Many organizations mistakenly equate psychological safety with being nice, getting your way, or letting performance slide.
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Many organizations mistakenly equate psychological safety with being nice, getting your way, or letting performance slide.
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Art Markman is a renaissance man of psychological science: He holds a professorship at the University of Texas-Austin, where he’s also the director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He co-hosts the podcast Two Guys On Your Head. He’s authored many books, including Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others. And he’s also a panelist on the Networking and Building Alliances session at this year’s NeuroLeadership Summit in October. We recently spoke with Art to learn about how immersing himself in motivation and decision science has shaped his life, and came away with some practice advice on how to get more good stuff done in our own lives. NeuroLeadership Institute: How has being in this field change the way you make decisions in your everyday life? Art Markman: There’s a lot of things I’ve done as a result of knowing more. Some of them have been pretty straight-forward. So for example, in my mid-30s I took up the saxophone because there’s all this data that suggests if you look at people’s regrets, the thing that old people regret more than anything else is not the dumb things they did but the important things they didn’t do. And so, I always recommend to people, periodically project yourself mentally to the end of your life and look back and ask yourself, is there anything I wish I would’ve done? And at some point, I thought, “Gosh I always wanted to learn to play a saxophone and I didn’t.” So about a week after that, I went out and found a teacher and bought a saxophone and learned to play. I think I also am better at seeing different sides of situations that I’m involved in. For example, there are broad tendencies to look at other people’s behaviors and assume that it’s being driven by their characteristics, their traits, and individual goals rather than the situation that they’re in. Whereas with our own life, we pay a lot of attention to, “Oh I was forced to do this in this situation.” So I think I’ve become more tolerant of things other people have done by routinely asking myself, “Well, what’s the situation? Did they do this just because they didn’t have a choice? As a result, should I be trying to focus on how to help, how to make that situation better rather than chastising them for some kind of fundamental limitation that they themselves have?” I spend a lot of time writing about behavior change. And so in my own life, like if I want to lose weight, I’m more effective at that because I understand how motivation works. I run this program. I have a staff of 6 people. I have 35 faculty who I work with and I feel like I can work more effectively with people because I have a better understanding of what factors influence behavior change and so we can set up what we do in ways that get people to do things a little bit different, not a manipulative way, but sharing a vision people can get on board with and also structuring a plan where people not only think this is a vision they can be a part of but also something that they can accomplish. NLI: I read somewhere that you lost 40 pounds — how did you do that, and how did your study on motivation help you achieve your goal? When it comes to weight loss, people think to themselves, “I don’t feel right. I don’t look right.” For me, I didn’t like the way I looked and felt anymore. I think that, for one thing, the formula for weight loss is not a carefully guarded secret. Everyone wants some special diet, but at the end of the day, if you’re going to engage in some kind of weight loss activity, you’ve got to burn more calories than you take in and you have to do that consistently. Then the question is, how do you structure your world to facilitate getting more exercise and eating less? It turns out the eating less is probably more important than the exercise. Because you can work really hard, but if you eat too much, you will overwhelm any amount of calories that you burned. There’s a great quote from Jack LaLanne that I love to use, and it’s “The best exercise is pushing yourself away from the table.” But I think what’s important is to structure that environment. One of the things I did was that I became a vegetarian when I wanted to lose weight in part because I figured, rather than just trying to do less than what I was already doing, I thought, “If I completely change the diet that I’m eating, then I have a chance to institute a new set of behaviors.” NLI: You broke the frame, so you’d have to keep paying attention. AM: That was one piece of it. One piece of it was planning a little bit better. If I cooked too much food, then putting the rest away in advance. Some of it was figuring out what to do when I’m faced with a buffet where you want to throw everything onto your plate. It’s really helpful sometime to find dessert plates that are lying around somewhere. They’re smaller plates so you put less stuff on your plate, and then you eat less. So I think there are a lot of ways of messing around with your environment that can help. When I made the decision to lose weight, I let everybody know. People don’t like to do that, because if they fail, it’s embarrassing. But actually when you let everybody know, then they help you. Maybe they choose not to have an ice cream right in front of you. Or they’re a little more sensitive to how they dole food out in front of you if you’re having lunch with them or something. You
Think back to your last feedback conversation at work — how did it go? Chances are, you and your partner felt uneasy, maybe even threatened. The reason is hardly a mystery. Feedback conversations as they exist today activate a deep-seated threat response in the human brain. Even if it’s just a chat, our brains want us to flee. According to a recent article in the NeuroLeadership Journal, research may be able to fix this broken aspect of professional life. In a study led by NYU psychologist and NLI senior scientist Tessa West, 62 participants at a major consultancy engaged in a mock one-on-one negotiation over the price of a biotechnology plant. Then they gave each other feedback on the other’s performance. Heart rate monitors listened all the while. In follow-up analyses, West and her colleague, fellow NYU psychologist Kate Thorson, discovered that giving feedback and receiving feedback were equally anxiety-producing. This was big news: It signaled managers, too, feel the pain of criticism. Even bigger news, however, was that people who responded to a request for feedback — rather than give feedback unprompted, as per typical conversations — experienced significantly lower heart rate reactivity and reported feeling much less anxious. According to West, asking for feedback is better for long-term improvement because it gives people more control over the conversation and certainty in what will be discussed. If people can start small, she says, the initial pain of inviting criticism will eventually lose its sting. “When you ask for feedback, you’re licensing people to be critical of you,” West recently told NLI for Strategy+Business. “It may feel a little more uncomfortable, but you’re going to get honest, more constructive feedback.” Leaders can use the new study as a tool to create more of a growth mindset at work. If everyone begins seeking out ways to improve, instead of shying away from them, entire organizations can adapt more quickly and edge out the competition.
