Innovation 2.0: Multiplying the Growth Mindset

Shankar Vedantam

This is hidden brain. Im Shankar Vedanta. Many years ago, two researchers at Harvard noticed something interesting at their universitys Peabody Museum of Natural History. It was a description about a pair of 19th century german glassmakers, it read, descended from a long line of bohemian glass artists. Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolph, were gifted with such extraordinary skill and passion for their work that one might argue these attributes were indeed in their blood.

The researchers, Chia Jung sai and Mahzarin Banaji, were curious. When we say someone is gifted, does it matter whether their talent is the result of hard work or natural ability? Would we see Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka differently if their skill and passion was not in their blood? In an experiment, the scientists asked more than a hundred musical experts whether innate talent or hard work was the more important factor when it came to musical ability. The expert said no contest.

What matters is hard work, hours of practice.

But when the musical experts were asked to compare two pieces of music, one of which featured a pianist who was said to work very hard at her craft and another from a musician who was just naturally gifted, the experts gravitated to the piece of music said to come from the performer who was naturally gifted. They thought her music was more beautiful. In truth, both the performances that the experts heard were by the same pianist. But the music seemed more impressive when it came from someone who was described as a natural talent rather than someone who was described as a striver.

Today we explore our love affair with brilliance thats in the blood, and we examine how these beliefs shape the organizations where we work and study and play the genius trap. This week on hidden brain support for hidden brain comes from Ulta Beauty. This AAPI Heritage Month, Ulta Beauty is celebrating the joy of belonging, belonging to a community composed of intricate connections, belonging to the heritage and birthright that is beauty. Ulta beauty spotlights the AAPI community, passing the mic to brand founders and creators to tell their stories centered on heritage, joy and beauty shop. AAPI owned and founded brands at Ulta Beauty stores and alta.com dot.

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Shankar Vedantam

Many episodes of this program explore the gaps between our perception and reality. What is true for individuals is also true for organizations. Schools, nonprofits, and companies want to encourage excellence and spur success. But what they think they are saying to encourage those things is often not what's heard at Indiana University Bloomington, psychologist Mary Murphy studies how one set of beliefs has come to exert a powerful hold on organizations around the world. She explores how this set of beliefs can work at cross purposes with what many organizations want to accomplish.

The mismatch has profound effects for institutions and the millions of people who live, work, and study in them. Mary Murphy, welcome to hidden brain. Thank you, Shankar. It is such a pleasure to be here with you. Mary, when you first arrived at Stanford University to go to graduate school, you picked up on something that many people at the school call the Stanford Duck syndrome.

Describe the syndrome for me, Mary yes. This is the idea that the most successful people at this elite, high pressure institution, those people who can look like ducks, who can kind of glide gracefully across the water, right? Any kind of hardship or struggle they might have simply rolls off your back. But if you look right beneath the surface, you see that people are kicking like crazy, right, to keep up. And I could see this among undergrads.

I would see that around them, like lounging in the student union, listening to music as if people didn't have a care in the world. No one seemed to have to try hard in order to do well in this environment. But when I talked to my undergrads in my lab, I noticed that students were really paying a high price to embody this cultural value of effortless genius, right? They were exhausted. They had a lot of anxiety and stress trying to keep up.

And I think that this syndrome, this Stanford Duck syndrome really came from this belief that effort and ability are negatively correlated, that if you have to try hard, that it means that maybe you don't have natural ability or skill to be there. So some years later, you found yourself at your first job at Indiana University, and you discovered that the school had a procedure to distribute merit raises to professors. It involved a certain letter that got dropped in your mailbox. What was it like to receive this letter? Yes.

A department merit review committee would review every faculty member's, what we call an APR. It's like an annual productivity report. And it has things like how many papers we wrote, how many students we advise, how many grants we get. And what they would do is that they would rank and rate each individual professor. And then, to my horror, I learned that each faculty member would then get a letter in their mailbox showing every person's rank from the highest to the lowest.

