443. Creating a Culture of Growth

Chris Dixon:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The ONE Thing podcast. I'm Chris Dixon

Nikki Miller:

And I'm Nikki Miller.

Chris Dixon:

And today, we had Dr. Mary Murphy on the podcast today and I really enjoyed this conversation. It was great to revisit kind of a classic concept in a modern application, which is the fixed versus growth mindset. And she really did a great job of reframing how this looks organizationally and culturally and the cultures of growth and growth mindset. I think it's great because you can shift your own individual perspective from fixed to growth. But then how can you influence this amongst teams and organizations? And I thought that was really interesting take.

Nikki Miller:

I never really had conceptualized, Chris, that while we talk so much in business and in entrepreneurship and in life about a person's mindset, that we don't typically consider the organizations can have mindsets too. And I loved her perspective around not only how to identify whether an organization has a growth or fixed mindset, but also how to improve it, change it, support it over time as well. I thought that was such an interesting part of her research. And I think that as we have so many entrepreneurs, businessowners, executives that listen to this podcast, it's going to be a really valuable conversation for them.

Chris Dixon:

Yeah. I think it's always a good thing to do to just check in against yourself and the teams or the people that you influence around you and see, are you in a fixed mindset or are you culturally in a fixed mindset and how can you make those changes to evolve into a place of growth so you can meet your goals and see them?

Nikki Miller:

Let's go listen to Mary. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to The ONE Thing podcast. We are here today with Dr. Mary Murphy, who's a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, the 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. A protege of Carol Dweck here to talk to us about her newest book, Cultures of Growth. Welcome, Mary. We're so excited to have you.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Thank you, Nikki. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Nikki Miller:

Thank you for what is an incredibly insightful book around something that I feel like, a concept I feel like they can always feel really broad and big, which is mindset. And it's so interesting because most of the time we read about mindset as it relates to the mindset of an individual, right, how I can improve my own personal mindset, how I can improve I'm going to show up in the world.

But you really focus in this book, and I think in your work, correct me if I'm wrong, but you really focus in this book around the mindset of organizations. And this is probably the first time that it had occurred to me that an organization could have a mindset much like an individual, which is so important because if you can improve the mindset of an individual, why can't you improve the mindset of an organization? And if a negative mindset of an individual can negatively affect them. Well, then so too can the mindset of an organization and I've never really interpreted it in this context.

So I'm excited to talk to you about this book today. Can you walk us through, what was the discovery? Did you always start here or is this something that you learned in your work and then went on to write more about it and study more about it?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. There's a few different ways I could go here. I think that one of the things I want to say to your first point about how we don't think about mindset as a quality outside of our head, I think this is one of the major misconceptions of the fixed and the growth mindset. So maybe, I'm sure all of your listeners have heard of the fixed and growth mindset, but just in case there are a few out there who haven’t --

Nikki Miller:

Oh, please explain it.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

The fixed mindset is this general belief that you either have it or you don't. Skills, talent, ability, intelligence, it's relatively fixed. You have it or you don't. Some people are math people. Some people are arts people. Some people are creative people, right? That's kind of our fixed mindset. And that is often contrasted with the growth mindset, which holds that we people have universal potential that we can all, regardless of where we start, we can all develop, learn, and grow with the right supports, with some help when we get stuck, with mentoring, and also with some persistence.

And so, where I think we have gone wrong when it comes to mindset, mindset has blown up all over education and it's more and more starting to be used in organizational and business settings, really pioneered by Satya Nadella at Microsoft, who named Microsoft as the first growth minded company, right? But I think there's been three major misconceptions about mindset.

I think the first major misconception is that there's just these two mindsets. If you Google mindset, you're going to see all these brains, these heads, and they're kind of against each other. And one is the fixed mindset and there's all the bad things associated with it. One's the growth mindset and there's all the good things associated with that.

And the questions often on these images is, which mindset do you have? As if you have to pick one or the other. I mean, do you see the irony here? It's like the most fixed way of thinking about the fixed and growth mindset. Which one do you have?

Nikki Miller:

It feels like a lifelong sentence a bit when you ask it that way too.

