Comedian Ben Gleib offers approaches for making mundane work feel a little less stuffy through humor.
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Comedian Ben Gleib offers approaches for making mundane work feel a little less stuffy through humor.
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If you feel stuck, you may have a fixed mindset about growth mindset itself. Here’s how to shift your thinking if you catch yourself using a fixed mindset.
Jam-packed meetings and overflowing project teams don’t do anyone any favors. They cause delays, create confusion, and generally make organizations less effective. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we view this as a product of over-inclusion — not in the strategic sense, like for hiring, but for more tactical matters. It’s what happens when well-meaning leaders involve more people than necessary to avoid certain people feeling left out. But what leaders really need, according to the brain science, is to learn the tactical habit of “thoughtful exclusion.” We recently explored the concept of thoughtful exclusion for HBR, in a piece titled “How to Gracefully Exclude Coworkers from Meetings, Emails, and Projects.” It makes three basic prescriptions, which we’ve summarized below. Manage cognitive overload Research has found that 3% to 5% of employees at a given organization drive the bulk of collaboration. In turn, they also tend to be the most prone to burnout. Leaders can begin practicing thoughtful exclusion by identifying these employees, and then strategically limiting their involvement in projects and meetings. The technique affirms to people that their input is valued, but also makes clear that not every project deserves the same level of attention. Consider the social brain Humans seek out potential threats and rewards at nearly all times, even in social situations. This means the act of excluding others is intensely emotional (as those who have been left out know firsthand). Specifically, people may feel a threat to their relatedness, or the sense that they belong in a certain group. With the right language, leaders can actively minimize employees’ threat response. For instance, instead of casually mentioning to someone that they are no longer needed on a project, leaders can provide the surrounding context and reasoning for the decision. They can say things like, “I know you’ve already got a lot on your plate, and I’d like to keep you off this meeting so you can stay focused. What do you think?” This is the “thoughtful” component of thoughtful exclusion. It communicates a leader has an awareness of others, and when employees sense that awareness, they don’t feel as threatened. Set the right expectations Addressing people’s social needs is partly a matter of addressing their cognitive needs. The science has made it clear that there’s a great cost to defying a person’s expectations. When our brains think one thing will happen, but then something else happens, the brain uses much more energy to process that new information. Leaders can use this insight to better communicate about particular projects. They can give people strong rewards of certainty and fairness — two other domains of social reward or threat — by being transparent about their decision-making. Each person who enters the meeting will know why they, and everyone else, is there. And everyone who doesn’t get invited will know why, too. When leaders harness the science to get their teams on the same page, they can avoid the pains of politeness and assemble the right talent for each project. As a result, organizations as a whole can start doing more with less.
It’s easy to get overly conclusive when talking about growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be improved over time. We may say, “Oh, I totally have a fixed mindset,” or “After all these years, I finally have a growth mindset.” But the truth is, that’s inherently a fixed-mindset way of viewing the concept, since it presumes that the mindset itself is set in stone. In reality, people don’t have a fixed or growth mindset; rather, they use a combination of the two depending on the situation. The NeuroLeadership Institute has caught this subtle difference many times over during various industry research projects, most recently culminating in our white paper “Impact Report: Growth Mindset Supports Organizations Through Disruption.” The paper features five case studies from companies making growth mindset come to life and driving lasting change. This variety made it clear that fixed and growth mindsets weren’t “switches” that people turned on or off. They were more like dimmers, capable of being dialed up or down depending on the context. How to actually think about growth mindset Think about your own life. Let’s say you like to cook and sing; maybe you’re learning a foreign language, too. At work you’ve just been promoted and now you oversee a larger team than you did in your previous role. It’s quite possible —probable, even — that you approach each of these domains with a different mindset about your abilities. Perhaps you relish the chance to try new recipes in the kitchen, and add more French to your vocabulary — classic growth mindset. At the same time, you feel like your singing chops aren’t good enough and leadership skills have hit a ceiling, each possibly indicating a fixed mindset. All those scenarios make it impossible to fairly say you have a fixed or growth mindset, because you’re using both all the time. NLI’s research over the past several months made it clear that leaders should go easy on themselves when developing a growth mindset, since the skill itself is something new to nurture. The key is to recognize when thoughts become self-limiting, and then actively work to move toward growth. If leaders can make this mental shift, past research suggests, they’ll be better at instilling growth mindset in their direct reports. In time, they can even create what NLI calls a Growth Mindset Culture — a confluence of growth mindset across an organization, each employee finding more value in getting better as opposed to being the best. This article is the fourth installment in NLI’s series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”cd97f93c-1daf-4547-8f7c-44b6f2a77b77″]
