695: Team Collaboration Supports Growth Mindset, with Mary Murphy

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Many of us have heard the distinction between a fixed and a growth mindset. Turns out it’s actually not an either or, and it’s certainly not with our teams. In this episode, how team collaboration can support a growth mindset. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 695.Podcast Production: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:28]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. The phrase growth mindset is one that many of us have heard a lot about in recent years, and many of us have an orientation to want to do a great job of having that growth mindset for ourselves and also having that for our teams. Today, how we can do an even better job of really creating a team environment of collaboration that supports growth mindset that helps our organizations to get to the results that we want, but also in a way that honors the people who are with us. I’m so pleased to welcome Mary Murphy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:20]:
She is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. She is also founding director of the Summer Institute on Diversity at the Center For Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and also 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. She is the author of Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations. Mary, what a pleasure to see you. Welcome.

Mary Murphy [00:01:53]:
Thank you, Dave. I am so happy to be here with you. I’m excited for this conversation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:57]:
Oh, me too. You know, team leadership collaboration, like, so important to the work of leaders. And the phrase that jumped out at me right away in reading the book, the first two sentences of chapter 1. And you write, “we’ve gotten mindset all wrong. Well, not all wrong, but we’ve oversimplified it drastically into our detriment.” This begs the obvious question. What have we gotten wrong and what have we oversimplified on this?

Mary Murphy [00:02:28]:
Yes. Well, probably, people are familiar with Carol Dweck and Carol Dweck’s idea of the fixed and the growth mindset.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:36]:
Yeah.

Mary Murphy [00:02:36]:
And what we have discovered since Carol kind of popularized these ideas in the late seventies and, you know, more than 30 years of research now, deep research on what happens when we’re in our fixed or our growth mindset. What we have seen is that as these ideas have moved into education and then into business, we have really kind of oversimplified this idea. And there’s 3 ways that we tend to get mindset wrong. 1, if you Google the fixed or growth mindset, and you look at Google images, you’re likely to see these 2 heads. And it’s like a red head that is like fixed mindset, and fixed mindsets in the brain somewhere, and all the negative things associated with fixed mindset. And then on the other side of the meme is the growth mindset. It’s usually in green. It’s the good thing.

Mary Murphy [00:03:23]:
And all the wonderful things associated with the growth mindset. And there’s usually a question at the top of this meme that’s like, which mindset do you have? And this is a really ironic way of thinking about mindset. Right? You either have the fixed mindset or you have the growth mindset. It’s a very fixed way of thinking about mindset. And so that’s the first thing we get wrong is that we think of them as these 2 mindsets, and you either have one or the other. When in reality, what we know is that everybody has the fixed and the growth mindset. We all have both within us, and it exists on a continuum. Right? We move along the continuum of mindset.

Mary Murphy [00:04:00]:
Sometimes we embody our fixed mindset, sometimes we embody growth. And then it becomes really important to know what are those cues? What are those triggers that move you along your fixed and growth mindset continuum? The second big thing that we’ve kind of gotten wrong as mindsets gotten popularized is that it’s only located in your mind. That mindset is just about your mind. And then the solution becomes, well, just change your mind. And we know Dave. Right? This is much easier said than done. And the good news is that, yes, mindset is located inside of our mind.

Mary Murphy [00:04:34]:
It’s a set of beliefs. But what actually affects those beliefs and whether we’re in our fixed or growth mindset is a lot, you know, based on who is around us and the environment that we find ourselves inside of. And then the last thing we get wrong is thinking that mindset is all about effort. That it’s just about change your mind and try harder. And what we know is that with a true growth mindset, effort is not just going to be the only most important factor. If you keep banging your head against the wall over and over and over and you say, try harder, just keep banging harder, we know no good outcome comes from that. Right? So it’s about what we call effective effort. A true growth mindset is understanding whether the effort I’m putting forward is moving me in the right direction toward my goals and being willing to seek help and mentorship and support from others, and to be able to pivot in order to continue to learn and grow and meet those goals that I’ve set.