Dr. Mary C Murphy: too.

A hundred percent, a hundred percent, right? And that really gets us to part of this misconception that it only exists in our head, that it's one or the other. And what's true from the way it's always been studied way back in the 70s and early 80s, it's always been studied as a continuum. And we've always understood that people have access to both their fixed and their growth mindset. And we move along that mindset continuum based on our local context, based on the situations and our environment and the culture that surrounds us.

So that gets me to our second mindset misconception, which is that, so the first one is that you only have two mindsets affixed in the growth, right, and which one are you? The second one is that it's again located all in our mind, right? If you have a certain mindset, as you said, Nikki, like it's all that you are, right? That's who you are. But in reality, mindset is greatly influenced by our environment.

And the book goes into these mindset triggers. Everyone has at least one or two mindset triggers, often all four of the mindset triggers that we see in the literature, I'm sure we'll get to that. But that's what really moves us along our mindset continuum in the moment. And then those situations are baked inside larger cultures, the culture of our family, the culture of teams, the culture of our organization, the culture of our schools, right?

The last mindset misconception is really about this idea that mindset is just all about effort. That is where we see, and particular in schools, it kind of going sideways, where we see teachers who say, oh yeah, I teach with a fixed mind, or I teach with a growth mindset. But when we dig into that a little bit, what they're saying is that they just tell kids to try hard. Or they say things like, I'm sorry, that kid has a fixed mindset. There's nothing I can do about it, right, which is also very ironic.

But this idea that it's just about effort, and what we know is that if you hit your head over and over against the wall in the same way, trying to just work harder. Right, it's your head that's going to explode, not the wall, right? So this is not effective.

And so with a true growth mindset, effort isn't really the only important factor. It's what I call in the book, and in our work, effective effort, which is the idea that we work hard, and we move in the right direction. And that takes a lot for us to know where we actually stand in our abilities. And if we're mentoring or supporting someone else, where they stand in their abilities, making sure that the effort they're expending is moving them in the right direction. It involves seeking help and mentorship and all the things that help us grow and develop.

So I think those are the three major mindset misconceptions. And I think that's really the place that we start in the book, that we need a mindset reset, and there's different directions we can go from there.

Chris Dixon:

I like that. You mentioned earlier on, like you said, regardless of where we start, like this is something you need to become aware of. And I like that because I feel like, and trying to bring some awareness too, I like the distinction you make too about like not having a fixed mindset about fixed mindset and being on this continuum, I think that's great. But so many people, I think getting them out of this, like this perception that they have different starting blocks and that they're at a disadvantage and like, that's where they get hung up for so long to just get them over that hump, get momentum and then like get going.

But what I'm curious is I find that sometimes it's helpful to separate yourself from your thoughts and like your beliefs and almost disconnect yourself from it and let those thoughts go by. And do you see value in doing that to help people get going and just kind of remove yourself from that as much as you can?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah, it's interesting. It's a good strategy in many different contexts. And I think that one of the things I'm often asked is how do we invoke our growth mindset? If we know we have both within us, how can we move to our growth mindset more of the time? And I think, Chris, to your point, one of the most effective ways to move towards growth is actually a lot of people think ironically to get to know and recognize and then work with the fixed mindset.

So understanding where those fixed mindset triggers are for us and be able, as you say, to sort of take a third party perspective on our own triggering into these fixed mindset contexts. And so say, oh, wow. oh yeah. I'm in this evaluative situation. Oh, I just saw my coworker get praised, right. Or they won this award that I thought I might win this year. And I noticed, oh my gosh, I'm in one of those fixed mindset situations for myself. And I can see myself moving into the fixed mindset. Well, if she's so good, maybe I can never compete. Maybe I shouldn't even try. Right.

