water, right? Any kind of hardship or struggle they might have simply rolls off your back. But if you look right beneath the surface, you see that people are kicking like crazy, right, to keep up. And I could see this among undergrads. I would see that around them like lounging in the student union, listening to music, as if people didn't have a car in the world. No one seemed to have to try hard in order to do well in this environment. But when I talked to my undergrad in my lab, I noticed that students were really paying a high price to embody this cultural value of effortless genius, right? They were exhausted. They had a lot of anxiety and stress trying to keep up. And I think that this syndrome, this Stanford Ducks syndrome, really came from this belief that effort and ability are negatively correlated. That if you have to try hard, that it means that maybe you don't have natural ability or skill to be there.

Yes, a department merit review committee would review every faculty members what we call an APR. It's like an annual productivity report and it has things like how many papers we wrote, how many students we advise, how many grants we get, and what they would do is that they would rank and rate each individual professor and then to my whore. I learned that each faculty member would then get a letter in their mailbox, showing every person's rank from the highest to the lowest. And your personal position would be brightly highlighted in yellow. And I have to say that this day, the day that the letters would arrive and everybody's mailbox was the day of the year that a lot of our faculty simply dreaded.

I was walking by a really large auditorium, our large teaching auditorium, and I noticed several sheets of paper taped on the wall outside of the entrance to that auditorium. And when I went to look more closely, I saw that these papers contained the grades of all students that were enrolled in our introductory psychology class, and they went from highest to lowest. And what I noticed was that as the students were streaming by, different students took different strategies, right? Some did like a wide arc to avoid these papers on the wall. Some people gathered around running their fingers down the list trying to look for their ID, hoping to find it on the first or second page and not on the sixth or seventh page. And I just think that this shows how these regular routines and practices, you're really stoked interpersonal competition. Make you feel as though you're learning and your productivity is really going to depend on how you do relative to others.

Stack ranking is a performance evaluation practice that's pretty common in many organizations. This practice is colloquially called rank and yink, and it was made popular in the early 80s by Jack Welsh, who was at that point CEO of GE. And at GE what they did was they created three different tiers employees in the top 20% those in the middle 70% and those in the bottom 10% who are more likely to be let go.

The company we work adopted some of this stack ranking, and they would let go up to 20% of their workforce annually. And in we work, these were called infamously genocides, because it would refer to the attorney, Jennifer Barrett, who was in charge of all of these layoffs. And what's important to know about stack ranking is that people say, well, it's okay for the 80% who's going to be left in the organization. But I have to say that being left inside of an organization is not going to be a walk in the park, right? We know that it breeds competition within each organization and it creates a lot of confusion for employees, right? Should we team? Should we compete? Which can breed a lot of cynicism and distrust?

Absolutely, there's this constant fear of a loss of status, right? A falling below that line. And those in the top tier are going to be forced to defend their position, right? They're less likely to share resources to help their colleagues for fear that they're going to be overtaken in the rankings. And they're going to dedicate more energy to watching each other, keeping an eye on their competition instead of focusing on how and where they can keep growing.

She shared with me the story of growing up and her elementary school classroom, where back in the day, in her class, they would seat students in order of their IQ score. So students who were the highest on the IQ score were always seated in front. And those who scored lowest, well, they were placed all the way in the back, right? and they would retake these exams and then they'd get re-shuffled based on how they performed on these exams. So there was always this threat of losing that status of being the good student and the smart student in this environment.

In a culture of genius, as I call it, the focus is really on star performers. And the belief that these people are inherently more capable and superior due to innate intelligence, ability, skills, things that just come naturally, effortless and perfect performance, right, is the goal in a culture of genius. And so we look for people and we look for individuals who are going to embody that culture of genius? Who are the stars? And how do we get more of those individuals into our organization onto our team so that we can build even more this culture of genius?

Absolutely. The culture of genius wants genius and they believe in genius very strongly. And so they're going to look for people who really seem to have these innate talents and gifts and they're going to try to recruit and retain those individuals. Those are going to be the individuals that are lifted up and that are promoted and that are going to be invested in in a culture of genius.