Mary Murphy [00:05:29]:
So those are the 3 main, misconceptions we have about mindset today.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:35]:
I did my master’s degree in org leadership, and I found the experience really insightful but also a little bit depressing and the reason was because when you get into the research and the reading is you realize pretty quickly, like, how much influence and sway, like, large organizational culture has. And you realize as an individual how little power you have as an individual to change that and I I say I I say that not to leave us in a place of despair but the opportunity of course is yes as leaders there is a ton that we can do and you point out that the mindset orientation doesn’t just affect perceptions and behaviors but it also shapes the bottom line in organizations what does the research show about what cultures of genius emerge and what cultures of growth emerge as far as results?

Mary Murphy [00:06:41]:
Yeah. So, you know, let’s just take 2 different companies or organizations. Right? So you imagine that in one, it has that fixed minded belief at the heart of it. You either have it or you don’t. You’re smarter or you’re not. You’re talented or you’re not. Right? And what that’s gonna do is really set up this dynamic inside the organization that’s really rife with internal competition. I have to attend to everybody else and making sure that I am performing at a high level, so I’m considered by the people who are going to evaluate me and potentially promote me as one of these gifted individuals.

Mary Murphy [00:07:14]:
Right? So instead of putting all my attention on the work in front of me, I end up having to look over my shoulder because a new star is being born every day and I have to be sure I can keep up. Right? So what we see in these cultures of genius is a lot of backbiting, information hoarding. Oops. I forgot to put you on the calendar invite for that important meeting. People holding on to information, not sharing it because that’s how they’re trying to maintain their advantage. We also see people being shy to take risks. Right? Or make mistakes because those mistakes in the culture of genius are taken as a sign that maybe you don’t have what it takes. Maybe you don’t belong here.

Mary Murphy [00:07:51]:
In the second company, the culture of growth company, what we see is that collaboration is really encouraged. It’s incentivized. It’s praised, because the idea is that it’s all about learning, growth, and development, and good ideas are gonna come from everywhere. We also see that mistakes are really normalized in this context and that there are structures in place systematically so that we can be learning the most from the mistakes that are made, so we never repeat those mistakes going forward. That learning is sort of shared across teams and across the organization. And so when you think about these 2 organizations, right, and you think about what actually it takes to be able to be innovative, to be able to be creative, to meet the moment, especially in times of upheaval and change, we see that that culture of growth performs better. They’re making mistakes. They’re learning from them more quickly.

Mary Murphy [00:08:43]:
No one’s trying to hide them. No one’s focused on just their own status and maintaining their reputation. They’re actually helping to share that learning. They’re taking informed risks. They’re measuring whether or not the effort they’re putting in is actually moving them toward the goal, and they’re getting to the goal faster. And so in these studies we’ve done with, you know, early start up companies, early stage organizations, as well as all the way to the fortune 100, we have found consistently that those with these strong cultures of growth are much more likely to meet and exceed their financial goals. They’re more likely to be more innovative, resilient, and financially successful when it comes to the bottom line revenue share. And in early stage companies, they’re more likely to re reach and exceed their fundraising goals, which is essential for those early companies.

Mary Murphy [00:09:30]:
And in larger companies, they have better market share numbers and more revenue that they are able to enjoy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:37]:
It’s really fascinating and fascinating like how consistent the research is on this and it kind of comes back to like some of the real practical things on like okay how can how can leaders really do a better job with supporting this. And I was thinking about one of the questions you highlight in the book that a lot of really well meaning folks, me included I’m sure, have asked at at some point well, how can we avoid hiring fixed mindset people? And the, if you challenge us and say, well, the the better question perhaps is what triggers our employees to adopt a fixed or growth mindset and how can we shape the environment to encourage a growth mindset more of the time? And one place where that holds sway is collaboration. That seems like a key entry point for this.

Mary Murphy [00:10:32]:
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. It is. Absolutely. There are so many practices, you know, this is also where we started was what are some of the misconceptions of mindset that we need a mindset reset from. And one of those, again, is thinking about mindset in this fixed way. Right? There’s gonna be growth minded people, and there’s gonna be fixed minded people.