Jay Van Bavel is a social neuroscientist who studies unconscious bias, group identity, and cooperation, specializing in understanding the neural mechanisms by which a sense of belonging to a group influence our thoughts and behavior. His most recent study found that increasing a group’s sense of common identity leads to greater cooperation, coordination, and collective intelligence — all topics he will be discussing at the upcoming NeuroLeadership Summit. We reached him at his lab at New York University, where he is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and an affiliate at the Stern School of Business. He is also editor-in-chief of the NeuroLeadership Journal and serves as one of our senior scientists. NLI: What are you working on that’s most exciting to you right now? Jay Van Bavel: I’m working on how to understand group coordination and cooperation. We’ve found that when you build a sense of common identity in a group, that leads to greater cooperation, and people are willing to sacrifice more to make the group succeed. They’re also more collectively intelligent. NLI: Can you define collective intelligence? JVB: Groups that perform better than the sum of their parts are considered collectively intelligent. Great groups outperform groups that might have a smarter person or a higher average intelligence. They’re really good at problem-solving tasks and creativity tasks. What’s going is that they’re communicating very well, making sure everybody’s insights are considered. This allows them to brainstorm and come up with different ways to solve the problem. NLI: Can you tell me how group identity fits into your recent study? JVB: We measured group identity and found that groups with the most pride and common connection to their team perform best at cooperation games. In one condition, we tell people they’re all competing against each other and the best individual is going to win. When we do that, they don’t work well together. Their performance isn’t very good. But when we tell people they’re working as a team to compete with other teams, it’s in that condition that they work best with the group they’re with and cooperate the most. Those teams end up having the best problem-solving. NLI: You’ve designed these tasks where cooperating increases the team’s performance as a whole. Is that the kind of task that best reflects what people typically have to do in organizations in the real world? Are business tasks generally tasks where a group cooperating is does better than individuals working independently and solo? JVB: Yes. In science, the best papers are driven by teams of great people working together. Even though we have this notion of Einstein, that’s not how science works. The most impactful science is done by teams, not by a single genius. In Hollywood, Pixar is famous for having these incredible creative teams that go off and do their bits and then come back and share knowledge and give each other critical feedback. Some tasks, like sales, are individualistic — you have people out in the field knocking on doors or making calls one-on-one. NLI: Yes! And salespeople need support, too. JVB: Most work nowadays — especially really complex high-impact work or creative work — is done in groups or teams. NLI: What can organizations do to increase cooperation in their teams? JVB: There’s a couple of things. One, they need to build a common sense of identity on teams that are working together. What we’ve found is that (A) you can measure it, so you can see which teams already have that kind of identity. And (B), you can manipulate it — managers and leaders can be empowered to create that sense of identity. Research has found that diverse teams benefit the most from having a group identity, because it helps them get on the same page and put aside their differences. Then they can use their different insights to solve a problem together, without the conflict that normally would come from that — and without breaking into a bunch of individuals. NLI: How can organizations create a culture of cooperation? JVB: Cooperation is hard. It takes a lot of prefrontal cortex activity to overcome your impulse to be selfish and instead engage in cooperation. We found that people who have damaged their prefrontal cortex can’t do it. That same logic probably also applies