Shankar Vedantam

Oh, wow. And your personal position would be brightly highlighted in yellow. And I have to say that this day, the day that the letters would arrive in everybody's mailbox, was the day of the year that a lot of our faculty simply dreaded.

Mary soon noticed that it wasn't just the professors who were being rated in this manner. I was walking by a really large auditorium or large teaching auditorium, and I noticed several sheets of paper taped on the wall outside of the entrance to that auditorium. And when I went to look more closely, I saw that these papers contained the grades of all students that were enrolled in our introductory psychology class, and they went from highest to lowest. And what I noticed was that as the students were streaming by, different students took different strategies, right? Some did like a wide arc to avoid these papers on the wall.

Some people gathered around, running their fingers down the list, trying to look for their id, hoping to find it on the first or second page and not on the 6th or 7th page. And I just think that this shows how these regular routines and practices can really stoke interpersonal competition, make you feel as though, you know, your learning and your productivity is really going to depend on how you do relative to others. So, Mary, the same approach to performance that you saw when you first came to Indiana was also showing up in the corporate world. The idea of stack ranking, as it's called, was popularized at General Electric in the 1980s. Tell me the story of stack ranking and Jack Welch.

Stack ranking is a performance evaluation practice that's pretty common in many organizations. This practice is colloquially called rank and Yank, and it was made popular in the early eighties by Jack Welch, who was, at that point, CEO of GE. And at GE, what they did was they created three different tiers. Employees in the top 20%, those in the middle 70%, and those in the bottom 10% who are more likely to be let go.

Shankar Vedantam

In an article published in 2013, Jack Welch said, yes, I realize that some believe the bell curve aspect of differentiation is cruel. That always strikes me as odd. We grade children in school, often as young as nine or ten, and no one calls that cruel. But somehow adults can't take it. Explain that one to me.

Stack ranking has spread to many other firms since Jack Welch and GE practiced it 40 years ago. Mary says that includes the co working company WeWork. The company WeWork adopted some of this stack ranking and they would let go up to 20% of their workforce annually. And in WeWork, these were called, infamously, genocides because it would refer to the attorney Jennifer Barrett, who was in charge of all of these layoffs. Wow.

And what's important to know about stack ranking is that people say, well, it's okay for the 80% who's going to be left in the organization, but I have to say that being left inside of an organization is not going to be a walk in the park. Right? We know that it breeds competition within each organization and it creates a lot of confusion for employees. Right? Should we team, should we compete?

Which can breed a lot of cynicism and distrust. So it doesn't take a genius to notice that people respond to the incentives around them. If you tell people that the bottom 20% are going to be fired, the goal might be to get everyone to focus on excellence. But in practice, it gets everyone to focus on each other. So the people at the top of the rankings, they don't want to be displaced.

Shankar Vedantam

And the people who are lower in the rankings just want to make sure that there's someone else who does worse than them. Absolutely. There's this constant fear of a loss of status, right. Of falling below that line. And those in the top tier are going to be forced to defend their position.

Right. They're less likely to share resources to help their colleagues for fear that they're going to be overtaken in the rankings and they're going to dedicate more energy to watching each other, keeping an eye on their competition instead of focusing on how and where they can keep growing. You know, there's the old joke about the two people who see a tiger. The first one starts lacing up his shoes, and the second one says, you're not going to outrun a tiger. And the first person says, I'm not trying to outrun the tiger, I'm just trying to outrun you.

Shankar Vedantam

Now, stack ranking also has found its way into many schools, and not just colleges and universities, but even primary schools. The psychologist Carol Dweck has stories of stack ranking, or its equivalent in elementary school. She shared with me the story of growing up in her elementary school classroom, where back in the day in her class, they would seat students in order of their IQ score. So students who were the highest on the IQ score were always seated in front, and those who scored lowest, well, they were placed all the way in the back. Right.