And so by noticing that, we can sort of identify, oh, I'm being triggered towards my fixed mindset. That's normal. There she is. Here I am trying to now move towards growth, right? And instead of being threatened by her success or make me feel as though I am less than, I can ask her what she did to prepare. I can ask her how she got to where she is. And then I can take some of those strategies and think about how to authentically apply them to my own contacts so that I can grow and develop in the ways that are going to be best for me. Not mirroring or mimicking exactly what the other person is doing, of course, but being able to identify maybe some new strategies that I hadn't thought of that I could take and really cultivate in my own way,

Nikki Miller:

Something I really appreciated in the book, Mary, is this concept of the mindset triggers. And I'd love if you could expand on the different ones a little bit more, because I think that when we think about fixed and growth mindset, for those of us that are not as highly trained in it, we think about the examples that you gave earlier. Whereas I find that in the triggers that you explained, there are places it comes up that we might not even realize. We might not even realize we're falling into a fixed mindset that we have and having the ability to catch it and then have some tools to get out of it is so helpful and I'd love if you could expand on those.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Great. I'm happy to do that. The first mindset triggers -- so these mindset triggers are really identified from cultivating the 30 years of mindset scholarship that my team and many others have been conducting over the years. And so these are the places that we see replicable, robust effects that really sort of help us identify where and when we're more likely to occupy our fixed or growth mindset. That's what these triggers are.

And so the first mindset trigger is evaluative situations. And Nikki, you asked me about the mindset culture origin story. Did I always come to this in this way? Or how did I come to discover really mindset culture? It was an evaluative situation that I was in. Evaluative situations, for your listeners, is the idea that we know when we're going to be evaluated. Maybe I'm preparing for a big talk or a presentation, or I'm writing a report that I know a ton of people are going to read, or I'm going to introduce a new idea into our next team meeting, right? And I know that how people respond to that is going to affect whether or not I'm able to like continue down that initiative, right, and put in that effort around that idea that I care a lot about.

So evaluative situations are when we're anticipating being evaluated by others. And I'll tell you a story that is the mindset culture origin story. So here I am in my last year of the PhD program at Stanford, and I've been studying how different cues in our environment really shape us. And I'm sitting in a talk, and I'm supporting a friend who's a fellow student and he's presenting his life's work to the group, right?

And suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, a faculty member blurts out, well, it's clear the fatal flaw is XYZ. And then another faculty member comes in and says, no, it's not that. The problem is really ABC. And they start fighting amongst each other to see who can take down my friend's idea the quickest, and with the most devastating remark.

Nikki Miller:

My Gosh. It’s like my worst nightmare.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

I know, I know, right? We've been there. Like where these people just start bickering amongst themselves and trying to see who's the smartest guy in the room. And I can't believe what's going on. I'm sitting there in horror and I'm watching what it's doing to my friend. He starts to lose focus. He's responding with all kinds of ums, ahs, right, all these speech disfluencies. And he's having a really hard time answering questions. And I see him and he's choking up there.

And it's really upsetting, not just for what it's doing for him in the moment, but what I saw it do for him long term, right? This was devastating. It completely shut him down. And not only did he not want to take up that work anymore for weeks and weeks at a time because it was too painful, he started to actually wonder whether he had what it takes to actually pursue and finish the PhD program.

So two weeks later, I'm in a different seminar and there's equally eminent faculty members, right, the number one PhD program in the country for psychology, but they're really approaching the student talks very differently. Instead of competing with each other to see who's the smartest in the room and leaving students devastated, they're actually working together to identify the best ways to improve the work.

And the sessions are tough. They're still critical, but they're decidedly about learning and growth. And I saw the students reacting very differently. They were reacting with enthusiasm. They're in it with the faculty. They're able to brainstorm in the moment and to make their ideas better. And when they leave, they were way more motivated to actually get to work and to change their studies and to do better in their own context.

And so as I'm sitting there and thinking about these contexts, I find myself like wondering, what is the difference here? And I realized that it's two very different ways to create environments that people think are motivating. And mindset really seems to be at the core of these things. In the first seminar, everyone's operating from their fixed mindset. It's that interpersonally, competitive, cutthroat culture of genius and those that survive it survive. And those that don't, well, maybe they didn't have it in the first place. Right.

And then the second seminar, everyone's operating from this more development-oriented culture of growth. And it's signaling to everyone that talent and ability is something that we're going to develop here together, right, to get everybody to be successful. And it's my first glimpse into what these mindset cultures actually look like and feel like.