Yes, the growth mindset is oftentimes characterized as a belief that talent and ability and performance, all of these skills, their potentials that we can grow with the right support asking for help, trying new strategies, and the opposite of the growth mindset is the fixed mindset. And this is the belief that talent, ability, skills, these are things that are fixed. They're like traits. You either have them or you don't. And so it's impossible to significantly grow change or develop those skills and abilities. And so the point of that fixed mindset is to figure out what you're good at and then just do those things.

Yes, that's the big difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

for about 25 to 30 years. This idea of the fixed mindset and the growth mindset were traditionally studied as individual differences. What's your belief, sugar, and what's my belief? And how does that influence our motivation, our engagement, the way we respond to challenges, whether we hide mistakes or whether we relish mistakes and learn from them? And the insight I had, oh, maybe about 12, 13 years ago now, was that The fixed and growth mindset isn't just inside our minds. It's not just a belief that you or I have that it actually can be a feature of an environment. It can be a feature of teams, of groups, of divisions, of organizations. It can be a feature of families. Anytime two or more people are together, we can have a mindset culture that really communicates whether we believe as a group. that intelligence skills and ability are fixed, you either have them or you don't, or it's possible to grow, develop, and learn new skills, intelligence, ability, and other aspects of ourselves.

This is one of my favorite studies. What this group of researchers did was survey more than 1800 faculty postdocs and graduate students across 30 different disciplines at universities across the United States. And then at the same time, they gathered data from the National Science Foundation about the percentage of women and students of color who went to pursue PhDs in each one of these disciplines. And what they found in that survey of faculty, postdocs and graduate students was that there seemed to be some consensus around different fields. Some fields really believed that what it took to be successful in that field required brilliance and genius for success, whereas other fields were thought to require more empathy or hard work or persistence through challenges. And what they found was that math, physics, economics, some parts of music, music composition in particular, but we're thought to require brilliance. And others that were thought to have other aspects that were important for success, things like empathy and hard work. were other of the social sciences, psychology, many of the humanities-based work, although philosophy was one of those that was really thought to require brilliance and genius for success. And what they found was that when those fields were thought to require more genius and brilliance for success, the less number of women and people of color were included in those disciplines as pursuing PhDs.

Yeah, one of the biggest problems that we see with cultures of genius is that we have a specific prototype of who is a genius. We have a prototype of who's going to be successful in these different environments. And what we've seen across decades of our work now is that while these prototypes can vary by industry, we find that most people, when you put in the word genius into Google images, the images that come to mind there, are people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, right? This is a pretty homogenous group. And what we see is that when we're in these cultures of genius, we look for people who are going to match our genius prototypes. And these are going to be the people who we seek out, who we hire, and who we promote in different organizations. And it's really why cultures of genius often overlook and miss out on identifying and recruiting people from diverse groups. And it's why in our own work, we started to see that any time these messages really suggest that these areas require brilliance. It undermines women's interests. because they expect to be stereotyped more in these environments as not being innately gifted, having those genius qualities, right? They don't really match this prototype and they know it and they think they're going to be judged for it in these environments.

I think that this is a bit of a myth more than what we want to acknowledge in a society that really values independence and natural talent and ability, right? I think there's many, many cases where we have told ourselves the story of genius of an individual, right? The apple just falls on the head and suddenly you have this brilliant idea and this equation comes to mind, right? We know these stories. But the truth is, Like in Thomas Edison's case, for example, right? We liked to hold him up as this genius, but of course he had teams and teams and teams of people working for him and with him to test many, many iterations of his technologies, right? And there were many more failures than there were successes. And so we really don't give enough space for the way that talent and ability is actually created and how we become the people we do over time.

Absolutely, I do think that there's probably some innate characteristics, some personality traits, some inclination towards different kinds of interests that can come when people are born and certainly when people are socialized by their parents, by their teachers, and by important people in their environment. But the truth is that we're all going to develop. Right, nobody is born knowing how to read out of the womb. When no one is born, right, understanding how to solve important math equations. I do think that people have different kinds of starting places and interests. The question is, I think, whether you want people to have a growth mindset about that inclination or do you want them to have a fixed mindset and make it real?

That's absolutely correct, so well said.

So some of the things that infamous things that people will say, say at the start of a difficult math class or a very large chemistry 400 person auditorium class, they might say, look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the semester, right? I couldn't think of anything more zero sum than that. My professor said 30% of you will fail 20% of you are going to get deez at the end of the term. It happens every year and it will happen this year to you. Right? A neuroscience professor who says, if students aren't confident about your ability, you should consider transferring to another instructor. Right? A chemistry professor who says, if you don't get it early and quickly, you just don't belong in this class.