Mary Murphy [00:10:53]:
And we really only want the growth minded people in our organizations, in our leadership, on our teams. Right? And yet, we know that that by itself is misguided. It’s just not what the research shows. We all have these mindsets. So as you say, the most important thing is to find the situations, these triggers. And our research has identified 4 predictable mindset triggers that really move us along the mindset continuum when our we find our beliefs moving towards our fixed mindset or our growth mindset. And those are quickly evaluative situations, high effort situations, critical feedback, and the success of others. And we can dive into those later or people can just take a look at them on the website.

Mary Murphy [00:11:36]:
But to your point, collaboration and how we set up collaboration is one of these situations that really overrides evaluative situations, high effort situations, critical feedback, and the success of others. How we assign people, and teams, you know, new assignments or stretch assignments is really gonna affect whether people are willing to collaborate or whether people are expected or and, forced really into competition with each other. And we know that when people are forced into those competitive, especially internally competitive context, that we see people shifting much more to their fixed mindset. It’s either him or it’s me who can be successful. Right? If she does something wonderful on this team and she’s getting all the praise, that must mean that maybe I can’t be successful in the same way as she is. Right? So these are the ways in which we can set up collaborative environments to actually be about learning, growth, and development. How do we learn from each other? Where are our structures that really help support good ideas coming from everywhere? Right? How do we set those collaborative environments up as leaders so that people are more likely to embody their growth mindset more of the time? That becomes the task that we have as leaders in setting the mindset culture.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:56]:
It’s so interesting how often we make moves from a leadership standpoint that, are for the most part really well intended. And by trying to be well intended, we end up actually going down a path that sometimes makes things worse. And the example that’s coming up for me from the book is a multinational bank that you cite that did some work to really was being thoughtful about how to keep employees happy. And one of the tactics was to give more senior folks, more experienced folks, the more difficult interesting assignments. And I think in a lot of organizations, that’s a practice that that happens. And in an effort to be collaborative and create a good working environment, but it it backfired, didn’t it?

Mary Murphy [00:13:42]:
Yes. Exactly. So right. When we start to say, okay. These are the people who we think have the potential. These are the high potential leaders, or here are the, people that we really wanna invest in to help promote them throughout the organization. And we only give the most challenging, effortful, and often prestigious work to those individuals so they can shine.

Mary Murphy [00:14:05]:
What it does is, sure, it gives those individuals a growth opportunity, but how about everybody else on the team as they are looking to their own work and they’re comparing themselves to what these other individuals are being offered and, you know, the challenges put in front of them, they kind of start to realize that there might be a little bit of a ceiling there for them. If they aren’t identified as the star, as the one who has it in these environments, then that’s the only way in these cultures of genius in order to rise, to be able to be seen as someone, who has the potential to grow within the organization. And so you see people get frustrated in their role. You see people kind of disengage, sometimes engage in unethical behavior. That’s another very robust finding we find across all studies we’ve ever done is that when these competitive internally competitive dynamics are set up, either intentionally or unintentionally in teams and organizations, we see people start to take subtly and sometimes not so subtly unethical behavior. Again, leaving people off calendar invites, hoarding information, taking shortcuts. Why? Because they’re gonna do anything to be able to be seen in the eyes of others as one of those stars, one of those geniuses who has it, who has what it takes, and to be able to get those compelling assignments that are then going to promote them within the organization to have success over the long haul.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:35]:
And it’s so interesting that you cite several examples in your book and the research of individual leaders who themselves are pretty competitive people. So it’s not that competition is bad by any means. Like, it it can be a very good thing. But what they’ve done is they’ve been really intentional, in addition to the competitive nature and spirit that they have of creating a collaborative culture of growth and they’ve done some things to like help the organization along in doing that and one of the invitations you make is to conduct a cues audit and also to start with affinity groups in the organization if it’s large enough. And I’m curious what is a queues audit first of all and what’s the reasoning behind starting with an affinity group?

