Mindset

Mindset explains the difference between having a fixed and a growth mindset, why one trumps the other, and what you can do to adopt the right one.

Big corporations like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs hire the best graduates and then expect them to perform perfectly and instantly. Instead of being trained on the job, employees are thrown into cold water and monitored closely for errors. Whoever doesn’t do a great job right away gets fired. This breeds a fixed mindset.

In a fixed mindset world, talent is king. Naturally, people want to look talented all the time.

By pushing people into mainly window-dressing their performance instead of actually performing, not only do the employers rob themselves of great people, their black-and-white thinking also cultivates a fixed mindset in others. Since the applicants already assume they’re always being judged as good or bad, the employers behavior turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As a result, most employees spend their time trying not to look stupid instead of working productively so their leaders won’t brand them as a failure.

If you give kids hard math problems, they love working on them and want more of the same kind. This is the growth mindset in a nutshell. The kids’ desire to face more and tougher challenges doesn’t necessarily come from wanting better grades. Instead, it comes from the satisfaction they get from pushing themselves as much as they can. They adopt the mantra “Practice makes perfect.” Two famous examples of a fixed and growth mindset are Lee Iacocca, who ran Chrysler, and Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM. Both came in when the companies were down in the dumps, and both successfully turned them around. The difference lies in what happened afterwards. Iacocca became complacent. He took all the credit, surrounded himself with worshippers and worried more about his own image than about the company. Seeking approval from others to compensate for his low self-esteem led him to make bad decisions. He ignored dwindling sales and even fired innovative designers, which brought the company right down again. Gerstner, on the other hand, recognized the internal battles at IBM didn’t help teamwork and customer service. So he broke up old hierarchies and even put himself on an employee level to communicate well. By focusing on teamwork and learning from past failures he showed a true growth mindset and brought sustainable success to IBM. In a similar manner, a furious, fixed mindset golfer might fire his caddy or throw his shoes into the crowd. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, never let a mistake stop him. His Airness has spoken – and he’s become the first billionaire basketball player in history. Trying to avoid difficult…