That's right. We do find over and over that students who see that their instructor endorses this belief that only some students have it and some students don't look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the term. If they find themselves struggling, if they find themselves making mistakes, if they find themselves not getting things effortlessly and perfectly right, immediately in the class, they can often feel as though they're an imposter in that classroom. And that can really set them back in terms of seeking help. asking questions, finding a study group to work with, and all of the things that we know actually contribute to student success.

This was a set of studies that I conducted with my former PhD student Kathy Emerson. What we were really looking at was the question of why women remain underrepresented in leadership positions around corporate America, right? And our theory was that women are going to be really vigilant to cues in the environment that signal to them whether they're valued and respected or whether or not they're going to be devalued and disrespected. And so what we did in the study was men and women looked at company mission statements and websites that contained either fixture growth mindset messaging. And what we found across these three different experiments and studies was that women more than men trusted that fixed-minded company last than the growth-minded company. And then we also found that the mistrust was actually driven by women's expectations that they were going to be negatively stereotyped by that company's management. They know what the prototype for brilliance in genius is in business. And they thought that the management and the leaders in that organization would really compare them to that prototype and find them lacking. And then finally, in our last study, we found that mistrust of these companies actually led women to disengage more following negative feedback from that company.

Yes, we have found this over and over in our work in terms of thinking about engagement and interest. We did these studies across many different institutions and many different contexts. And what we found was that when students perceive their instructor to endorse more fixed mindset beliefs when they feel as other in this culture of genius, we find that these cultures of genius, lower students' interests not just in this particular chemistry class or that particular biology class. But it actually also lowers interest in the professor's discipline more generally. So now I'm less likely after finishing this class to take chem 201 or biology 201. And I start to close doors to different kinds of opportunities and paths myself because I simply notice I'm feeling this way in the classroom.

I do think that Elizabeth Holmes serves as a model for the really the extremes of this fixed-minded behavior. Holmes set out to really create this device, which maybe not incidentally was dubbed the Edison, right, another famous genius? That would perform hundreds of tests on a very tiny sample of blood. And people were really trying to raise the bowel and suggest that maybe this isn't possible or maybe we need a different strategy or this simply isn't working, right? But what she did was she would ignore the naysayers and she found individuals who really believed in her compared her to geniuses. that said that she was like bait-hoven and soon she became this darling of the tech world and she found herself in really high-stakes situations where she had to make good on hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. The problem was that of course the device didn't work. And so instead of coming clean and asking her prestigious board members or her mentors for help, she lied to investors and employees, right? She lied to the board and to federal regulators, and also she pushed workers to falsify test results. And workers sent blood samples to regular blood testing labs for analysis and then pretended the samples had been analyzed by the Theranos machines.

So the kinds of interventions that had most often been studied in the last 10 to 15 years present students or employees with different kinds of science-based materials that show individuals the brains ability to grow new connections to create new pathways to actually generate new cells when people are really in the process of learning, when people are making mistakes, and communicating really how our intelligence, talents, and abilities can shift over time by trying hard, by trying new strategies when we get stuck by seeking help and the support of others, that it really seeks to then instill that growth mindset, and I would say that these direct to student or direct to employee interventions at first had a lot of success. But as they have grown and as different groups have tried to replicate them, they take different kinds of strategies in that replication, they might try different kinds of outcomes. And we are seeing variability in these results over time, where some studies are replicating these effects. And in others, there's finding challenges in finding effects or as large of effects as some of the original studies had shown.

I don't think that it is. My research and the research of others on this idea of the cultures of growth actually can explain why we see some of this variability in the results. The truth is that our capacity to use our talent and our ability is really going to depend on the people in the context around us, right? This is a social endeavor, learning and development. And, you know, students and employees can have the strongest growth mindset at the personal level, but if they find themselves in these fixed-minded cultures of genius, they're not going to be able to use or benefit from that growth mindset.