So I take this insight to Carol Dweck. She's the founder of this idea, the fixed and growth mindset. She had just arrived to Stanford. And I pop into her office, and I knock on her door, and I say, Carol, I know everyone's thought of mindset as this quality inside their head. What's your mindset? How does it affect you? What's my mindset? How does it affect me? But has anyone ever thought of mindset not just in our minds, but actually as like this cultural feature of groups and teams and in organizations and environments. And she looked at me and she like smiled this big smile and she's like, “No, Mary, no one's ever done this, but we should do it together”.

And so that was the birth of mindset culture. And I think that in many of our schools and our workplaces, we think we've got culture right. But often I think we might be doing more harm than good, right, thinking that the best way to motivate people is to set up these harsh, proven perform environments, you're only as good as your last performance, right? Those are those evaluative situations where I know I'm going to have to act in this certain way and prove how smart I am or how capable I am in this moment.

But when we look deeper, and we see what's really happening on the ground, we can see that we're actually building in this fixed mindset idea in all of our interactions, our policies, our practices, our norms. And we see what that does to people in terms of their motivation and their actual performance. And it harms women, people of color and anyone with other differences even more. And how cultures of growth on the other hand can really empower and support everyone to be successful.

So that's the first mindset trigger. That's evaluative situations. And it's how I came up with this idea was witnessing these evaluative situations and what they were doing to people in the moment.

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Chris Dixon:

So if you have the feeling that you will be evaluated, there's kind of a fork in the road in whether or not you feel like you're going to be in a place that that's going to have collaborative repercussion or punitive, I guess if you're in this kind of high stakes burnout or succeed kind of one shot moment or if you feel like there's going to be an opportunity to gather feedback and grow. And so what you're trying to cultivate there from the perspective of a team is creating an environment where people still are competitive because that pushes you to go forward, but you feel like your efforts will be reciprocated back and opportunities to improve.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah, that's right. And I want to kind of revisit that idea of you want your environments to be competitive. I think that's true, but you don't want them to be interpersonally competitive. You don't necessarily -- you want to compete against your external competition. You want to be sure that your team and your organization kind of knows where they are situated in the landscape and they're motivated by the competition with external services, products, teams, organizations, right?

But when we turn that competition internal to each other, it can have really negative repercussions. An example of this in companies is stacked ranking. Stacked ranking, right? This is that idea that it was popularized in the 80s by Jack Welch at GE, and it had people, everyone got a ranking in the organization. And the bottom 10 or 20%, depending on what company you're talking about, they'd get summarily fired and the rest would then get reshuffled until the next performance review when it would happen all over again.

In that kind of interpersonal competition, that's what that's stoking, right? Because you never know whether you're going to be in that bottom 20% percent. Hopefully you know, but it's something that's always on your mind. And so you're always kind of watching your back, wondering whether or not your supervisor is going to see you as gifted and capable and able. And that's putting differential attention on that instead of your work, or instead of collaborating or instead of having new ideas.

And so that's why I think that interpersonal internal communication or competition can really –

Chris Dixon:

There's a risk.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

There is risk.

Chris Dixon:

In the way you set that up. But I think when I -- great point. And I think what I was trying to highlight is you want to be competitive with yourself more than anything else. Like you're trying to grow, get feedback. And so there's competition in the way that you show up that I think could be healthy too, right?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah. Yeah, actually. Yes, absolutely. You want to always use yourself as a marker, but that requires a lot of self-knowledge too, right? It requires knowledge and accuracy to know where I am in the moment and what are the places that are my strengths, what are the places that are my weaknesses, and also support so I can figure out how I can improve those weaknesses, right?

And that support, that's why I always think about this as, it's why some of the typical ways of thinking of mindset as just in our heads, it really locates the problem as an individual problem. But the truth is that for all of us to grow and develop, we need feedback from others. And we are growing and learning in a context surrounded by other people.

And so to really know our own skills and accuracy, we need feedback from others that's unbiased and accurate and that then we have to be open to receiving that feedback and figuring out strategies and resources and people that we can sort of rely on to help us learn and grow and develop.