if you’re distracted — it might make cooperation hard. But if you’re working with a group of cooperative people — if you’re in a cooperative team or an organization with a cooperative culture — all of a sudden cooperation becomes easy. It no longer requires your lateral prefrontal cortex, your working memory, or executive function — and it seems to feel good. Once you turn the corner and create a culture of cooperation, people get a reward signal when they make decisions to cooperate, so it becomes easier. It doesn’t require as much self-control and regulation, and they can do it without thinking. We’ve looked at data from around the world from thousands of people, and we’ve found that in places where cooperation is common, people do it automatically. Whereas if they’re coming from places where cooperation is not common, like Manhattan, then it’s hard for them, and it takes them longer to come to the decision to cooperate. NLI: What are people responding to exactly? Is it the norms of the group they’re in? JVB: Yup, exactly. Norms. Of course, some people pick up on norms and other people don’t. This really only applies to people who are paying attention to the norms around them. When the norms are good, they cooperate. NLI: So how can an organization create a norm of cooperation? JVB: Several things. First, they can hire cooperators. Hire people who are cooperative and don’t hire people with sharp elbows. Second, promote and reward people — especially in public ways — who show that they value cooperation and collaboration. Third, leadership can send signals by being role models. If you put people in a group with somebody
Everyone knows the pain of feeling left out, but fewer discuss the dread of needlessly being left in. This is what we at the NeuroLeadership Institute call over-inclusion, and the downsides are massive. In the rightful pursuit of lifting up diverse voices and opinions in recent years, leaders have started over-correcting. In order to reach a happy middle ground, they must pay attention not just to moments of exclusion, but over-inclusion — cc’ing more people than necessary in emails, jam-packing meeting rooms, and creating multi-armed project teams. According to our research, the way to create that efficiency is through a careful process of expectation matching. Swinging into the danger zone At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we think of inclusion as a pendulum. It can swing from under-inclusion, where people fail to loop in the right team members in meetings, projects, and emails; to optimal inclusion, where the right people know the right info at the right time; to over-inclusion, where people sit in meetings wondering “What am I doing here?” We recently discussed this phenomenon in a Quartz article entitled “It’s possible (and dangerous) to be over-inclusive.” Most people know from personal experience that over-inclusion is possible. But the science of why it’s dangerous is perhaps less well-known. Research has shown that humans naturally want to empathize with others, which is why we do our best to be fair and include everyone. The downside is we may unknowingly burden their cognitive load and create decision fatigue, leading them to develop an unhealthy, “always-on” attitude toward work. Getting everyone on the same page We find the solution to over-inclusion is thoughtfully excluding. It’s about leaving people out of meetings and emails because you recognize their time and energy are better spent on other things. Based on the leading brain science, we contend the way to do that is through expectation matching. When we run into something that violates our expectations, it causes our brain to do some heavy lifting. With a finite amount of cognitive resources at our disposal, the more those expectations are violated, the less focus and thought we can give to other matters. Leaders who want to thoughtfully exclude can follow the wisdom of science by laying out expectations ahead of time. They can explain who needs to be involved and for what purposes. If everyone is on the same page around those priorities, those who are left out will better understand why. The certainty and fairness will feel rewarding, and they may even thank you for excluding them, as they can now use their cognitive surplus for more productive ends.
