Dr. Mary C. Murphy explains the downsides to the culture of genius—and shares an alternative path for transforming individuals, teams, and organizations.
You’ll Learn:
- The biggest misconceptions about the growth mindset
- The optimal number of mistakes to make
- How to deal with the four situations that trigger a fixed mindset
About Mary
Mary C. Murphy is the Herman B Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Founding Director of the Summer Institute on Diversity at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Founder and CEO of the Equity Accelerator, a research and consulting organization that works with schools and companies to create more equitable learning and working environments through social and behavioral science.
Murphy is the author of more than 100 publications and in 2019, was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. government. She is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research has been profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and NPR, among other outlets.
Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she earned her BA from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University in 2007, mentored by Claude Steele and Carol Dweck. She splits her time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Palo Alto, California.
Mary’s new book on organizational mindset, Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations is available now.
- Book: Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations
- Assessment: Mindset Triggers Assessment
- Substack: Culture Catalyst with Mary C. Murphy
- Website: MaryCMurphy.com
Resources Mentioned
- Article: “The Magic Relationship Ratio, According to Science” by Kyle Benson
- Storytelling Coach: Kymberlee Weil
- Book: Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson
- Book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
- Past episode: 960: Surfacing Hidden Wisdom for Huge Breakthroughs: A Masterclass in Asking with Jeff Wetzler
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Dr. Mary C. Murphy Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Mary, welcome.
Mary Murphy
Thank you, Pete. It’s so good to be here.
Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to dig into your wisdom when it comes to talking cultures of growth and mindset, transforming individuals, teams, and organizations. Could you kick us off with a fun story that really shows what’s possible or what’s at stake with this kind of stuff?
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. So, I can tell you the mindset culture origin story, where it came from.
Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.
Mary Murphy
And I think it will help share for your listeners, their experiences of the cultures of growth and cultures of genius. So, at Stanford, where I was getting my PhD, it is tradition that all graduate students present to their faculty. So, I was in one of these seminars, we’ve all been in one of these seminars, where a friend was presenting his work from the year. And, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, didn’t raise their hand, just blurted out, this professor blurts out, “Well, it’s clear the fatal flaw in this work is XYZ.”
And then another professor on the other side blurts out, “No, the fatal flaw isn’t XYZ. It’s ABC.” And they start fighting amongst each other to show who’s smarter than whom, right? Who’s the smartest in the room? How can they take down this idea, the most devastating comment, right? How quickly they could do it. And it was very much this culture of genius idea, relying primarily on star performers. Can you cut it, or can’t you? Do you have it or don’t you? Who’s the smartest in the room?
Two weeks later, I’m in a different seminar, and the faculty there have a totally different way of engaging with the students as they’re presenting their research. And, yes, they are identifying what are the challenges, what are the problems with the work, but what they’re competing on is not how smart you are. They’re competing on who can find the solution, the most elegant solution to the problem. Maybe this student needs to include a different survey, work with a different population, do their work slightly differently.
And what I saw in those moments was both of these are characterized by mindset, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And what they did to people in those seminar series was very different as well. In the first one, the student didn’t want to touch his work for weeks later because it was so painful the way that it had been treated in this fixed mindset culture of genius. In the other seminar series, we saw students so ready to hit the ground running, and they had ideas and strategies to actually engage their work differently because that was the focus of the culture of growth there, the growth mindset sort of embedded in that environment.
And so, this is the beginning of mindset culture where I saw mindset doesn’t just exist in our minds. What’s your mindset? How does it affect you? What my mindset is and how does it affect me? It’s really in our interactions, in our teams, in these groups, what we say and do, how we interact with each other. That’s where mindsets are made. And that mindset culture shapes almost everything, our thoughts, our feelings, our behavior, and our performance.
Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, I love it. So, we’ve got cultures of growth, cultures of genius. And it’s funny, genius sounds like a good thing that we want to do.
Mary Murphy
It does, doesn’t it?
Pete Mockaitis
But here, it is not the preferable option of the two.
Mary Murphy
That’s right.
Pete Mockaitis
Can you unpack a little bit these terms and the cultures, what they look, sound, feel like in some depth?