Nikki Miller:

I'd love to get into some of the tactics and how you actually develop this in organizations. But you said something earlier, and I have to imagine it will connect. You said something earlier that I think I'd love for you to expand on, which is that when you're assessing these mindsets in organizations and in larger groups, it can be especially challenging or can especially affect minorities. And I'd love for you to expand on that, and also talk about how we might be able to better that in the organization.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a great point. It's really important. We're all taught that genius is good, right? And we all want it. We all want to be a genius in some way, shape, or form. But our work has really shown that genius and these fixed minded cultures of genius may have some really important downsides that we don't realize is limiting our success. So if you Google genius, right, I use Google images a lot to show what our culture or what our society actually thinks, right, as to what comes to mind. So if you Google the idea of genius, who do you think comes up? Let's, let's –

Chris Dixon:

Einstein.

Nikki Miller:

Steve Jobs.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Einstein, Steve Jobs. Yes, absolutely. Einstein is everywhere. Chris, you're like check plus plus plus. Absolutely. And everything been rebranded the genius. Anyone else?

Nikki Miller:

Who else? Probably Ben Franklin.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison. Sometimes --

Chris Dixon:

Tesla maybe.

Nikki Miller:

Yeah, Tesla.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Elon Musk comes up. Absolutely.

Nikki Miller:

Bezos, for sure.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

A hundred percent. So what do all these people have in common?

Nikki miller:

White men.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

They tend to be white. They tend to be male. They tend to come from a certain class and educational background. And so what happens is that in these fixed mindset cultures of genius, they're going to take this cultural representation that we have of genius to heart. And they start to search for and prize these stars that match this prototype. So these cultures of genius really create a narrow pathway to success that is going to sadly sideline anyone with any difference, right, diverse voices. And by the way, it's not great for those who match the prototype either, right? It doesn't leave them any room to grow or make mistakes. And if you're dethroned in a culture of genius, right, you actually end up being nothing.

So in cultures of genius, who counts for genius is this narrow mold. And here who's you're not seeing. You're not seeing women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA people, anyone with difference. And these folks who don't fit these cultural models of genius simply aren't on the radars of organizations and teams who have strong cultures of genius. Recruitment, retention, promotion efforts are always going to favor those who fit that mold, which is going to perpetuate this cycle of exclusion.

And what we know from our research is that even if diverse talent is identified and hired into strong cultures of genius, they often face limited opportunities for growth and development. They have less access to mentors and to sponsors. And they're often denied these kinds of key leadership roles that really help support their growth over time in an organization.

And this not only hurts retention, but it also hurts the organization's potential for innovation and progress because we know diversity, though it can be kind of hard to navigate sometimes, it actually produces better outcomes for organizations over the long term. So that's how it really impacts people. It's that pernicious, prototype that we have of genius and then the fit to that that gets applied in organizational and team settings.

Nikki Miller:

Thank you for providing that example. I don't think I ever would have thought of exploring something that way to go and look at the photos. And yet you're so right, that those are the examples that we usually see in that category, and I'm sure we could do it for a lot of other types of categories too. So can you walk us through, we have a lot of people who listen to our podcasts who are in leadership positions and organizations or CEOs, high level C suite executives, people who own their own businesses, or even someone who's not, who just wants to see a shift from maybe a fixed to a growth mindset within their own organization, or to have some influence on the mindset of their own organization, how do you go about doing that?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah. Well, it's really important. I just want to be clear with everyone that I'm not saying that we're just a victim of our environment, right? The truth is that we are all culture creators, meaning that we can all shape our surroundings. And while shifting an entire mindset culture of a group or a team or a whole organization, is a group effort, we each are going to play an important role.

And so how do we go about doing this to your question? The key is really to look at everything through the lens of learning. How can I grow and develop in each task and in each interaction? And how, as a leader, can I set up those teams and tasks and interactions to really support everybody's growth and development. So this is really where knowing our, as leaders mindset triggers, which of the four mindset triggers do I really find as applicable to me and to be able to have that self-awareness and then to shape these situations, so I myself can embody more of my growth mindset when I'm interacting with my team and my direct reports, right?