This study included a nationally representative sample of more than 12,000 students. And what we found in the study was that students who participated in an online program really designed to instill that growth mindset we talked about earlier, we did find overall that they earned higher grades and they were more willing to take on challenges by enrolling in more advanced classes over time. However, We also looked at where this program did not work and where it didn't help students was when teachers were in their fixed mindsets and when they were engaged in teaching practices consistent with those fixed mindset beliefs or in other words where they were creating these cultures of genius. And this is why cultures of growth are really crucial for helping us get into, stay in, and then maximize the benefits of our growth mindset. If we have a strong culture of genius around us, there's going to be very few opportunities for us to actually engage in the process of learning to make mistakes. To raise our hand and say, I don't understand, can you tell me again? We're not going to feel comfortable really engaging in the behaviors that increase learning and development and growth.

We looked at measuring people's individual mindsets and then we looked at the mindset culture that was being communicated in regular practices and policies at the organization and in their routine interactions that managers would have consistently with employees. And what we found was that above and beyond the effects of anyone's personal mindsets on the ground, in terms of predicting their performance outcomes and predicting their experiences in the organization, how motivated they were, how satisfied, how much they trusted the organization, how committed to it they were. We found that it was actually that mindset culture as communicated in the way culture is through these policies, practices, norms, and leadership messages. that the way in which managers gave feedback to individuals, the way that they praised individuals, right? Were they just signaling out individuals who are already seen as high performers and only giving those individuals praise? Were they giving stretch assignments to individuals who are only considered geniuses? Or did they really focus on developing everybody on their team over time? We saw that these kinds of manager policies and practices and the way that they ram their team meetings to really sort of emphasize learning and growth, right, reflect on our mistakes and then brainstorm together how we're going to address them versus only talk about the good things that are happening on our team and hide mistakes. That culture is the thing that predicted people's experiences in that organization above and beyond individuals' personal mindsets.

I think that is important. I also think that it can be important to tell stories, real stories of how brilliance and geniuses developed over time. I don't know if you're familiar. I bet that you are with Anders Erickson's work where he sort of followed people in their trajectories of you know the most talented and brilliant and gifted musician and basketball player and artist right across all these different disciplines and you know when you ask and you look at these people's life histories what you see over and over is that everyone close to them when they were little oftentimes wouldn't have predicted the trajectory that they ultimately found themselves in, right? That these kids were not distinguishable from their peers most of the time. That it actually took development and their parents, teachers and coaches and others really investing time, energy, and resources to help those individuals become who they became. And I think that that kind of story around genius, right? Is one that actually can give people the motivation and some of the strategies that actually might be useful to achieve their potential.

They are not that kind of stack ranking practice. That went out the window many years ago. We had a brilliant chair in our department who decided that instead of that, we're going to model the extent to which faculty collaborate with each other on papers and grants and projects. And so he used this sophisticated modeling program to actually produce a diagram that would show all the interpersonal connections within our department. And he printed that out and our department's collaboration network diagram has now been posted in our front office. So right by the faculty mailboxes, every day when you walk in, And you pick up your mail, you're reminded about that value as an organization, as a department. I think this goes to how important it is to really challenge the dominant and competitive culture of genius that exists in so many of our fields and certainly in academia.

Sure. Some of the examples that we found in this data was student saying things like, I had one math professor who described a student from a previous semester who said he was not naturally good at math, but the student regularly attended office hours as questions and ended up getting the highest grade in the class. He, the teacher, told the story to encourage us the students to ask questions and attend office hours. Another example that we saw in the data, the students in my class, had no idea how to write a scientific paper. But the professor had a 72-hour policy, where all students could turn in their paper 72 hours before it was due, and the TA would read it and give them comments. This helped teach us what you did write, what you did wrong, and how to fix it before it was submitted for a grade. Another example is, my math teacher says, you're all smart enough to get an A. However, you're going to find a few topics difficult to cross the term. If this is the case, please come to my office hours so we can discuss the topic more in depth. I'm here to help you. And then finally, my professor always gave the class advice about how to improve and do better in the course. Especially after the class got their grades back from test, he always told us how we could improve.