Mary Murphy
Yeah, absolutely. So, the culture of genius really has at its core this fixed mindset belief. You either have it or you don’t. You’re smart or you’re not. And it’s really focused on identifying who those star performers are with the belief that these are going to be the team members and the performers that we are going to elevate and put all the resources around. These are people who are inherently more capable due to maybe some kind of superior intelligence or talent or ability.
And they really focused in these cultures of genius on those standout individuals to carry the rest of the team. And the whole organization and teams are set up around it to do that. It’s, find the genius and give them the ball. And that’s a very fixed-minded way. It’s like there are only a few people who have these kinds of skills, only a few people who have this kind of ability.
The culture of growth has, at its core, the growth mindset belief that talent, ability, and intelligence is a potential, that, sure, we all differ based on it, but the commitment of the team and the organization, if it has a culture of growth, is that we are going to take everyone, hopefully everyone with very high intelligence, talent, and ability, and we’re going to challenge and grow them and give them strategies and resources to take that talent, intelligence, and ability and grow it even further to the benefit of the individual and to the benefit of the organization.
And so, this culture of growth, you can tell it from a culture of genius because supports are given to people to develop and to contribute. The reality, though, just as we’ve gotten fixed and growth mindset wrong by saying, “Do you have a fixed mindset? Or do you have a growth mindset?” this false dichotomy, we’re not going there when it goes to mindset culture. Mindset culture exists on a continuum, and the truth is that many teams and organizations are usually a mixture of the two.
And so, you can have a bit of a culture of growth or a bit of a culture of genius, especially if you have a very large organization. We find almost always pockets of cultures of genius and pockets of cultures of growth. And then it becomes, “How do we actually move the whole organization to be more growth minded more of the time?”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the continuum is present both for individuals and for organizations, teams.
Mary Murphy
That’s right. The individual mindset continuum and then the mindset culture continuum. And we move between at the individual level. We move between our fixed and growth mindset. That’s like the last third of my book. It really talks about the mindset triggers that we know from 30 years of research on the fixed and growth mindset. What are those situational triggers that move us between our fixed and growth mindset sort of on a daily basis in the workplace, in our relationships, in our families? What are those triggers?
So, we identify four of those that have really strong empirical evidence to back them up. And then we help people identify which are their triggers, and then how to move more towards growth when I identify that I’m in a triggering context that’s going to move me towards my fixed mindset sort of automatically.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s so helpful. And I find that is dead on with my own experience. Like, “Yes, indeed, I believe not just because I’m supposed to, but because the science and data tells me it’s better and superior, that growth mindset is true. Like, yes, human beings can, in fact, learn, grow, develop, improve in things.”
Mary Murphy
That’s right.
Pete Mockaitis
Like, neuroplasticity, etc.
Mary Murphy
And I’m in my fixed mindset all the time, too. I mean, talk to me in the evening when we are loading the dishwasher. And I’m like, “Man, there is a right and the wrong way to do this. This is the right way to do it.” And you talk to my husband, he does it a completely different way. I got a very fixed mindset about the way to do that.
We can’t be thinking about it that we can’t talk about when we find ourselves in our fixed mindset, what are the triggers that move us to our fixed mindset. Because then it becomes more of a religion. The growth mindset becomes more of a religion. Like, you have to have it. You have to bow down to it. You can’t admit to ever having a fixed mindset thought or behavior. And then we never get better. It just becomes something that we kind of give words to rather than actual behavior on the ground.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, Mary, when you say on the ground, I think loading the dishwasher is about on the ground as it gets. And I think, I don’t want to spend too much time here, but I think we must spend a minute or two. So, is it, in fact, not the case that there is an optimal way to load the dishwasher?
Mary Murphy
I actually think there is a scientific way, and I think YouTube will probably give you about 400 videos about the scientific A versus B testing of the better way to load the dishwasher.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess what I think about there is, like, I’ve got my own opinions on dishwasher loading, but I think in, some ways, it all depends on what do we mean by better in the terms of the speed in which you can load it.
