We’re conditioned to think that people who excel at school are the ones that go on to excel in business. However, research indicates that a better guide is not the distinction between A and C students but between ‘fixed’ and ‘growth’ mindset individuals. Robert Wood explains.
Effective CEOs must cope with, and recover from, setbacks and remain adaptive in the face of often overwhelming pressures and competing demands.
Those who don’t are increasingly being shown the door.
C students have to learn how to cope with setbacks and failure to meet expectations and, if they are to get through, recovery strategies for their next assignment or exam.
Sound familiar? All this is good training for the stressful demands of the CEO role, which is anything but a set of structured assignments with defined grading criteria.
It is not the A or C performance level of a student that determines or even defines their capability for management roles, it is what they learn from the experience.
Failure and setbacks can be great sources of learning, depending on the mindset that individuals adopt when confronting challenging tasks.
Carol Dweck of Stanford University has identified two mindsets that influence how people react to challenges, cope with failure, continue solving problems and learn from experience.
She calls them the ‘fixed mindset’ and the ‘growth mindset’.
Fixed mindsets are held by people who believe that abilities are fixed or innate. They often refer to ‘natural ability’ or as being ‘gifted’ when referring to exceptional performers. When they don’t perform well on a task, they often attribute it to a lack aptitude.
Developmental mindsets believe that performance is the product of effort, understanding, strategies and other factors that can be learnt or developed through experience.
My research has established that individuals differ systematically and consistently in their mindsets. Here are a few of the important effects that differences in mindsets can have for senior management roles:
Fixed mindset individuals attribute performance setbacks and failures to ability or lack of capability. They become self-doubting, which undermines their cognitive functioning, leading to further poor performance. Often, their primary response on tasks that must be done is to work harder and they spend too little time on diagnosis and strategy creation.
Growth mindset individuals may have initial self-doubts, but move more quickly beyond negative evaluations to diagnostic analyses and consideration of alternative strategies.
Fixed mindset individuals are more risk averse. They prefer to work on familiar tasks and to employ strategies that they know work. They also tend to be highly vigilant to errors, which they seek to avoid. This makes them ideal for roles that require error avoidance and highly structured risk-avoidance approaches.
Growth mindset individuals see errors as opportunities to learn and refine strategies. This does not mean they try to perform poorly, just that they respond more constructively when things go wrong. They are also more likely to experiment and seek improvement, even when they are performing well. Think of Tiger Woods, who even though he was ranked number 1 in the world, took a year to improve his grip and fell in the rankings while doing so.
Fixed mindset individuals are quicker to judge themselves and others and they rely more on categorical judgments than their growth mindset counterparts. When assessing people, they refer more often to ability, personality traits and character.
By way of contrast, growth mindset individuals are more likely to suspend judgment and to use less categorical explanations or descriptors. If a staff member performs poorly, they are more likely to talk about strategy or task understanding or contextual factors like other work commitments as reasons for the poor performance. They are slower to reach an opinion on people.
Finally, people with a growth mindset are more coachable and more willing to learn new tasks than those with fixed mindsets. They respond more positively to the inevitable setbacks and displays of ineptitude that occur when learning a new task. They try new strategies, discard those that don’t work and do not get locked into cycles of frustration when progress is slow. Fixed mindset individuals do, and, given a choice, are more likely to avoid or give up on learning new and challenging tasks if they do not make rapid progress.
So, what about the C student? Well, developing a growth mindset is a product of life’s experiences and the guidance we receive from people and institutions about how to interpret that experience.
This guidance and our experience shape the mindsets we develop. If we experience some of life’s ups and downs, like our C student, and our friends, family and partners help us to focus on strategies and what we could do in the future, then we are more likely to develop a growth mindset.
If, instead, we receive messages that we lack competence whenever we are outside our comfort zone and not performing effectively, have no aptitude for a subject or are not as talented other people, then we are more likely to develop a fixed mindset.
Robert Wood is Professor of Management (Organisational Behaviour) at Melbourne Business School, which was named the number one provider of executive education in the Asia Pacific region by the Financial Times 2008.
Photo: Lentini
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Philip Bateman
November 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Thank you for writing that, really enjoyed it. I previously found a complimentary reference on the Khosla Ventures site; “What makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial – Effectual (vs causal) reasoning” – http://bit.ly/88VRfs
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Anthony Reply:
November 27th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Thanks for that link, Philip. Good paper.
Also a very enjoyable article from Robert Wood, who makes an excellent point.
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Trevor
November 24th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
not only all that… but my experience of uni was that a huge number of people were cheating, doing everything from plagiarising essays & just using find replace text & other techniques to make the work appear original, all the way through to puchasing exams, and bringing answers into exams taped to their chest, or hidden in the toilets where they would go to read them…
so someone doing well at uni means very little indeed with the present methods of testing & examination
…and even when cheating is not involved, there is also a HUGE difference between someone who just memorises stuff well, and someone who doesnt remember as much, but what they do remember they have a profound understanding of
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Billy Bob
November 24th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Agree with Trevor above. In addition:
Information is easy to get hold of these days so the ability to USE information and problem solve is of MUCH higher value than parrot fashion knowledge.
Of course both together thay are powerful as you can see opportunities others miss. Work on your problem solving skills early then increase your knowledge through life = growth mindset and success
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Trevor Reply:
November 24th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
i agree with you also BB… and one of the biggest problems here is that companies themselves and also in conjunction with the human resources industry, continue to make the exact same mistakes in laying down a narror/rigid set of selection criteria, which in many cases will exclude rather than include anyone who has any idea at all of what innovation means beyond being just a really good word to bandy about when you want to impress people.
i still dont understand why people cant see the plainly obvious fact that the more “normal” someone’s career life is, the less likely they are to be a true innovator… and perhaps some may disagree with me here & quote all sorts of examples, but ultimately it comes down to how you define “innovation”, and i think the disagreement comes basically because people like myself (and perhaps you also) hold a much higher standard of expectation before we are willing to apply the adjective “innovative” to what it is that someone does… and what many people regard as successful examples of their ability to innovate, are to us nothing more than achievements of doing something bleeding obvious that should have been done YEARS ago, that did NOT require restrospective sight in order to see the need for it (despite claims to the contrary by those who took so long to act), and which they wouldnt have even been able to do in the first place if someone else didnt think of it for them, and they were just lucky enough to have a boring enough work history to impress HR people and thus get into the position of authority where they could affect such a change.
i am not implying that this is universally the case… so dont go getting upset (anyone reading this) because i seem to be dissing your success… however, what i am pointing out (yet again), and this relates to the debate about executive remuneration also, is that people in positions of power often get far more credit than they are due, both in terms of recognition & reward.
So whether its innovation we are talking about, who makes a better CEO, or anything else, the same facts remain true… if you want to achieve something BEYOND the every day, you do have to look outside the square for someone capable of thinking outside of it… and in many cases, this means you need to actually give some serious consideration to the candidate who pisses you off the most… because the guy you like, the “safe bet”, who ticks all your boxes, and fits into that nice little box, is probably the wrong guy… and if everything that has happened in the world over the last decade isnt enough to prove this to people who still disagree, well then you can see why i often just give up talking in these debates… there is no point in talking to people who believe they already know the truth.
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