And they would retake these exams, and then they'd get reshuffled based on how they performed on these exams. So there was always this threat of losing that status, of being the good student and the smart student in this environment. So, Mary, you say that there is an underlying set of beliefs, a mindset, in all of these examples that we've discussed, you call it a culture of genius. What does this term mean? In a culture of genius, as I call it?

The focus is really on star performers and the belief that these people are inherently more capable and superior due to innate intelligence, ability, skills, things that just come naturally. Effortless and perfect performance. Right. Is the goal in a culture of genius. And so we look for people and we look for individuals who are going to embody that culture of genius, who are the stars, and how do we get more of those individuals into our organization, onto our team, so that we can build even more this culture of genius?

Shankar Vedantam

And so when we have this culture of genius, whether that's at an individual level or at a collective level, what that basically says is some people know how to swing a baseball bat, some people know how to play chess, some people know how to do math. Those are the people who are going to be good at doing those things. Absolutely. The culture of genius wants genius, and they believe in genius very strongly. And so they're going to look for people who really seem to have these innate talents and gifts, and they're going to try to recruit and retain those individuals.

Those are going to be the individuals that are lifted up and that are promoted and that are going to be invested in. In a culture of genius.

Shankar Vedantam

When we come back, the psychological origins of the culture of genius and its effect on people and organizations. You're listening to hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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Shankar Vedantam

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Now this is hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Have you ever been in a school or organization where you felt that people wrote you off, where no one believed in you, and people communicated that you didn't belong? If this has happened to you, you know it doesn't feel good. But more than the problem of how it feels, something profound happens in our minds when we come to believe that there is a ceiling on what we can accomplish, what we can learn, and what we can do.

At Indiana University, Bloomington, Mary Murphy studies the effects of these mental ceilings on organizations and the people who live and work inside them. Mary, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck was your mentor, and she developed an idea known as growth mindset. Could you explain what a growth mindset is as well as its opposite, a fixed mindset? Yes. The growth mindset is oftentimes characterized as a belief that talent and ability and performance, all of these skills, they're potentials that we can grow with the right support, asking for help, trying new strategies.

And the opposite of the growth mindset is the fixed mindset. And this is the belief that talent, ability, skills, these are things that are fixed. They're like traits. You either have them or you don't. And so it's impossible to significantly grow, change, or develop those skills and abilities.

And so the point of that fixed mindset is to figure out what you're good at and then just do those things. I mean, in some ways, this seems to be partly about the age old debate between nature and nurture. Is ability merely something that's inside of us, or is it something that we can learn and cultivate? Growth mindset seems to emphasize the role of effort and hard work and perseverance in developing skills, whereas a fixed mindset might emphasize innate ability, innate talent. Yes, that's the big difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

Shankar Vedantam

How does the culture of genius fit with these two ideas? In some ways, it seems to be connected to what you just described as the fixed mindset. For about 25 to 30 years, this idea of the fixed mindset and the growth mindset were traditionally studied as individual differences. What's your belief, Shankar? And what's my belief?

And how does that influence our motivation, our engagement, the way we respond to challenges, whether we hide mistakes or whether we relish mistakes and learn from them. And the insight I had, oh, maybe about 1213 years ago now, was that the fixed and growth mindset isn't just inside our minds. It's not just a belief that you or I have that it actually can be a feature of an environment. It can be a feature of teams, of groups, of divisions, of organizations. It can be a feature of families.

Anytime two or more people are together, we can have a mindset culture that really communicates, whether we believe as a group that intelligence, skills, and ability are fixed, you either have them or you don't, or it's possible to grow, develop, and learn new skills, intelligence, ability, and other aspects of ourselves. Now, a focus on brilliance can seem like a good thing. You know, what can be wrong with being brilliant? But the philosopher Sarah Jane Leslie and the psychologist Andre Simpion once analyzed how much people in different fields believe that success is about innate ability. Can you tell me what they found?