Mary Murphy
That’s right. That’s right. How do we define better? It’s a good question for mindset culture, actually, more generally. How do we define better? How do we define high performers or top performers? Are we talking about efficiency? Are we talking about outcomes only? Are we talking about process? Being able to make those definitions transparent and clear is the first step to actually figuring out then what we are trying to drive towards.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, I did want to hear about these triggers, but first, let’s hear a little about the genius notion. So, is it not true that there are stars that we do need to disproportionately lavish with coaching and resources and attention to maximize shareholder value, etc.?
Mary Murphy
Yeah, so I think that this is one of those things that we haven’t really thought all the way through. I do think a big question is, “Wouldn’t an organization just want to hire geniuses? Aren’t they all high performers? Or don’t we want a whole organization with just these geniuses there?”
And what we see is that high performers actually prefer, because we’ve done the research with thousands of people at hundreds of companies, that high performers actually prefer the culture of growth because, to your point, most organizations, if they’re hiring for genius, they are not investing in the growth and the development of those geniuses. They are hiring geniuses and say, “Now you take us to where we need to go. Now you take us,” and they don’t give people resources or strategies and supports to actually help them continue to grow their skills and abilities. They expect them to get there and to do the work.
The problem with having a whole organization where you do nothing but hire these geniuses is that it creates a hugely interpersonally competitive environment within the organization, because, again, if you have that fixed mindset view, there’s only some who are smart, “Look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year when we do our stack ranking evaluations.” It creates this environment where everyone is only as good as their last performance.
People start to hoard information. They start to leave people off calendar invites in order to show that they’re the smartest ones in the room. They’re the ones with the best ideas. They know a new star is being born every day, and so they really want to hold on to not only their reputation, but also their status within the organization. And so, you have people concerned about that instead of concerned about doing the work that’s going to move them and the organization forward. And you also see big ethical problems in these organizations due to this internal competition.
And so, ultimately, high performers know that the culture of growth is the place where they can take risks, they can be supported in that risk taking, they’re going to be continually resourced and invested in across time, and that the process is going to matter just as much as the outcomes. The outcomes are very much going to matter in a culture of growth. But there’s also the whole thing about process and development and the work of, “Will the company allow me to take some risks to actually do something innovative and creative?” That’s where the culture of growth really out-beats the culture of genius and the bottom line, because we’ve studied that too.
Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I think I’ve seen in my own experience, having hired folks who were amazing, it’s not true that you just hire someone who’s brilliant and then everything they do is brilliant always and forever.
Mary Murphy
That’s right.
Pete Mockaitis
Like, I actually scratched my head a few times. It’s like, “Well, what happened here? We had someone who was just amazing and then they stopped being amazing. Like, what’s the deal?” And sometimes you might never know the answer as to what happened, but it really is, I think, almost like, folks are realizing, “Oh, this isn’t quite right. This isn’t quite my thing. I’m actually getting progressively exhausted and burnt out by being so amazing day after day, and I’m just tired of it now.”
Mary Murphy
That’s right. That’s right. I mean, that’s what our research shows, too, that as it turns out, even geniuses don’t fare well in the culture of genius. In these environments, high performers are usually put on a pedestal and that creates almost like a straightjacket where they’re not allowed to take risks, they’re not allowed to make mistakes, and it puts them in a very fragile place where they’re afraid to fail, and so they become very risk averse, and they kind of do the thing that we kind of thought we’ve seen in the past, “Well, that worked in the past, so I’ll just keep redoing that cause that’s the safe thing. We know that will be a success.”
So, you see people not putting forward their best ideas, not innovating, not being creative in their work. And we see this too in school settings where we label kids as gifted, and then it becomes that they’re often terrified of underperforming. So, they play it safe, they hide their mistakes. They don’t take on any kind of intellectual challenges because they have been labeled gifted and they can’t lose that reputation or that status. So, that’s what we do when we put people in those roles and when we surround them with that culture of genius.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. I’ve known some folks who, they were on a valedictorian track, and they weren’t going to mess it up by taking the hard AP classes.
Mary Murphy
That’s right. Exactly right, yeah. That’s a good example.
Pete Mockaitis
So, you make reference to a prove and perform mode. Sounds like we’re talking about that right here. And so, you say that when we escape from that, we actually improve our cognitive abilities. Can you tell us about some of this underlying research and just how much of a lift do we see there?