Mary Murphy [00:16:21]:
Yeah. Well, the question is how is culture? How do I know when I move into a team or into a whole organization where the team or the organizational culture sits on the mindset culture continuum? How do we actually know this? And the answer is that because this is a cultural feature, we look to the cultural artifacts in the environment. So I’m looking at what people are saying and doing. I’m looking at the norms for interaction. How do we start our meetings? How do we end our meetings? How do we praise people on our teams? How do we actually deal with mistakes when mistakes are made? What are the practices, the policies, the norms that we have in place? And this in organizational culture kind of research and academia, there’s a big, argument. What is real culture? Is culture what we say we believe in our mission statements and our value statements? Or is culture what we actually do on the ground? And what I tend to come down on and what my research seems to suggest is that it’s those cultural artifacts on the ground. So accuse audit asks us to look at those policies, practices, norms, interactions, leadership messages, what we’re actually saying and doing on the ground to really understand where we are on the mindset culture continuum. And to your question, what we know is that individuals from underrepresented, underserved, numerically underrepresented backgrounds in organizations are often more vigilant to the culture on the ground.

Mary Murphy [00:17:55]:
They have to understand it so they know how to navigate it. They’re wondering how the culture is gonna see them, how other people are gonna see them, especially if you’re one of very few in your organization, you know, that you stand out either on the dimension of gender or race or disability or neurodivergence or many different, parts of our identity. There are ways in which we can stand apart. And what that does, being numerically underrepresented in a context, is that it actually queues us in to the different practices and policies. It makes us know them well. So when I ask them, who’s the expert in the culture? Is it gonna be the CEO, or is it gonna be people on the ground and maybe even people who, are from underrepresented backgrounds or numerically underrepresented in the organization? Who’s gonna be the expert? And what we see over and over, it’s those underrepresented individuals who are tuned in, are more vigilant to these cues, to culture, and who can tell us a lot about what the cues are and what they mean when someone says x or y. What does it actually mean for the way that they’re thought of in the organization, the way they’re treated in the organization? And so I like to go to those individuals first as experts to try to understand what are the cues that matter here that are telling me whether I’m in more of a culture of genius or culture of growth. How does that matter for the way people are treated, evaluated, given opportunities in the organization, promoted within the organization? And then we move up through the organization into leadership, into other domains, and we’ll ask people the same sort of thing.

Mary Murphy [00:19:30]:
And you’ll be surprised at the differences that we see along the hierarchy within organizations of the cues people point to as to what the culture really is. And then when we lay it all out for people and we say, okay, here’s what people from all walks within this organization are telling us are the cues to this culture. Let’s then take them and they provide opportunities for learning and potentially change. Right? If this practice or policy is that unintentionally communicating that you either have it or you don’t, you’re smarter, you’re not, you’re capable, or you’re not. And it seems to be going more towards individuals who match our genius prototype in the culture. Right? Who tends to be who? Like, Einstein and Steve Jobs and maybe Elon Musk. Right? These individuals who are really held up in our society as these geniuses. Well, then maybe that practice or policy is something we wanna revisit.

Mary Murphy [00:20:21]:
Maybe we wanna clarify it or shift it a little and look at whether or not it’s having a different impact on more inclusive opportunities and evaluation and promotion inside the organization.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:34]:
Fascinating. I’ve had some really interesting conversations come out of that for an organization that’s ready and willing to engage and listen well in order to discover that. And, I was also really struck by a line in the book you write “a common misperception is that cultures of growth are less data oriented than cultures of genius in fact the reverse is often true.” I think if you had asked me last week, Mary, before I got into your book and the research, like Mhmm. Who’s more focused on data, culture of genius, or culture of growth, I probably would have said genius. Not true though, isn’t it?

Mary Murphy [00:21:12]:
Yeah. Absolutely. Dave, I love every single point you are bringing up here. This is one of my favorite findings that we have seen over and over again. You would think that if you are in an environment that’s really focused on genius and all you wanna do is have all these geniuses in the room together, right, and gather them and that that would be the best outcome, that would be the best environment in which to work. It’d be the environment that produces the most innovation, creativity, and performance. We find just the opposite. And the reason is because these cultures of genius, oftentimes, they will rely on the gut of the resident genius in house.

