According to Mary Murphy, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Indiana, to help individuals find a “growth mindset” we need to cultivate a “growth culture.” Our ability to maintain a growth mindset is influenced by how the people around us talk about growth.
In a Hidden Brain interview, she explains, “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.”
According to Murphy, performance management systems like stack ranking can undermine the establishment of a growth culture by nudging many of us to conflate recent performance with growth potential (future performance).
Moreover, by putting us in direct competition with our peers, such systems can also erode social trust and psychological safety in ways that leave us with little bandwidth (and perhaps even desire) to contribute to each other’s growth.
Murphy collaborated with Carol Dweck on research exploring how culture affects individuals’ ability to find and maintain a growth mindset.
More from Murphy:
“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 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.”
“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.”
“Students who see that their instructor endorses this belief…Look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is gonna 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.”
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