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. So, this really goes to some of the cognitive and neuroscience work that’s been done when we look at mindset and mindset culture. And so, what this shows is that when we are really only focused on performance goals, rather than performance goals and learning goals together, which is the alternative in a culture of growth.
When we’re only focused on performance, you’re only as good as your last performance, you have to prove your worth with every example that you are engaged in, every piece of work you’re engaged in, a new client presentation, a report that you’re writing, “Show me how smart you are. Show me what you did for me lately or how smart you are,” and that any mistake can be taken as a sign that you don’t have it.
When we are focused on those performance goals, a lot of our cognitive resources and executive function actually is focused on the self, “It’s focused on me and how I’m coming across and my reputation and how other people are seeing me.” And so, by dividing, literally dividing our attention in this way, our executive functions in this way, self-focus and then the work that you’re actually trying to do, it takes longer to do that work. We do it, ironically, with more mistakes, and it actually undermines, therefore, the quality of the work that comes out.
Whereas, if we can focus on the performance, and we want to do the best possible work we can, but we want to also learn the most while we’re doing this, it takes the self-focus off and it puts the focus on the work itself and how to improve the work, “How can I write the best client pitch that’s really going to help the client see that we’re going to be the best for them? What can we learn with the client together? What are they going to want to learn from us by working with us? How do I build that into the pitch?”
You take that learning lens onto the work, in addition to the performance, takes the attention off of you, puts the full executive function onto the project itself, and that ultimately produces the best outcomes at the individual level, and then when you aggregate that at the team and the organizational level.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you’ve got a good turn-of-a-phrase, succeed by failing at 15% of your efforts. How so? And why 15%?
Mary Murphy
Yeah, so this is basically from a set of studies, kind of a meta-analysis of many studies, that looked across many different modes of being. So, it looked at human performance. It looked at animal performance in animal studies. It looked at AI algorithms and the performance of those algorithms. And in each case, the question was, “What is the optimal amount of mistakes that actually support learning?”
If you think about it, if you have flawless performance, what are you learning? You’re not learning anything. You’re not learning what worked. You’re not really learning about what might work or what could work or how to get innovative about it, and so mistakes are integral. And we actually have parts of our brain that are tuned to mistake-making that really help us then concretize, “Okay, that didn’t work. Here’s the lesson. Here’s a new way to solve or strategize for this problem, so that we can actually update in our minds, and then solve the problem going forward.”
Those systems are not activated without the mistakes. So, the question becomes, “What’s the optimal amount of mistakes?” And these studies over time, in many of these different modes shows that 15% is the optimum amount of mistakes to enhance learning and performance.
And so, if you’re not making about 15% of mistakes, if 15% of what you’re doing isn’t failing, you’re not pushing yourself. You’re not actually learning and performing at what could be your best. You’re playing it a bit safe. And so, that’s where that 15% comes from. And it’s a really nice study of studies that sort of shows what’s optimal.
Pete Mockaitis
You know, what I find intriguing here, as we talk about teams and cultures and such, is Gottman and others have talked about the five-to-one ratio associated with praise to critique, and, mathematically, 15% critique…
Mary Murphy
Pretty close, right?
Pete Mockaitis
…and 5X praise, yeah, that is rather close.
Mary Murphy
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m not surprised, too, that, like, in many of these contexts, making mistakes, yes, it’s a negative experience in the same way that being critiqued by a partner is a negative experience. And so, you need to have a lot of that positive reserve. But if you have no complaints or critiques of your partner, are you actually learning and growing together?
Are you different people? You probably are, if you’re human, you are going to be different people on some dimension. And if there isn’t enough space for that in the context of the larger success of the couple or of the organization or team, you’re probably not optimally growing together either.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, as I think about a team, could you give us a story of someone, or an organization rather, who was able to turn it around, they noticed, “Hey, we’ve got a culture of genius here. It’s not serving us,” they took some steps and they transformed and saw cool things happen? Could you share something about this?
Mary Murphy
Yeah, I have a lot of these examples. I think that the one that I worked with closely was Shell. The oil and gas company, Shell. And they were really challenged by a goal that they had set back in 2007, called Goal Zero. They wanted zero leaks in their pipeline, and they wanted zero fatalities with any of the production or consumption of their oil and gas throughout their whole process.