Mary this is one of my favorite studies. What this group of researchers did was survey more than 1800 faculty, postdocs, and graduate students across 30 different disciplines at universities across the United States. And then at the same time, they gathered data from the National Science foundation about the percentage of women and students of color who went to pursue phds in each one of these disciplines. And what they found in that survey of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students was that there seemed to be some consensus around different fields. Some fields really believed that what it took to be successful in that field required brilliance and genius for success, whereas other fields were thought to require more empathy or hard work or persistence through challenges.

And what they found was that math, physics, economics, some parts of music, music composition in particular, were thought to require brilliance, and others that were thought to have other aspects that were important for success. Things like empathy and hard work were other of the social sciences, psychology, many of the humanities based work, although philosophy was one of those that was really thought to require brilliance and genius for success. And what they found was that. But when those fields were thought to require more genius and brilliance for success, the less number of women and people of color were included in those disciplines as pursuing phds. So in your own work with these two researchers, you've explored why messages about brilliance might undermine women's interest in certain fields.

Shankar Vedantam

Why does this happen? Mary yeah. One of the biggest problems that we see with cultures of genius is that we have a specific prototype of who is a genius. We have a prototype of who's going to be successful in these different environments. And what we've seen across decades of our work now is that while these prototypes can vary by industry, we find that most people, when you put in the word genius into Google images, the images that come to mind, there are people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, right?

This is a pretty homogenous group. And what we see is that when we're in these cultures of genius, we look for people who are going to match our genius prototypes, and these are going to be the people who we seek out, who we hire and who we promote in different organizations. And it's really why cultures of genius often overlook and miss out on identifying and recruiting people from diverse groups. And it's why, in our own work, we started to see that any time these messages really suggest that these areas require brilliance, it undermines women's interest, because they expect to be stereotyped more in these environments as not being innately gifted, having those genius qualities, right? They don't really match this prototype, and they know it, and they think they're going to be judged for it in these environments.

Shankar Vedantam

You know, I think some people might say, you know, isn't it true that some people in some fields, like mathematics, for example, are really brilliant, that in some ways, it comes really easy to them that they are able to pick up on things very quickly? I think that this is a bit of a myth, more than what we want to acknowledge in a society that really values independence and natural talent and ability, right? I think there's many, many cases where we have told ourselves the story of genius, of an individual, right? The apple just falls on the head, and suddenly you have this brilliant idea, and this equation comes to mind, right? We know these stories, but the truth is, like in Thomas Edison's case, for example, right?

We like to hold him up as this genius, but of course, he had teams and teams and teams of people working for him and with him to test many, many iterations of his technologies, right? And there were many more failures than there were successes. And so we really don't give enough space for the way that talent and ability is actually created and how we become the people we do over time.

Shankar Vedantam

Is there any space in your vision and philosophy, Mary, for innate differences between people? Absolutely. I do think that there's probably some innate characteristics, some personality traits, some inclination towards different kinds of interests that can come when people are born, and certainly when people are socialized by their parents, by their teachers, and by important people in their environment. But the truth is that we're all going to develop, right? Nobody is born knowing how to read out of the womb.

No one is born right. Understanding how to solve important math equations. I do think that people have different kinds of starting places and interests. The question is, I think, whether you want people to have a growth mindset about that inclination, or do you want them to have a fixed mindset and make it real.

Shankar Vedantam

I think what I'm hearing you say is that it's not that there are no innate differences between people, but that the more we focus on innate differences that we cannot control, the less we'll be able to focus on the things that we can control. So to pick a completely different domain, I'm a keen amateur swimmer. You're not saying that if I really worked at it, I could outswim Katie Ledecky. But you are saying that to the extent I believe that Katie Ledecky's ability is purely innate and not the result of tons of hard work, it makes it less likely that I'll put in the work to become the best swimmer I can be. That's absolutely correct.

So well said. In your surveys of college students, Mary, you find that they often get messages, usually implicitly, but often explicitly, that some people have what it takes and others do not. What are some of the things that students have reported to you? So some of the things, the infamous things that people will say, say at the start of a difficult math class or a very large chemistry 400 person auditorium class, they might say, look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the semester, right.