Peter Glick is a psychologist who studies benevolent sexism — the paternalistic belief that women are pure, fragile flowers in need of men’s protection. Benevolent sexism, unlike hostile sexism, feels positive and well-intentioned. But Glick and his colleagues have found that it actually undermines women’s careers by excluding them from challenging assignments and depriving them of honest, critical feedback. We reached Dr. Glick at his lab at Lawrence University, where he’s the Henry Merritt Wriston Professor in the Social Sciences, to ask him what insights he’ll be bringing to the NeuroLeadership Summit. NLI: At the Summit you’ll be talking about your work on benevolent sexism. Tell me about that work. Peter Glick: It’s collaborative work I started with [Princeton psychologist] Susan Fiske on reconceptualizing sexism. Prior to our work, when you talked about sexism, people immediately thought about hostility toward women. I mean, that’s how we define prejudice. And sexism is a form of prejudice. Right? Historically, and even today, men have more power and status. But they’re intimately interdependent with women, if they’re heterosexual. So this theory is rooted in the idea that heterosexual intimacy is part of it, combined with the power and status difference. I call this the “Central Gender Relations Paradox.” It’s a very weird situation when you start to think about it! You’ve got a group that’s more powerful and has more status. And when groups have more power and status, they like to maintain their privileges and tend to view themselves as superior. But at the same time, this powerful group is intimately interdependent on the subordinated group! NLI: And what’s the effect of that? PG: It creates this ambivalence toward women. On the one hand, men want to maintain control over them and keep women in their place. But at the same time, they want to maintain positive relationships in intimate relationships with women. So how do you resolve this paradox? The power difference creates hostile sexism that demeans women, but the intimate interdependence necessitates “benevolent” sexism, which is this paternalistic, protective attitude toward women. Because men are intimately interdependent on them. It’s basically, “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” Benevolent sexism is this view that women are wonderful, pure, fragile flowers in need of men’s protection and provision and being cherished and adored. There’s this classic Motown song that goes, “I would kiss the ground she walks on, cause it’s my word, my word she’ll obey.” NLI: “It’s my word she’ll obey”? Wow. PG: We have some fantastic research that documents the many surprising and insidious ways in which benevolent sexism undermines women’s equality and undermines women — sometimes more than hostile sexism. It’s harder to get a handle on too because subjectively it’s really nice. This is not some plot men hatched. It’s just the natural, almost inevitable outcome of this heterosexual interdependence coupled with the power difference. We found that across nations, benevolent sexism and hostile sexism go hand in hand. They tend to go together. They’re not conflicted. Hostile sexism and benevolent sexism go hand-in-hand. It’s the carrot and the stick. Hostile sexism is the stick. If you get out of line, the hammer comes down. But if you stay in line, we’ll take care of you. NLI: Can you give me some examples of beliefs that characterize each? PG: For the hostile sexism scale, there are anti-feminist items like, “Feminists are demanding too much of men,” “Women complain about things at work,” “Women use sex to manipulate men and gain power over men.” So that’s about all the “conniving” ways basically that women “try to gain power over men,” or the idea that women compete with men in ways that aren’t fair. This is the modern version of hostile sexism. If it were 200 years ago, it would have been, “Women are incompetent and stupid.” But things have changed, so hostile sexism now is subtle hostility in an environment where there’s more competition. Whereas with benevolent sexism, you could translate it into Ancient Greek and Homer would have recognized it. It’s stuff like, “Women are more pure and moral than men,” and “Women deserve and need men’s protection.” NLI: You were saying that hostile sexism and benevolent sexism go hand in hand. PG: Right. The hostile sexist nations are also the benevolently sexist nations. But if you compare men’s and women’s scores on benevolent sexism, we don’t find as big a gap. Because benevolent sexism sounds really nice — and it is, by the way, subjectively positive on the part of men who hold these attitudes. They’re not being sneaky. Their mom told them, “Don’t ever hit a girl,” and, “You’ve got to protect women.” Romantic scripts tell them that! Benevolent sexism and romance are very hand-in-glove too. So they’re feeling like, “Hey, I’m treating the ladies like they need to be treated.” It’s a very subjectively positive thing. Yet we find these objectively negative outcomes. NLI: When you say that women score high on benevolent sexism — they’re scoring high on benevolently sexist beliefs about women, not men, right? PG: Right. It’s “Women should be cherished and protected by men, do you agree or disagree?” Women can say, “Oh yeah, men should cherish and protect women, for sure.” “Women are more pure and moral.” “A man needs a woman he can adore.” “He’s not complete without a woman.” Women can endorse that stuff as well. I’m not real militant. In romantic relationships, you’ve got to figure out what you want. But when it comes to work, we’ve found that benevolent sexism is related to things like not giving women challenging assignments — because maybe it will be too stressful for them or too demanding. But challenging assignments are how you get promoted! And how you develop your skills! Women often get softer feedback. It’s, “Oh, you’re so wonderful,” and often that praise is on more feminine dimensions, like “Clients love you because you’re so warm and nurturing.” But then when it comes to promotions