And they were not able to meet Goal Zero for years and years and years. And they started working with me and several inside the organization together to start to think about how a growth mindset culture, how a learner mindset might actually be able to help identify, “What’s the missing piece that has not allowed us to reach that Goal Zero?” and started to do this with talking to the frontline workers.
They looked at their evaluation and promotion processes. Are they learning the most that they possibly can about their employees and their work, and how to improve it? They changed those things. They started talking to frontline workers who may not even be Shell employees. They might be contractors, but they’re out on the deepwater platforms and they’re in the fields of Afghanistan doing this work. And, “How can we help support them?”
And so, the conversations basically started to permeate the whole organization. They started to change some of their policies and practices on the ground. And, ultimately, they had a couple of individuals on the frontlines that said, “Hey, I have an idea. Like, we go through this process with regards to this work that we’re doing, but we think that there’s a hole here. We could, actually, if we’re doing this learner mindset thing, we can actually try this other way of this process. And we think that will allow us to not have any risk for leaks or fatalities that might happen.”
And so, they started to shift that. They found mechanisms to lift that information up to decision-makers. That was a new strategy they did as part of a culture of growth culture change. They changed some of these practices and then they reached Goal Zero. The only company within this industry to do so after sort of working on this culture change for a couple of years.
Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And so, it’s funny how… I mean, I’m sure you worked hard, and I don’t mean to diminish this fabulous accomplishment. At the same time, it sort of seems like, “Yeah, we probably should have been doing this forever.” But I guess that’s the way of like most improvements. It’s like, “Oh, I probably always should have been exercising,” or, like, all the things like, “Oh, yeah, people know stuff, so we got to make sure we have mechanisms by which we can get that surfaced and implemented.” And yet, often we just don’t get the wisdom inside people’s heads. Jeff Wetzler, we just had on, discussed this matter. We don’t get that wisdom in people’s heads up and out and going.
Mary Murphy
That’s right. And I think that the reason, one of the reasons for that, is because sometimes some of these changes, they can seem sort of piecemeal, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good practice. We should put that practice into place,” But without a framework, a unifying framework that says, “Here’s growth mindset culture. What does a growth mindset culture look like? What does it do? What is its focus? It’s on learning and development.”
“Now we take every one of our processes and our practices and we put them through the lens of learning. Are we learning what we need to learn? If not, let’s change it through that, and to figure out the best practices to advance that across the organization.” Otherwise, it’s just popcorn. Like, different practices that we should always have been doing, but without understanding why or what the larger goal is, what we’re trying to create more constructively for the whole organization.
And that’s, I think the benefit of that growth mindset culture idea, and then the particular norms and practices that we know and have studied that actually create that growth mindset culture and make it real on the ground.
Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, when you said culture, it’s almost like the process is an organism that learns as well, not just an individual human.
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. That’s right. You might fire these individuals, or they might retire, or leave the organization, and the new people that come in, the process and the practices are so embedded in the work that they then can enact that and come back into that learning organism that exists, and be plugged into that and be able to take that on almost immediately because that is the benefit of culture, not just working at the individual level, it’s the benefit of the cultural level.
Pete Mockaitis
And can you share a couple of these norms and practices that are just transformational in terms of they might seem small and yet they make all the difference?
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. So, we find that fixed and growth mindset cultures differ on the basis of five different norms kind of consistently across all of the studies and the research that my team has done and that others in the scholarship area and academia have done. And those are collaboration versus competition, the extent to which those are everyday practices, and how that collaboration versus competition is structured.
Those practices also exist when it comes to evaluation and promotion of individuals. So, you might think about, “Are people only getting benefit in their performance evaluations based on the outcome instead of the process, or how they galvanized an entire team, or how they collaborated to make this work, either with external or internal individuals?” So, collaboration versus competition, all the practices related to that.
Innovation and creativity, that’s the second norm that is really shaped by cultures of genius or cultures of growth. In cultures of genius, we see people playing it safe. They are afraid of bringing different ideas to the table because if they don’t work, they’re going to be taken as a sign that, “Me, personally, I don’t have it. I don’t belong here.” It makes people’s imposter syndrome kind of go through the roof because, “If I make a mistake, it’ll be seen and it’ll be known that maybe I’m an imposter in this environment.”