It's also really important as a leader for us to know the mindset triggers of those we lead, because if we are setting up these situations for them, we're about to give someone a stretch assignment while high effort situations is the second mindset trigger, right? When I have this new situation, I have never done this before, I have to master a new area or I have to try a new strategy that I've never tried, feels a little risky. I'm going to have to put in a lot of effort, work over time to figure out this new product or service that I'm now in charge of selling, right?

How a leader assigns that task, knowing that high effort situations could be a mindset trigger of the person I'm giving it to, how would I set it up so that it doesn't trigger them into their fixed mindset and approve and perform your only, if this doesn't work, it's the end of our success here? And how do we actually help people by assigning that differently, describing it differently and giving people the supports they need to embody their growth mindset when they take that on?

An example I like to give here is how we praise people. So when someone does a great job at work, what do you usually say?

Nikki Miller:

Great job on X, Y, and Z.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Great job, right? Excellent, genius work, whatever, right? You just say great job. That's usually what people say. But when we look at this praise through the lens of a culture of growth, what is it actually telling us about what we did well? It feels really good, right? It helps boost our self-esteem quite a bit. But does it actually help us understand what we did well so we can replicate that success in the future? And does it tell us anything about our strengths already so that we could build on that and maybe be even stronger in the future?

And so I think a lot, even our praise practices, right, the getting critical feedback or getting success praise is the third mindset trigger. And so how we set that up, right, rather than just saying good job, which is what we all do naturally. And we don't want to take that away because that feels good. So it's a good job, but also what did they do well specifically that we liked and what else could we improve in the future?

And you're getting the growth mindset feedback you need when you receive it that way. And you're moving your boss towards their growth mindset when you ask them those follow up questions from the good job praise that your supervisor’s giving you, right?

Chris Dixon:

Can I circle back to the second, which is high effort situations? I was curious. I wanted to get a little bit more insight from you. So I agree, if you could be proactive in identifying or helping someone identify maybe like a limiting belief that would, or something that would tease my language, but to trigger them into a limiting mindset versus a growth mindset by saying, hey, here's this opportunity that I've seen would be great for you to help you develop, considerate of your goals and where you want to go inside this organization, your career, this would be a great opportunity for you to work on this. Like, if you were to pass someone work like that without using a specific example, are there some ways that you could call out that would help a leader or the person receiving the work get out in front of that and to stay?

Thank you for

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why I wrote the book. It was because I was working with a bunch of leaders and many different organizations, from early-stage startups and entrepreneurs just getting going to Fortune 100 companies, right? I worked with Shell. I've worked with many other very large-scale multinational global companies. And what I was seeing was that people had these interactions over and over again, just everyday interactions. Asking someone to do something that's going to require a lot of effort of them is not an uncommon thing.

And so to your point, Chris, we could anticipate that this is going to happen. I know I'm going to make this ask of someone. How do I actually structure it so that I move people toward growth rather than fixed in my first moment of introducing the task or the ask, right, to them? And so these high effort situations, it really comes down to what we believe about effort. We call this in research, we call these effort ability beliefs. So if we believe that having to try hard means that we lack ability, if you have to try hard, it means you're not natural. It means that you don't have it, right. Then we have this negative association sometimes on a very subtle level around having to try hard, of having to put in a lot of effort.

And so if I know my direct report has one of these negative effort ability beliefs because I've seen the way that they respond when we as a team are taking on new challenges or having to work hard and doing an overnight or two or whatever gets asked of us, right, I can see then that when I assign that individual a new task, something that they're really going to have to work hard at, I can frame it in such a way that says, you know this is going to take some effort and time, but I know you're up to the challenge.

So you kind of express the truth that this is going to take a lot of effort, but you give them support. And you also, this is called wise feedback, give them this belief that you know that they have what it takes to actually rise to the occasion and that they're not alone in doing it. Right.