Mary Murphy [00:21:52]:
And so they’ll say, what does he or she want us to do? What do they think the best direction is? And sometimes that gut is based in data. But sometimes, more often, what we see is that it’s based on some intuition that they have. Right? And that may or may not be grounded in the data. And the data may or may not be used to assess whether or not moving in that right direction is the correct way to meet a goal that the organiztion has set for itself. So we see that these cultures of genius swing wildly, Elon Musk would be a good example I would say, where we see these wild swings around strategy and around direction in different organizations based on the resident geniuses outcome. Whereas what we see in the culture of growth is that it’s all about learning and development. And so what they do in a culture of growth is they have systems in place that really data is available to everyone. It’s not siloed into just some areas of the company. And they’re using the same data to be able to say across the organization, here are our metrics, here are the things we’re going for, here are our goals, and we’re going to be assessing across time, not just in the middle of the year or at the end of the year.

Mary Murphy [00:23:04]:
We’re gonna have metrics that are gonna tell us according to the data we’re collecting whether the effort we’re putting forward is actually moving us in the right direction. What are some of these early signs? And they’re gonna do learning along the way so that if they decide and they see in their data that they are not moving in the right direction, they’re going to ask why. They’re gonna want to learn more about that. They’re going to try new strategies, try a little pivot, then collect a little bit more data. Are we moving in the right direction? And so these cultures of growth are data obsessed. They are much more rigorous environments, and decisions are not made unless the data are consulted. Right? And because the data is widely shared, people are not in the dark as to what the strategy is going to be, and the strategy does not wildly shift based on the whims of the resident genius, in the moment and how they’re feeling that morning. And so what we see is it’s a much more steady and also data driven, much more successful over time approach in the culture of genius because it is so rigorous, because it is so data obsessed in these environments.

Mary Murphy [00:24:10]:
And because that knowledge is so widely shared, everyone can get on board toward that learning and development and the organization’s goals.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:19]:
So much of our conversation, I’m just struck by how getting better at this is really changing our mindset about mindset I mean it’s really a meta thing. Yeah I mean it’s so many things we’ve talked about I mean thinking about the either or I’m either a fixed or growth mindset or thinking about just what you said of round what we would normally think about data or competition I mean it’s really interesting how part of this is just being willing to set aside some of our own mindsets and look at, okay, how do we recast things a bit? And and speaking of recasting, one of the other invitations is to recast competition. And and to our point from earlier, it’s not that competition’s bad. It’s just how to think about it differently and to do it in a way that’s a little bit more helpful. Tell me a bit more about that, and what do organizations do to recast us in a way that actually speaks more to a culture of growth?

Mary Murphy [00:25:20]:
Absolutely. So recasting competition is the idea that we are going to recast, especially internally when it comes to our own internal competition, on what dimensions are we competing? Are we competing to see who’s the smartest in the room, who has it and who doesn’t, or are we competing on the dimension of learning, growth, and development? Is there a way in which real tangible incentives are provided for the way in which you contribute to the outcomes that are the team outcomes? Right? How has your contribution actually helped the organization or the team learn something essential that is basically going to shape the outcomes for the organization in the long term. Right? So how do we identify who those individuals are who are contributing to the organization and the team in this way that really will further collaboration, growth, and development. And then when it comes to how we identify those individuals, then it becomes, well, what do we give them? Right? What are the incentives that we’re actually providing? And what we know is that one of the mindset triggers for a lot of individuals is the success of others. So when we are going to recast competition to not be about how smart you are, if you’re the resident genius, or if you’re not, but instead how much you’re contributing to the team effort, to the growth and development of the organization’s goals and the team’s outcomes, then we say, well, how do we reward these people? How do we praise people in a way that’s not gonna move everyone else into their fixed mindset? And so what we see is that there’s ways to really help people be inspired by instead of threatened by the success of others, when others are really doing a great job along this dimension of collaboration, growth and development. And the incentives, you know, there’s a lot of organizations, you know, at Pepsi, their annual bonuses are tied to what they’ve done to help other people succeed as an example. Another tech company has decided to, for collaborative behaviors, they’re offering financial incentives and also non financial incentives, like a Kindle preloaded with the best business books that the CEO has handpicked. Right? So these are examples of ways that are really stoking continuous learning and development, and really helping people see that this is gonna be the thing that’s most important as a cultural value inside the organization.