Whereas, in the culture of growth, people are really so focused on learning that they’re willing to try new things. And in fact, they’re motivated to do that. But they set up very safe experiments that actually help them take innovation and creativity piece by piece, and gathering the data along the way to really see whether that innovation or that creativity problem-solving is actually moving them in the right direction. It’s what I call effective effort.
This is a big difference between cultures of genius and cultures of growth. Cultures of genius rely on the guts of their geniuses, what do they care about today. Elon Musk is a great example, where he says, “Today, I feel like Twitter/X should be like this. And that’s what the whole organization is going to do. Tomorrow, it might be like that.” And you see these huge swings in these cultures of genius based on what the genius feels or wants in that given moment.
In a culture of growth, it is so much more rigorous. It’s based on data and experimentation. And we’re going to see whether or not the changes that we are actually making at the organizational and team level is having the impact that we expect it to have. And so, a culture of growth ultimately ends up being much more successful because they are learning so much baked in.
And the last three quickly is just risk taking and resilience, integrity and ethical behavior, and then diversity, equity and inclusion. We see much more diversity naturally in cultures of growth than in cultures of genius, because the culture of growth is not tied to the genius prototype that exists in our society. Pete, if you’re going and you Google genius, and you put the Google image, you click Google images, who do you think you’re going to see in the Google image?
Pete Mockaitis
Albert Einstein.
Mary Murphy
Albert Einstein, a million, bazillion. Who else?
Pete Mockaitis
Nikola Tesla. Ben Franklin.
Mary Murphy
Yeah, good.
Pete Mockaitis
Edison.
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. Right. Or present day, you might think Steve Jobs, or you might think Elon Musk even. But you think about, “Who are these people? What do they have in common?” They all tend to be mostly men. They all tend to be white. Or they all tend to be of a certain economic or social background. And so, the culture of genius uses that prototype, even implicitly, not even in an explicit, conscious way. Implicitly, we want to hire the geniuses. We want to bring those in.
So, when we’re thinking about who matches that or internally who we should promote who’s a genius within the culture of genius, it will benefit these individuals that fit that cultural prototype and leave aside women, people of color, people with disabilities, really anyone who doesn’t match that cultural prototype that we also know in our bones what that prototype is. The culture of growth, on the other hand, they’re focused on who can learn, grow, and develop the most.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, I definitely want to make sure we can touch on the mindset triggers. Can you unpack a few of these and kind of raise our attention to, “Aha, this is the specific kind of a situation that nudges me over into fixed land” and what to do about it?
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. So, there’s four mindset triggers. The first one is evaluative situations where we anticipate, before we’re even getting the work done, we anticipate and we know that we are going to be evaluated on the basis of what we’re working on. So, that might be, again, a client pitch, a presentation, a report that I’m writing. For a lot of people, being evaluated is their fixed mindset trigger. And they then create work and set up their outcomes very differently.
For example, if I’m giving a presentation, I might decide I’m only going to hit the high points and the successes, not the challenges and things that we actually struggled around because I don’t want to admit any weakness. And I might not leave any time for Q&A at the end of my presentation because I don’t want anyone to question whether or not my ideas or the recommendations that I’m putting forward are appropriate or are optimal. So, evaluative situations, we know that that’s a big trigger for people.
The second is high effort situations. That is where we believe in the negative correlation between ability and effort, “If I have to try hard, it means that maybe I don’t have it. Maybe I’m not a natural.” And in the culture of genius, this is really, really threatening because you should have it. You should absolutely know exactly what you’re going to do and be successful every single time.
And so, what we see in the culture of genius, with the high effort situation trigger, is that people only want to do the easy parts. They don’t want to take on stretch assignments. They don’t want to take on mastering a whole new domain. Even if they get promoted and get more money from it, we see that a lot of times people are held back by this fixed mindset trigger of high effort situations. It puts them right into their fixed mindset rather than their growth mindset.