So I have this new task for you, it's going to require a lot of effort, right, but we're in this together. And I know that you're going to be able to deliver on this, but you're going to encounter some challenges. You're going to encounter some setbacks. When you do, please reach out for help. I can support you. And if I can't, I'll find the right resources and the right people to put around you so that we can ensure that this is going to be successful. You are not alone in this, and I'm here to help support your needs. Please come to me when you have these challenges.

It's a very different way than saying, I need you to master this new situation. I need you to lead the charge in this new direction. It's going to take a lot of time and effort. Let me know when you successful.

Chris Dixon:

Sure. Yeah. I like the positive reinforcement that you're calling out there, for sure. Something I've said in the past, or I've tried, it starts with something I was telling myself and teaching myself that I've tried to share with others, I'm curious what you think about this. I've always, I've said that those kind of high effort scenarios, I don't know that I've ever internalized in that language, but I think this is what you're saying. Those high effort scenarios that sometimes feel maybe even painful at times, like you can learn to retrain yourself to recognize that as growth, that there's a lot of value in seeing that you're just being stretched and creating a gap. And that gap, though it feels like more effort is actually you just building that growth muscle. And I don't know, does that think --

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Absolutely. And neuroscience backs you up. Neuroscience backs you up that like when we are really in challenge, if we're not failing, this was a study, it was a neuroscience study. It was done with humans. It was done with animals. It was done with AI and machine learning algorithms. And what they find over and over again is that if we're not making mistakes 15 percent of the time, we're not really maximizing and optimizing learning and development. We're not likely to get the optimal outcome.

So to this idea that these high effort situations, I'm likely to falter, I'm going to have to put in a lot of work, but knowing that this is moving me towards optimal outcomes, it's growing me, it's growing my skills, it's growing the outcome, that can really help buoy us in those moments when we find ourselves moving towards our fixed mindset in those high effort situations.

Chris Dixon:

So as a leader, can you then, is it beneficial then to create a culture of awareness around this and then kind of, as much as you can, because this is like an impossible thing to do, like turn the dials enough with your team that they're in places of growth and like kind of throttle up and throttle back so that they are --

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that's why. mindset has got to be a cultural feature, right, because it is something we are creating together. It's how we introduce meetings, right? At the very beginning of the meeting, what are we doing? What's the first thing on the agenda? A lot of organizations now are using the roses and thorns model, which is really like what's gone well, and then what are some of the challenges we're dealing with and spending a little bit of time really working to normalize mistakes and challenges together and then helping to brainstorm ways that we're going to meet those challenges or how we're going to approach them, any kind of shared learning that can happen to make those challenges easier.

That's a time that, you know, so that's just one practice, right, that you do culturally. You do it in together as a team and that leaders can bring to those situations. Really, like you say, being able to throttle up and throttle back, the way we think about effort, the way we think about mistakes, the way that we approach failure, which is inevitable. Especially if you're innovating and being creative, how do we do that in a way that's going to move us more towards our growth mindset? Mindset is cultural.

Nikki Miller:

I want to get your expansion on -- so I think about this, and where I always get stuck is in the tactical application for our own self, because I think that what I heard you say is that the way that we really affect change in an organization is to start by modeling it ourselves, to ourselves show how we move from a fix to a growth mindset. So you give tactics and tools to recognize when you're triggered, but what happens after that? Like I'm now recognized that I'm triggered, I'm aware of it. What do I do to change it so that this thing, this environment, this person, this scenario stops triggering me?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

So, each different trigger has probably about 10 to 12, maybe 15, depending on the chapter, strategies that individuals can take to move from their fix to their growth mindset if they discover that this is a place where they're more often inhabiting their fixed mindset. So let's give some examples of this. So the success of others is one we've talked about.

Someone gets praised or someone gets an award on a team that I really was gunning for and hoping to get this year. And I'm feeling deflated, but then I'm also later on at home starting to ruminate about whether or not I'm ever going to be able to be seen as successful by others. Will I have the opportunities to actually rise in this organization? If I really thought I was up for this and I was so off the mark, what does that mean about my own abilities and skills? Right. So I'm noticing, oh God, here it comes fixed mindset. And so what do I do?