Mary Murphy [00:27:47]:
We also wanna be sure that when we’re praising those folks, we’re telling the story not just about the outcome, but about the journey it took. Right? What was the distance traveled that this individual or this team took upon themselves in order to reach this goal? By telling these stories, you can actually create more inspiration rather than threat or competition, and it illuminates the strategies that were most successful in reaching these outcomes that you wanna praise and that you wanna highlight as a leader. And so how we set up these internal collaborative competitions, should we say, because competition is not bad as you describe. It’s just on what dimension are we competing, and then how do we reward and highlight and help others in the organization see the pathways by which we can be successful in this competitive collaboration, this competitive learning and growth and development that will illuminate how many other individuals and teams can follow.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:48]:
And I love your reminder of storytelling. Right? The language of leaders of telling the story about it too, not just the results itself. So key. The the final invitation you make in in the collaboration and and the work is to consider redoing your rating system. And we have seen a lot in popular media in the last few decades of organizations that have, very what’s the word? Harsh rating systems, and Jack Welch is probably the pinnacle example of that. Right? Let go the I forget the bottom 10 or 20% every year of of people who are not performing well. The and, and, hopefully, we’ve we’ve started to put that to bed. That that does not work.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:30]:
But the the invitation is to maybe go a little bit of the the opposite way and thinking about ratings. Who have you seen do this well that supports a a culture where growth is more at the central point thinking about ratings?

Mary Murphy [00:29:45]:
Yeah. Well, I have a lot of different examples, but the person that I really am inspired by quite a lot is Dean Carter, who’s the head of HR for Patagonia. And what Dean understood when he came to his position was really he started to understand and he took this approach that I think is really interesting, and his metaphor is thinking about agricultural approaches to planting and to harvesting. Right? And he talks a lot about how every time you grow a plant and you pluck it out, or you cut it down and you tell the ground, you are depleting the soil. Right? And so the question is, are we is our system, our rating system, is it something that’s depleting people, or is it something that is actually reinvesting in people, refertilizing people? Right? Actually helping them be able to rather than extraction, thinking about what we put into people and not just what we take out of people. And so what he was seeing when he came to Patagonia was that people were just exhausted by the rating systems by the continuous evaluation and feedback. And so what he did was he really thought about this regeneration model in agriculture and moving from an extractive model into one that really invests in people. And so instead of having to do this in terms of a evaluation process every cycle, and then you get a little time off and then you have to do it again, what he decided to do was completely overhaul the performance management process.

Mary Murphy [00:31:23]:
And when he announced that he was gonna take this up and he was gonna take input from employees about how it should be done, people literally stood up and applauded in the all hands meeting around this. Right? Because they were so interested in thinking about together what a different kind of annual evaluation system would be. And what they ended up with in Patagonia is, a really interesting system that might not be for everyone, but I like to think about it again on this mindset culture continuum. I’d say it’s on the far end of a very strong culture of growth in this way, where HR, instead of an annual evaluation, HR is gonna provide a tool that employees can basically opt into to help their performance, and they are given different opportunities for learning, growth, and development, and all of that goes into considering where they are at the end of the year and being able to get really actionable feedback that’s focused on their own goals and the organization’s goals for their growth, development, and success over time. And so this system really produced all kinds of new insights and new data that Carter and the Patagonia team were able to use across time to really look at new dimensions of performance analysis. Right? Getting much more useful information, and it freed up time of the employee and also the managers to do their best work. And so this was a sort of a reinvention and a real shift from a culture of genius, proven perform. We’re gonna be doing these evaluations over time.

Mary Murphy [00:32:53]:
Patagonia never had the stack ranking that Jack Welch and many other companies and by the way, I see this emerging in more and more in tech companies today. This is stack ranking is having a resurgence.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:04]:
Oh, interesting.