In 2012, a reporter did an in-depth investigation into Microsoft and interviewed a bunch of current former employees. And every single one of them who were interviewed cited stacked ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft. They said it was driving untold numbers of people out. And so the practice at Microsoft required managers to really grade employees against each other and rank them on a scale of 1 to 5. And so if you had a team of 10 people, even if that team was the highest performing and most innovative team within the organization, you still knew that no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven people are going to get the mediocre review, and one was going to get a terrible review. And of course, as we've talked about, this led employees to really focus on competing with each other so much though that when Sachin Adela became CEO, he pointed to this infamous cartoon, and it has an organizational chart showing guns pointing in every direction. And he said, this is the Microsoft that he inherited. So, you know, in this system, even if you achieved your goals, even if you achieved everything that was on your plate and everything that was expected of you, it didn't guarantee safety because it was always possible that a colleague, right, could achieve better than you. And so what the experience was like in that company was that employees were really focused on suppressing their colleagues, gaming the system with holding information, right? in 2013, Microsoft threw out their stack ranking system. Instead, Nadella's wife actually shared with him, Caroled wax book on MindSat and he was so inspired by this. He decided, I'm really going to take this mindset idea and see if we can shift the MindSat culture of this organization, through a lot of these practices and policies that we've been talking about today. So stack ranking goes out the door. Now there's a new evaluation system that has just been unrolled, looking at people's potential, looking at the opportunities, a manager has been giving to individuals, and people's responses to those opportunities for growth and development. One of the things that they did was also revamp the talent identification system. within Microsoft and by doing that it involves multiple days of the CEO and his executive team sort of sitting down with all the leaders of the different arms of the organization and talking about individuals who are seen as having growth potential who really seem to be able to be benefited by stretch assignments and by moving to different teams taking on new roles within the organization or actually getting different resources in order to go deeper with the things that they seem to be developing. And by doing this, they really get a sense of how the organization can actually support a larger set of individuals than what other boys be recognized in a traditional culture of genius.

I do hear that we are quote unquote lowering standards when we are creating these cultures of growth. But actually our research shows just the opposite that actually high performers perform better in cultures of growth because these environments are more rigorous and more supportive. They expect more from individuals, right? And they expect more from a broader swath of individuals than a culture of genius does. We see if you imagine this in a classroom context, right? What we see in the data from very large introductory STEM classes is that when students perceive their instructor to have more of a growth mindset, It's not that it's rainbows and sunshine, right, and unicorns all day long. Students actually report a good amount of frustration and a good amount of annoyance sometimes in those classes because the instructor holds everyone to such high standards a continuous growth and development. So even if you're already doing well, even those individuals should show some growth and development in their trajectory. And it can be really rigorous and difficult in these environments. And so this is one of those myths about mindset culture that cultures of growth are soft and always affirming and less rigorous, dumbing down the standards. And actually we see just the opposite in the data.

You know, anytime you have to or more people that interact with each other, You're going to have a mindset culture, right? About how you think about each one of your skills and abilities. So my husband, Victor, and I have really tried to notice where we're putting ourselves and each other into these kinds of fixed-minded boxes and to do some small experiments that kind of challenge these assumptions and showing ourselves reminding ourselves that we're fully capable of growth and change. So one of my fixed minds that believes about Victor is that he's too modest, he's self-effacing, but he's also, frankly, in his own right, a badass. The work he does in his job as a law professor is really to transform courts and judicial systems nationally. So what I've done is to really work to notice and highlight for myself and for him, different places where I see him putting forward his findings and his contributions in a way that makes him feel comfortable, but also in a way that he shows what he has discovered. For his part, Victor speaks minds that belief about me is somewhat accurate. that I enjoy systems and really being in control. And so he's made a lot of efforts to say something to me when he notices that I'm sitting back and encouraging other people to call the shots. I'll also share that this summer Victor noticed that I'd really developed an interest in the cello. So he encouraged me to find a teacher here in Bloomington and he's done a million little things to really take things off my plate so I can go to lessons and practice at home. And so I think that in personal relationships when we can support the aspirational selves we really like to be and who we'd like to become can inspire in us a courage to kind of seek out more of those cultures of growth and create those cultures of growth for ourselves.

Well, I will tell you that I just graduated from being able to pick Mary had a little lamb and twinkle twinkle to bowing and it is a revolution. It is so fantastic. I'm really looking forward to where it's going to take me.

Absolutely not. I do have to tell them in the other room, but still, no, it's too embarrassing.

Oh, gosh. Shankar, have we created a culture of growth? That's not going to judge. This is a performance.

Thank you Shankar, it's been such a pleasure.

It was fun for me. Bye.