I couldn't think of anything more zero sum than that. My professor said 30% of you will fail, 20% of you are going to get DS at the end of the term. It happens every year, and it will happen this year to you. Right. A neuroscience professor who says if students aren't confident about your ability, you should consider transferring to another instructor.

Right. A chemistry professor who says if you don't get it early and quickly, you just don't belong in this class. So you found that students who perceive that their professor endorses a fixed mindset experience a number of things, including feelings of being imposter. So even if they do well, they tell themselves, you know, it can't be true because I'm not a genius. That's right.

We do find over and over that students who see that their instructor endorses this belief that only some students have it and some students don't. Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the term. If they find themselves struggling, if they find themselves making mistakes, if they find themselves not getting things effortlessly and perfectly right immediately in the class, they can often feel as though they're an imposter in that classroom, and that can really set them back in terms of seeking help, asking questions, finding a study group to work with, and all of the things that we know actually contribute to student success.

Shankar Vedantam

One of your studies examined differences between men and women to signals that their company had a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Can you tell me what you found? This was a set of studies that I conducted with my former PhD student, Kathy Emerson. What we were really looking at was the question of why women remain underrepresented in leadership positions around corporate America. Right.

And our theory was that women are going to be really vigilant to cues in the environment that signal to them whether they're valued and respected, or whether or not they're going to be devalued and disrespected. What we did in this study was men and women looked at company mission statements and websites that contained either fixed or growth mindset messaging. And what we found across these three different experiments and studies was that women, more than men, trusted that fixed minded company less than the growth minded company. And then we also found that the mistrust was actually driven by women's expectations that they were going to be negatively stereotyped by that company's management. They know what the prototype for brilliance and genius is in business, and they thought that the management and the leaders in that organization would really compare them to that prototype and find them lacking.

And then finally, in our last study, we found that mistrust of these companies actually led women to disengage more, following negative feedback from that company. Yeah. Another effect of a culture of genius is that it can cause people to decline new opportunities. Why might this be? Mary?

Yes, we have found this over and over in our work in terms of thinking about engagement and interest. We did these studies across many different institutions and many different contexts. And what we found was that when students perceive their instructor to endorse more fixed mindset beliefs, when they feel as though they're in this culture of genius, we find that these cultures of genius lower students interest, not just in this particular chemistry class or that particular biology class, but it actually also lowers interest in the professor's discipline more generally. So now I'm less likely after finishing this class to take Chem 201 or Biology 201, and I start to close doors to different kinds of opportunities and paths myself, because I simply notice I'm feeling this way in the classroom.

Shankar Vedantam

Now. Cultures of genius can also lead to high stakes disasters, because, of course, when you anoint someone a genius, you stop being able to question if they could be wrong. Many listeners on this show are going to be familiar with the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her blood testing company, Theranos. But can you briefly describe for others what happened and how it might be connected to this culture of genius? I do think that Elizabeth Holmes serves as a model for, really, the extremes of this fixed minded behavior.

Holmes set out to really create this device, which maybe not incidentally, was dubbed the Edison. Right. Another famous genius that would perform hundreds of tests on a very tiny sample of blood. And people were really trying to raise the bell and suggest that maybe this isn't possible or maybe we need a different strategy or this simply isn't working. Right.

But what she did was she would ignore the naysayers, and she found individuals who really believed in her, compared her to geniuses that said that she was like Beethoven. And soon she became this darling of the tech world, and she found herself in really high stakes situations where she had to make good on hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. The problem was that, of course, the device didn't work. And so instead of coming clean and asking her prestigious board members or her mentors for help, she lied to investors and employees. Right.

She lied to the board and to federal regulators. And also she pushed workers to falsify test results. And workers sent blood samples to regular blood testing labs for analysis, and then pretended the samples had been analyzed by the Theranos machines.