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Change is the only constant, the old adage goes, which might explain why today’s organizations are so focused on adaptation. After spending several months interviewing 20 global organizations about growth mindset, the NeuroLeadership Institute has identified six business reasons an org might look to put the concept to use, which we’ve summarized below. (Note: Percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding.) [action hash=”7b17478f-7c52-499f-9fd4-7a4d4b69cfa1″] 1. Digital transformation (38% of sample) The most popular reason an org might focus on growth mindset was to stay agile in the face of technological uncertainty. Big data and artificial intelligence are rapidly becoming commonplace, and organizations of all kinds — mid-tier companies and corporations alike — are looking to keep talent ready to change on a dime. 2. Business improvement (19% of sample) Some organizations used growth mindset to introduce leaner methodologies into their work streams, restructure teams, or implement new business strategies. These orgs wanted to be more agile, too, but focused more on improving internal operations than adapting to market forces. 3. Growing up (13% of sample) Growth mindset meant just that to some organizations: growth. Maturity stood out as a major reason for organizations that were smaller and looking to expand quickly and sustainably. Financial pressures, internal turmoil, and other setbacks often accompanied these efforts. 4. Reinvention (13% of sample) Organizations focused more on pivoting in some form used growth mindset to change their culture, rebound from financial troubles, and shift gears after a shakeup in leadership. Among these organizations, especially, growth mindset represented a way to see challenges as opportunities, not threats. 5. Performance management transformation (13% of sample) For some organizations, growth mindset was instrumental in overhauling the way they interviewed and hired candidates, and evaluated employees. Instead of asking employees to prove their worth, orgs can use growth mindset to see the value in improvement over time. 6. Quality enhancement (6% of sample) The university in our sample was the lone organization to use growth mindset for accreditation. It saw the concept as the means to enhance the quality of its program for the benefit of current and future students. Parting shots Why one organization might embrace digital transformation over reinvention is a product of the industry and size of each enterprise. A major takeaway from our research is that organizations mold growth-mindset efforts to fit their needs. What works for one might not always work for all, so look for the process in your org that may need growth mindset the most. This article is the third installment in NLI’s new series, Growth Mindset: The Master Class, a 12-week campaign to help leaders see how the world’s largest organizations are putting growth mindset to use. [action hash=”7b17478f-7c52-499f-9fd4-7a4d4b69cfa1″]
In-depth interviews with organizations about growth mindset revealed a fascinating collection of goals, use cases, obstacles, and outcomes.
When Peter Mende-Siedlecki was visiting a loved one in the hospital recently, he noticed something strange by the person’s bed. It was a set of statements, designed to remind the hospital staff of three things. “Please call me _____.” “What I would like you to know about me is _____.” “What I value/love most is _____.” For Mende-Siedlecki, a psychologist at the University of Delaware who’s spent a career studying empathy and spoke at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, this was a fantastic discovery. In just three prompts, the hospital engaged in expert individuation, or the psychological practice of seeing people as unique, distinct beings. We can think of it as the opposite of stereotyping. In the workplace, individuation matters because empathy matters. Every day, teams collaborate based on overlapping strengths and weaknesses, constantly keeping others in mind. We sense people’s needs, they sense ours, and everyone adjusts accordingly. The trouble is, science has repeatedly shown that empathy is a scarce resource; our brains don’t want to spend it willy-nilly. This leads to unfortunate observations like “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic,” and the all-too-human habit of “compassion collapse” in the face of mass tragedy, where the brain apparently has an easier time caring about one than many. Individuation, Mende-Siedlecki’s research has found, works as a kind of shortcut to empathy. If we can remember that the people around us feel pain, stress, joy, and all the other things we too feel, maybe we can escape some of the habits that hold us back. Teams don’t necessarily need to mimic the hospital’s prompts to reap the benefits of individuation. Instead, they can model themselves after the behaviors of society’s master networkers — namely, asking one another about aspects of their personal lives, such as where they’re from, who their family is, and how they stay busy, just to name a few. The practice also helps build what Stanford University psychologist Leor Hackel calls “reciprocity.” Hackel, also a speaker at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit, has found in his research that “paying it forward” through charitable actions or words, builds compassion in people. Creating empathic teams is valuable for leaders because NLI’s own research has found that collective intelligence — even of the emotional kind — is critical for team function. It’s not enough to have a star player, in other words. The best teams are smarter, more creative, and generally higher-functioning because the whole is greater the sum of its parts. It’s an ironic, humanistic takeaway: The more you help employees see each other as individuals, the stronger your entire team will be.
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In 2007, David and Lisa Rock and their team had been working in leadership development and executive coaching for ten years, when David coined the term “NeuroLeadership.”ef
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