Mary Murphy [00:33:06]:
And but instead, they really kind of moved even from where they were kind of in the middle of the mindset culture continuum towards the far end of growth to really think about what would be the data they need in order to be able to help support employees growth and development and the organization’s goals. Being able to collect that kind of data and then to be able to invest in the learning and development through various programs offered to employees, and then to see whether or not that had an impact on the goals, on the work itself over time. And so they were able to collect more relevant data to the organization’s actual goals than what the previous employee management system and performance system had been focused on.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:50]:
Fascinating. Mary Murphy is the author of Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, teams, and organizations. Mary, thank you so much for all your work.

Mary Murphy [00:34:02]:
Dave, thank you so much. I love all of your questions. This was such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:08]:
Oh, my pleasure. If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 related episodes I’d also recommend. One of them is episode 326, growth mindset helps you rise from the ashes. Jeff Hittenberger was my guest on that episode. Bonni and I have known Jeff for many years. He’s the former chief academic officer for the Orange County Department of Education here in Southern California. Has, since we recorded that conversation, moved to become a professor and a researcher, helping so many of us to benefit from education and growth mindset. And in that conversation, Jeff and I talked about how he brought the perspective of growth mindset into a government agency, how they work together in their reading and in teams to work from a team standpoint.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:58]:
I think it’s a great real world application of growth mindset and also how he’s done that personally. Episode 326 for that. Also recommended episode 404, how to build psychological safety. Amy Edmonson’s work, always important for all of us to be aware of. She’s been on the show a few times over the years. On that episode, we talked about how to actually build psychological safety within a team. And the good news for all of us is that even if the larger organization isn’t doing that well, an individual leader can do a lot to build and support psychological safety with the people they work with. Episode 404, great compliment to this conversation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:39]:
And speaking of a great compliment, episode 644, how to help your team embrace growth mindset. Eduardo Briceño was my guest on that episode, and we talked about the distinction he makes of helping a team to be in the zone of learning versus in the zone of performance. Both of them are really important, and we discussed how you actually get into that place of learning and to be able to encourage and support that growth mindset. It’s a wonderful compliment to this conversation. I think I must listen if you found this conversation helpful. Again, that’s episode 644. All of those you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. If you haven’t yet, I’m inviting you to set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:21]:
It’s gonna open up a whole bunch more resources to you inside of the website that we’ve made available to you to make your listening, your resources really helpful to you. And one of my favorite things inside of our website is my own library, Dave’s library. And what I’ve been doing over the last I think it’s been 7 or 8 years now. Anytime I find something that I pass along in the weekly leadership guides or mentioned on the podcast or just am doing my own reading, I database it. And I database articles, resources, pulling things from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Harvard Business Review. So many of the great publications out there that I do pass along individually, but the whole database is there available to you. It’s completely open. It’s for free.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:06]:
It’s inside of the free membership, and it’s all searchable by topic. I have been organizing and hashtagging all of that over the years. So if you’re looking for an article on a particular topic or a credibility piece for a stakeholder, I had to invite you to start there. I’ve done all the work for you, and it’s all part of the library inside of the free membership. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership. Once you do, click on Dave’s library, and you’ll see right there how to access everything. It’s a great resource available to you. And if you’re looking for a bit more, Coaching for Leaders Plus may be your next step.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:43]:
You can find out more by going over to coachingforleaders.plus. One of the things that we’re doing every month is I’m making an invitation to a past guest who’s been on the podcast to come and sit down with our academy and pro members for a live conversation. And rather than me asking the questions, it’s our members asking the questions of the experts directly. We record all of those, and we make them available to all of our coaching for leaders plus members. And just this past month, Bonni was our guest. Since Bonni’s been on the podcast many times, I invited her to come join us and her and I actually had a conversation about work life integration. We looked at a little bit more of the personal side of leadership. How do we navigate it all? Both having demanding jobs and balancing kids and family and personal time and all those things, and what do we do well and what don’t we do well? We had an hour long conversation about that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:34]:
That recording is one of the dozens and dozens of recordings inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus, those expert chats, one of the many benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. Again, for more details, go over to coachingforleaders.plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to have Marshall Goldsmith back on the show. We’re gonna be having a conversation about his iconic book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Join me for that conversation with Marshall, and I’ll see you back on Monday.