Shankar Vedantam

The solution to the problem seems easy. Just tell students and employees to have a growth mindset. When we come back, why that approach does not always work. And Mary's insight into how to bring about real change. You're listening to hidden brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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Shankar Vedantam

This is hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Mary Murphy is the author of cultures of growth, how the new science of mindset can transform individuals, teams, and organizations. She's interested in what schools, companies, and organizations of all kinds do and don't do to get the best out of students, employees, and citizens. So, Mary, researchers have been trying for a while to change some of the negative outcomes we see with fixed mindsets.

Many of these interventions focused on students or employees and tried to get them to see their own potential as malleable rather than fixed. I'm wondering if you can give me a flavor of the kinds of interventions that have been explored, as well as what can be fairly described as the mixed bag of results that came from these interventions. So, the kinds of interventions that had most often been studied in the last ten to 15 years present students or employees with different kinds of science based materials that show individuals the brain's ability to grow new connections, to create new pathways, to actually generate new cells. When people are really in the process of learning, when people are making mistakes and communicating really how our intelligence, talents, and abilities can shift over time by trying hard, by trying new strategies, when we get stuck, by seeking help and the support of others, that it really seeks to then instill that growth mindset. And I would say that these direct to student or direct to employee interventions at first had a lot of success.

But as they have grown and as different groups have tried to replicate them, they take different kinds of strategies in that replication, they might try different kinds of outcomes. And we are seeing variability in these results over time, where some studies are replicating these effects, and in others there's finding challenges in finding effects or as large of effects as some of the original studies had shown. Hmm. I want to talk a moment, Mary, about how some people have taken this mixed bag of results and drawn the conclusion that growth mindsets as a whole are not real or that they don't exist, or that interventions are completely ineffective. Is that an accurate characterization of the body of research?

I don't think that it is. My research and the research of others on this idea of the cultures of growth actually can explain why we see some of this variability in the results. The truth is that our capacity to use our talent and our ability is really going to depend on the people in the context around us, right? This is a social endeavor, learning and development. And, you know, students and employees can have the strongest growth mindset at the personal level, but if they find themselves in these fixed minded cultures of genius, they're not going to be able to use or benefit from that growth mindset.

Shankar Vedantam

So what I'm hearing you say, Mary, is that when it comes to changing a fixed mindset, it's not enough just to focus on individuals. You actually have to think about the culture around that individual. And there have been a number of studies now that have looked at this question. In 2021, you and a number of other researchers ran a study that explored why growth mindset intervention sometimes work and sometimes don't work. You were looking at teachers and students.

Can you describe what the study did and what you found? This study included a nationally representative sample of more than 12,000 students. And what we found in the study was that students who participated in an online program really designed to instill that growth mindset we talked about earlier. We did find overall that they earned higher grades and they were more willing to take on challenges by enrolling in more advanced classes over time. However, we also looked at where this program did not work and where it didn't help students was when teachers were in their fixed mindsets and when they were engaged in teaching practices consistent with those fixed mindset beliefs, or in other words, where they were creating these cultures of genius.

And this is why cultures of growth are really crucial for helping us get into, stay in, and then maximize the benefits of our growth mindset. If we have a strong culture of genius around us, there's going to be very few opportunities for us to actually engage in the process of learning, to make mistakes, to raise our hand and say, I don't understand. Can you tell me again, we're not going to feel comfortable really engaging in the behaviors that increase learning and development and growth. So in some ways, what we're doing is we're really moving from perhaps the fixed mindset, growth mindset dichotomy to really the idea of a culture of genius and a culture of growth as sort of saying, this is not just about the individual, it's about the world in which the individual finds herself situated. You once ran a study at a large multinational bank, and you discovered that the mindsets of managers played a very powerful role in how they behaved toward employees and how employees then behave themselves.