There's a couple of things, one very good strategy for any of the triggers because I want to help like the most with a generalizable strategy is to have created a growth mindset pod. If this is a cultural feature, how do we actually use interactions and friendships and others, sometimes within the organization, it could be our growth mindset pod. Sometimes, it's people outside the organization, a close friend who's also really into this idea of trying to identify when we're in our fixed mindset and helping to strategize about ways that we can inhabit our growth mindset more of the time.

And a lot of times, I see this done in partnership. I do this with my husband all the time. We talk about how in relationships, we tend to, close relationships, romantic relationships, we tend to sometimes fall into this fixed mindset culture in our marriage or in our relationships, right, where you're good at this, so you're just going to do it that way. And I'm good at this thing over here, so I'm going to take care of that. And it's a really good way to divide up the tasks that we have to do, right? I don't like doing dishes. He's great at it. I like to cook, right, so I'm going to go ahead and do that.

But what it actually is doing is it's applying the fixed mindset into this is what we're good at. And so we never actually challenge ourself very often to get out of that rut in the way that we're seeing each other. And so that's where one of the strategies at the individual level is to have those conversations with people we’re close to and create these growth mindset pods so that you can say, listen, I'm feeling this way again. I saw this teammate of mine get this award coming back to the success of others. What do you think I should do about this? I wonder if I could take that person out to coffee and get a sense of what they did to prepare or what they did to kind of reach this pinnacle in their career. And by learning and hearing those strategies, right, we can become inspired. We can also pick up really tangible strategies, right, that will help us in our own growth and development.

So that's something at the individual level we can do. And it's also how we marshal community and culture around us in our close relationships and friendships and our colleagues, right, to try to create these cultures of growth around us. And that's why the book has many different circles because there's cultures, right? There's the culture of our relationships and our family. There's the culture of schools and teams. There's the culture of a division in an organization. And then there's the larger culture of an entire organization, right?

And so there's levels of this. Many settings can have a fixed mindset, overall, culture, but these pockets of growth mindset culture within them in many large technology companies. I see an overall model of this culture of genius because tech is famous for genius, but I still see in the R&D, right, the research and development arms, the most creative arms inside these companies, extremely growth minded. They're all about killing their ideas, right, their first ideas in order to improve them, right? And to think about how to improve them, how to be creative, how to be innovative, how to learn from their mistakes. And they learn quickly, right, in order to innovate.

So this is why we have to attend to these cultures and figure out how to create them around us. Does that answer your question?

Nikki Miller:

Yeah, it absolutely does. And I'm going to encourage everyone to pick up a copy of the book where they can find their own unique flavor, whichever one tends to be the most challenging that they can figure out the tactics to get through it. At the end of these interviews, Mary, we always ask, what is the one thing for the listeners who are listening to this conversation, what's the one thing that you would want them to take away?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah. I think that the one thing I want people to take away is the knowledge that they can do this, right? That every person is a culture creator, whether that culture is our family, our relationships, our workplace, our learning environments, right? And that every interaction has a mindset culture. And the question is, what is that mindset culture? How can we become aware of it? And how is it affecting us? How is it affecting me? And how is it affecting you as we interact with each other?

And so understanding that we all have the power regardless of our role to really become culture creators and to enact that in our own lives to build cultures of growth, that's the one thing I want people to take away.

Nikki Miller:

It's also very empowering to know that through your own development and through your own movement from fix to growth, you can affect so much change, which I think you do a beautiful job of walking everyone through the book. So thank you for that. And thank you for being here today. If people want to know more, if they want to find you, where can they connect with you?

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Yeah. they can go to my website, marycmurphy.com. And if they're not sure about the book, no problem, go to the website and take the quiz because the mindset triggers assessment is on the website and people can take that. They can also download an excerpt of the book and get an early view. The book doesn't come out till March. So I'm excited for people to take that assessment and see, get some strategies right away that they can use today.

Nikki Miller:

Thank you, Mary. Thank you for being here.

Chris Dixon:

Thanks, Mary.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Thank you so much. You too. I really appreciated this. This was a lot of fun.

Chris Dixon:

Likewise.

Dr. Mary C Murphy:

Take care. Bye bye.

Outro:

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