In a recent pop up survey on NeuroLeadership.com, we asked visitors one question: What does it mean for a person to have a “growth mindset”? From the 208 responses we received, we learned that, given a few options featuring the most common meanings attached to growth mindset, the vast majority of participants identified the right one: 89% of survey participants correctly identify growth mindset as the belief that a person’s abilities can be improved (correct) 9% think that having a growth mindset means to be positive and optimistic (incorrect) Only 1.4% think that it relates to striving for business growth (incorrect), and 0.5% don’t know what it means (unfortunate) These results basically reflect the findings from our recent industry research on growth mindset. As HR and talent teams work hard on clarifying and communicating the correct definition throughout the organization, they mostly succeed. Once in a while, though, they may encounter individuals or teams that hang on to misinformed and false ideas of growth mindset. We recently explored this trend in an article called “5 Mistakes Companies Make About Growth Mindsets” for the Harvard Business Review. Simply put, don’t mistake growth mindset for endless optimism. We at the NeuroLeadership Institute define growth mindset as the belief that skills and abilities can be improved, and that developing our skills and abilities is the purpose of the work we do. But we have also learned something else in our research: people in organizations attach various, personalized interpretations to the idea of growth mindset — something we highlighted in our recent webinar Growth Mindset 101. Getting the idea of growth mindset right matters. This powerful concept will be increasingly important for individuals and organizations who need to adapt to the ongoing changes posed by digital disruption. Given the many interpretations of growth mindset that are out there, clarifying what it means — and what it doesn’t mean — is a crucial step in creating a growth mindset culture. What really makes a difference is when organizations are able to weave the concept of growth mindset deep into their people’s everyday behaviors and their organizational processes. In order to do that, organizations first need to be clear on what growth mindset means to them. Send your thoughts, feedback, and criticism to Andrea Derler, NLI’s director of industry research. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
Feedback is essential for organizational (and organismal) growth, but what’s the best way to give it? Typical feedback conversations are painful and extremely stress-producing. Managers who try to avoid offending their employees risk over-correcting, giving feedback that is polite, but ultimately unhelpful. Billions are spent each year in an attempt to solve these feedback problems. A recent feature story in strategy+business could hold the key insight: Asking for feedback, rather than giving it unprompted, may be the smartest way to develop a growth-oriented culture. “We’re not promising it’s going to feel good right away, but it will be better for you in the long term,” says NYU psychologist and NLI senior scientist Tessa West. Putting the brain in the right state West and her colleague Katherine Thorson, also of NYU, recently ran a study at a major consultancy that tracked people’s heart rates during mock negotiations. Afterwards, each participant took turns giving and receiving feedback. Certain groups were instructed to ask for feedback, while others gave it unprompted. The findings showed giving feedback was just as anxiety-producing as receiving feedback. However, when people received feedback that wasn’t asked for, their heart rates jumped around erratically. (Equivalent spikes have been found during some of the most stressful events, such as public speaking.) Our brains suffer in these moments of duress. Stress causes a decline in cognitive function and a narrowing of the senses, limiting our ability to think critically or learn. To serve their crucial function of helping employees improve and grow, feedback conversations should avoid this threat response. Based on her recent study, West believes asking for feedback could hold the power to make discussions less painful. When people know to ask for feedback, they feel in control, West says. They feel psychological rewards of autonomy and certainty. They can steer the conversation wherever they choose and feel confident about which topics will get discussed. Givers also feel more certainty, because they no longer have to guess what kind of information will be most useful. Creating the habit of asking To make an asker-led culture a reality, West says to start small. “It’s like going on a diet,” she says. “You don’t want to cut out everything that’s delicious. You have to gradually replace the unhealthy with the healthy.” Leaders can take the first steps by asking for feedback themselves — perhaps about the temperature in the last meeting. Gradually, West says, people will feel safer asking for feedback if they know the resulting discussion will be productive, not threatening. Over time, organizations that take up the strategy should expect to have regular feedback conversations more often, which means avoiding errors earlier and innovating more rapidly. SEE ALSO: How Microsoft Transformed Its Approach to Feedback
Since 1998, when Lisa Rock and I launched a coaching business that would become the NeuroLeadership Institute, we have been passionate about identifying language that helps people be more effective. In 2008, when we launched NLI formally, we went even bigger. For the last decade, we have been on a mission to develop a new language for leadership, culture, and learning. Today, our work is impacting millions of people in hundreds of the world’s largest companies — 30% of the Fortune 100, to be specific — always with the desire of making workplaces more fundamentally human. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Your Brain at Work, NLI’s official blog for all things neuroleadership. It’s a chance for us to pull together, in one place, the many ideas and insights we have been developing over the years. We’ve already got some amazing content we think you’ll love. Here’s just a sampling. In The Biggest Myth About Growth Mindset, we present a major finding from our recent industry research project in 16 international corporations showing how managers may be unknowingly burning out their employees. In The Smartest Teams Embrace the ‘Diversity Paradox’, an excerpt from a Corporate Membership piece reveals the hidden challenge associated with diversifying a workforce. Research on power and voice forms the foundation for a thought-provoking piece called What Airline Pilots and Nurses Can Teach Organizations About Decision-Making. Leaders who hold regular performance reviews may be sending the wrong signals or making premature decisions, according to Why the Typical Performance Review Is Overwhelmingly Biased. Click here to check out the rest of our content that showcases research on culture and leadership, performance, diversity and inclusion, and more. The field of neuroleadership is only getting more exciting as the years go by, and we can’t wait to go on the journey with all of you. Thank you for reading! SEE ALSO: The Hidden Leverage of Feedback
Chris Pirie isn’t putting the future of organizational learning in the hands of gut feelings. He’s relying on hard brain science. In a recent interview with Singularity Hub’s Lisa Kay Solomon, Pirie, the general manager of worldwide learning at Microsoft, explained how companies will begin infusing research into their development processes. “We’ll start to know what it looks and feels like to pay full attention and which social and physical conditions can accelerate or throttle the learning process,” Pirie said. “Organizations like NeuroLeadership Institute are codifying the research into workable models that help [learning] designers to leverage those brain chemistry process and biases.” In addition to neuroscience, Pirie speculated that data science and social science will also inform how learning experience designers create their internal programs. “The learning scientists are coming!” he said. “Within corporations, we’re going to see a fundamental rethink of the role and responsibility of learning in organizations and the creation of a new type of learning organization.” Pirie has plenty of experience applying research to organizational habits: For the past two years, Microsoft has partnered with NLI to change its culture with the help of brain science. In mid-2016, the tech giant debuted its three leadership principles company-wide: Generate energy, Create clarity, and Deliver success. Simple as they may seem, a great deal of research suggests they put Microsoft in the best position to achieve its goals. For instance, as Pirie points out in his interview, scientists are making great strides in understanding how knowledge moves from short- to long-term memory. Specifically, we have seen the benefits time and again of making learning “sticky,” or memorable, by chunking bits of information into easily digestible pieces. We also minimize the amount of work required of the brain, since humans can’t juggle more than four or five ideas at a time. Microsoft’s leadership principles rely on that set of insights. Each principle is easy to remember, but so is the trio as a whole. We call this “coherence,” as it’s near impossible to remember one leadership principle without thinking of the other two. These strategies don’t just get people excited about making a change; they actually change behavior. As Pirie explains, this is one of the hallmarks of neuroscience-based learning initiatives, and what will propel the field into the future of learning. “I believe we will soon see diagnostic tools to help evaluate costly corporate learning programs against such standards,” he said, “and tools to help learning experience designers design for maximum impact.” SEE ALSO: The Smartest Teams Embrace the ‘Diversity Paradox’
Growth mindset has gained a lot of popularity in organizations over the past decade, now standing as many leaders’ favorite buzzword for boosting productivity. But there’s still one myth that widely persists among companies — at the risk of employee and organizational well-being. Contrary to what many leaders believe, growth mindset does not refer to a person’s limitless capacity to get things done. For the past three months, NLI has interviewed HR practitioners at more than 20 major organizations around the world, as part of an industry research project. Our goal was to find out what, exactly, leaders were doing when they implemented growth mindset around their organization. We found a range of interpretations. Some thought growth mindset was purely a focus on business growth. Others saw it as the belief that any achievement was possible, no matter how unrealistic the goal. In fact, our working definition of growth mindset is: the dual belief that skills and abilities can be improved, and that developing your skills and abilities is the purpose of the work you do. On occasion, managers who hadn’t quite grasped this concept thought employees with a growth mindset were happy to take on projects endlessly. If they claimed their plate was full, they were seen as having a fixed mindset — a scarlet “F” around many offices. The trouble with this line of thinking is that everyone, at some point, faces issues of “capacity,” or the brain’s limit for cognitive function. There is only so much thought people can devote to their various tasks before their output begins to plateau, or even decrease. Managers who keep overloading their employees with work actually inhibit, not propel, long-term progress. What’s more, by making a judgment on people’s ability to handle more and more tasks, managers risk damaging employees’ sense of status. What initially may have been a point of pride could turn into shame over poor productivity. For the sake of employee and organizational health, leaders should align on the true definition of growth mindset. Saying your plate is full isn’t a sign that your thinking is flawed. In fact, it may be the opposite — a sign that in order to develop your skills, the most important thing you can do is pause, and focus on the job at hand. [action hash=”6cd538cd-54dd-4b69-a152-d85ebcd24518″]
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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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