Shankar Vedantam

Tell me about the study. We looked at measuring people's individual mindsets. And then we looked at the mindset culture that was being communicated in regular practices and policies at the organization and in their routine interactions that managers would have consistently with employees. And what we found was that above and beyond the effects of anyone's personal mindsets on the ground in terms of predicting their performance outcomes and predicting their experiences in the organization, how motivated they were, how satisfied, how much they trusted the organization, how committed to it they were. We found that it was actually that mindset culture as communicated in the way culture is through these policies, practices, norms, and leadership messages, that the way in which managers gave feedback to individuals, the way that they praised individuals, right?

Were they just signaling out individuals who were already seen as high performers and only giving those individuals praise? Were they giving stretch assignments to individuals who were only considered geniuses? Or did they really focus on developing everybody on their team over time, we saw that these kinds of manager policies and practices and the way that they ran their team meetings to really sort of emphasize learning and growth, right? Reflect on our mistakes and then brainstorm together how we're going to address them versus only talk about the good things that are happening on our team and hide mistakes. That culture is the thing that predicted people's experiences in that organization, above and beyond individuals personal mindsets.

Shankar Vedantam

So, of course, organizations and individuals are not either entirely growth mindset, entirely fixed mindset, entirely culture of genius, entirely culture of growth. They reside on a spectrum. But I think what I'm hearing you say is that there are a number of things that leaders, managers, and teachers can do to deemphasize the importance of innate brilliance. And the first might be to simply stop talking about brilliant geniuses. Do you think that might be a first step?

Mary? I think that is important. I also think that it can be important to tell stories, real stories, of how brilliance and genius has developed over time. I don't know if you're familiar. I bet that you are with Anders Erikson's work, where he sort of followed people in their trajectories of the most talented and brilliant and gifted musician and basketball player and artist across all these different disciplines.

You know, when you ask and you look at these people's life histories, what you see over and over is that everyone close to them when they were little, oftentimes wouldn't have predicted the trajectory that they ultimately found themselves in, right? That these kids were not distinguishable from their peers most of the time, that it actually took development and their parents, teachers and coaches and others really investing time, energy, and resources to help those individuals become who they became. And I think that that kind of story around genius, right, is one that actually can give people the motivation and some of the strategies that actually might be useful to achieve their potential. You told us earlier in this chat, Mary, how your current institution, Indiana University, used to use this ranking system to award merit raises. Are those lists still in practice today?

They are not that kind of stack ranking practice that went out the window many years ago. We had a brilliant chair in our department who decided that instead of that, we're going to model the extent to which faculty collaborate with each other on papers and grants and projects. And so he used this sophisticated modeling program to actually produce a diagram that would show all the interpersonal connections within our department. And he printed that out. And our department's collaboration network diagram has now been posted in our front office.

So right by the faculty mailboxes every day. When you walk in and you pick up your mail, you're reminded about that value as an organization, as a department. I think this goes to how important it is to really challenge the dominant and competitive culture of genius that exists in so many of our fields and certainly in academia. Hmm. We talked earlier in this conversation about your survey of college students perceptions of their instructors mindsets.

Shankar Vedantam

There were a lot of fixed mindset comments, but the survey also provided examples of messages that teachers could send that students perceived as growth oriented. Can you read out some of them as well? Mary sure. Some of the examples that we found in this data was students saying things like, I had one math professor who described a student from a previous semester who said he was not naturally good at math, but the student regularly attended office hours, asked questions, and ended up getting the highest grade in the class. He, the teacher, told the story to encourage us, the students, to ask questions and attend office hours.

Another example that we saw in the data, the students in my class had no idea how to write a scientific paper, but the professor had a 72 hours policy where all students could turn in their papers 72 hours before it was due and the TA would read it and give them comments. This helped teach us what you did right, what you did wrong, and how to fix it before it was submitted for a grade. Another example is my math teacher says you're all smart enough to get an a. However, you're gonna find a few topics difficult across the term. If this is the case, please come to my office hours so we can discuss the topic more in depth.