The third one is critical feedback. Now, instead of anticipating that I’m going to be evaluated by others, now that evaluation has come and the feedback is not good. This is a lot of people’s fixed mindset trigger, where people feel like the negative feedback that they’re receiving or the critical feedback says something about them as a person rather than the work. They take it personally. We call this also the backpack kid. When they get a negative performance grade on a test, they crumple up the test, they put it at the very bottom of their backpack, crumpled up at the bottom, never to be seen again.
We see the same thing happening in workplaces where people get their evaluation, they look at the top to see where on the scale they lie, and then they put it away, rather than actually read through and remember the ways in which they’re being offered support, or what they could do to improve. That’s how critical feedback can operate as a fixed mindset trigger.
And the last one is the success of others. And here we can really think about the ways in which we praise people individually and on teams. What do you usually say when someone performs well? What would you say to them?
Pete Mockaitis
Good job.
Mary Murphy
“Good job!” Right, exactly. Now, good job makes us feel great, and it’s kind of the most common way we praise, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what we did well. Like, what would we actually improve or what would we actually want to replicate because we did it so well in this context? And so, when we think both about praising individuals and praising teams, how can we take this from, “Someone else got praised on my team. Now that means that there’s less for me”?
Putting people in that zero-sum mindset, that scarcity mindset around praise or success, which is really showing that this is one of our fixed mindset triggers, and actually help people see, even in the good stuff that people are creating, how they can learn, grow, and develop from that, and make it not an individual thing, but also so the whole team is learning what was really great about this presentation, how can the team replicate that or take it to the next level the next time that they’re working on it.
Pete Mockaitis
And if we catch ourselves, let’s say something triggers us and then we have a thought like, “I guess I’m just an idiot,” and so then it’s like, “Oh, that’s fixed mindset. Uh-oh.” So, you mentioned, like, religion, it was like, “No, no, no, I have sinned by thinking this into our thought,” what is the ideal response? And how do we, ideally, I don’t know if recover is the right word, but kind of get back into an optimal groove?
Mary Murphy
Absolutely. So, I do think people think of it sort of counter intuitively, but truly the best way to learn and to lean into our growth mindset more of the time is to acknowledge and learn to work with the fixed mindset, to not sort of be shocked or dismayed when it shows up, to just be like, “Oh, yeah, old friend, I remember you. Here you are again.”
Remembering that this is where my fixed mindset is likely to show up. If I know I’m going to give a presentation and I know I’m expecting some critical feedback from the people in the room, preparing myself for that and trying to tell myself, “Okay, when this happens, I’m going to make a plan to go into learning mode rather than going into prove and perform mode where I get defensive, where I have to show how smart I am.”
Asking questions of the questioners, trying to learn where they’re coming from, trying to learn and think about the ways and the experiences that we’ve had that might be able to answer their question in a way that everyone can learn from. So, I think identifying those triggers for ourselves, and then making a plan to know that these are predictable context, predictable situations, when I know I’m going to go into it, making a plan to prepare for that and not, you know, you’re going to be in your fixed mindset occasionally. That’s normal, right? Normalizing that, not beating yourself up about it, and just saying, “Next time, I’m going to focus on moving towards growth.”
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mary, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?
Mary Murphy
Well, I would say if anybody’s interested in identifying their own mindset triggers, on my website, we have a Mindset Triggers Assessment that people can take. And you can take that for yourself. Or if you are a leader or you have some direct reports, you can also take it as a group and understand each other’s mindset triggers so you can work together better.
The other thing I would say is that we have a culture cues audit. So, if you are looking at, “What are the triggers and the situations in our own teams or family or clubs that you might be a part of? What is the mindset culture of these?” you can sort of look at the cues and the environment that sort of helps show you where you are on the mindset culture continuum and give you strategies to help you move towards growth, even no matter what your role is, even if you don’t have direct reports or others that you’re responsible for.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Mary Murphy
I am really inspired by the African proverb, I think it goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” That idea, I think, is really interesting. And I probably would amend it a little. That if you want to go fast, go alone. You’re not going to go optimally.
I think that we tend to think, in American society, that we’re all independent agents and that we can sort of operate completely alone if we choose to do so. And we know that that’s just not a fact. We know that when we operate alone, we’re not going most efficiently. We’re not taking all the best ideas. We can’t possibly as an individual. And so, I’m really inspired by that idea that to go far, we go together.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Mary Murphy
We had a study with over 600 entrepreneurs, and we looked at the mindset of founders in early-stage companies. These are like series A, series B, very early-stage organizations and companies. And we saw that the founders’ mindset influenced so much in these early-stage companies as to the clients they would bring in, the hires they would make, and also the culture that they started to, even if they weren’t attending to culture, it really impacted the culture that they started to create with the organization.
And we saw that these companies started by founders with more of a fixed mindset, they were more risk averse, they were less creative, they didn’t want to hire anyone that was smarter than them, which actually really stymied the innovation and the market share that these companies actually created. And we also found it influenced their fundraising. And so, the ones with more growth-minded founders who created more cultures of growth in their companies, they actually were able to meet and exceed their fundraising goals much more than those with a fixed minded culture of genius.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?
Mary Murphy
Most recently, I read Amy’s book, Amy Edmondson, Right Kind of Wrong. I really loved the examples she provided and the stories she told. So, I would recommend that to people.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?
Mary Murphy
I started to work with a coach around storytelling, and I feel like examples and resources and tools to help make better stories and to help create storytelling has really helped me be better at my job.
It’s also showed me new research questions and new ideas for studies when I listen to other people’s stories through the lens of really understanding what makes them work and what are the mechanisms underlying people’s success or people’s failures.
Pete Mockaitis
And can we hear who this amazing storytelling coach is?
Mary Murphy
Her name is Kymberlee Weil, and she has an organization called the Storytelling School, and you can also listen to her podcast, but she is incredible.
Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?
Mary Murphy
Mindset is not just in our minds. For years and years, we have thought about it that way and we have seen it actually be used to label people and kids in classrooms, “So, that kid just has a fixed mindset. There’s nothing I can do about it,” says some teachers. And we see that in the workplace too or in families.
And so, seeing that mindset is not just in the mind, it’s co-created in relationships and teams and organizations. And then how do we help each other create these mindset cultures? I think that really resonates with people.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Mary Murphy
I’d point them to my website, MaryCMurphy.com. That’s where those quizzes are located. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter and all the other places. I also have a Substack, if people are interested in that, and that is recorded as an audio too if people are into the audio formats rather than the reading format. So, yeah, they can find me there.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Mary Murphy
Oh, yes. So, this would be a homage to my mentor, Carol Dweck, who came up with the idea of the fixed and growth mindset, who wrote the book Mindset. She challenges her first-year seminar students, her first-year college seminar students to this, and I would challenge your audience in the same way, in Carol’s name, that think about over the weekend or in the next few days, whenever you’re listening to this, what is one outrageously, outrageously growth minded thing you can do in the next few days?
Imagine what that could be, commit to doing it, and then tell me about it. Find me on social or anywhere. I would love to hear what your outrageously growth-minded thing is that you’re going to take on today.
Pete Mockaitis
Now, Mary, could we hear just a couple examples of…?
Mary Murphy
Well, Pete, what do you think? What is one example that would come to your mind?
Pete Mockaitis
Outrageously growth-minded, I don’t know.
Mary Murphy
Yeah, outrageously.
Pete Mockaitis
I’m meeting my podcast mastermind group shortly, and we’re going to do stand-up paddle boarding, and I’ve never done that before.
Mary Murphy
Hey, that’s good.
Pete Mockaitis
I feel like I’m going to fall over many, many times. So, that’s the first thing that came to mind.
Mary Murphy
I love that. That is a fantastic example. I started to pursue a couple of things. One, I mean, you can’t sort of take this on in just a day. But I started to pursue cello recently because I got really into it, I don’t know where it came from. A lot of family members are musicians. But I got really into this idea so I just signed up for a cello lesson. And then I got really into it. Now I’ve been sort of doing it for several months. But I think follow one of those passions that you might have or some inkling that you have, that’s a way to, and then commit to doing one step towards it. That’s outrageously growth minded.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you, Mary. This has been much fun, and I wish you many fun growth environments.
Mary Murphy
You as well, Pete. Thank you so much for having me. This has been fantastic. I hope your listeners enjoyed.