I'm here to help you. And then finally, my professor always gave the class advice about how to improve and do better in the course, especially after the class got their grades back from Tess. He always told us how we could improve. And I understand that in corporate settings, there are company wide practices that can also be designed to convey a growth mindset. I understand that Microsoft was once notorious for having a fixed mindset culture.

Shankar Vedantam

It used to practice the stack ranking procedure that we talked about earlier. What was it like to work at Microsoft then and now? In 2012, a reporter did an in depth investigation into Microsoft and interviewed a bunch of current and former employees. And every single one of them who were interviewed cited stacked ranking as the most destructive process inside Microsoft. They said it was driving untold numbers of people out.

And so the practice at Microsoft required managers to really grade employees against each other and rank them on a scale of one to five. And so if you had a team of ten people, even if that team was the highest performing and most innovative team within the organization, you still knew that no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review. Seven people are going to get the mediocre review, and one was going to get a terrible review. And of course, as we've talked about, this led employees to really focus on competing with each other. So much so that when Satya Nadella became CEO, he pointed to this infamous cartoon, and it has an organizational chart showing guns pointing in every direction.

And he said, this is the Microsoft that he inherited. So, you know, in this system, even if you achieved your goals, even if you achieved everything that was on your plate and everything that was expected of you, it didn't guarantee safety, because it was always possible that a colleague. Right. Could achieve better than you. And so what the experience was like in that company was that employees were really focused on suppressing their colleagues, gaming the system, and withholding information.

Right. In 2013, Microsoft threw out their stack ranking system and instead, Satya Nadella's wife actually shared with him Carol Dweck's book on Mindsat. And he was so inspired by this, he decided, I'm really going take this mindset idea and see if we can shift the mindset culture of this organization through a lot of these practices and policies that we've been talking about today. So stack ranking goes out the door now. There's a new evaluation system that has just been unrolled, looking at people's potential, looking at the opportunities a manager has been giving to individuals and people's responses to those opportunities for growth and development.

One of the things that they did was also revamp the talent identification system within Microsoft. And by doing that, it involves multiple days of the CEO and his executive team sort of sitting down with all the leaders of the different arms of the organization and talking about individuals who are seen as having growth potential, who really seem to be able to be benefited by stretch assignments and by moving to different teams, taking on new roles within the organization, or actually getting different resources in order to go deeper with the things that they seem to be developing. And by doing this, they really get a sense of how the organization can actually support a larger set of individuals than would other boys be recognized in a traditional culture of genius.

Shankar Vedantam

I'm wondering, Mary, if one concern about encouraging a culture of growth is that people will say, you know, you're being too soft or lenient, and that these things will not produce success. Do you hear that worry among the institutions you work with? That moving from, you know, this fixed mindset to a culture of growth mindset will create a culture of leniency. I do hear that we are, quote, unquote, lowering standards when we are creating these cultures of growth. But actually, our research shows just the opposite, that actually high performers perform better in cultures of growth because these environments are more rigorous and more supportive.

They expect more from individuals, right? And they expect more from a broader swath of individuals than a culture of genius does. We see, if you imagine this in a classroom context, right. What we see in the data from very large introductory stem classes is that when students perceive their instructor to have more of a growth mindset, it's not that it's rainbows and sunshine, right? And unicorns all day long.

Students actually report a good amount of frustration and a good amount of annoyance sometimes in those classes because the instructor holds everyone to such high standards of continuous growth and development. So even if you're already doing well, even those individuals should show some growth and development in their trajectory. And it can be really rigorous and difficult in these environments. And so this is one of those myths about mindset culture, that cultures of growth are soft and always affirming and less rigorous, dumbing down the standards. And actually, we see just the opposite in the data.

Shankar Vedantam

So all of us can be culture creators in our own lives and in the lives of our families and workplaces. And I understand that you and your husband, Victor, have thought about these questions in the context of your marriage. Can you describe one domain for me where you had maybe a fixed mindset about Victor, and he had a fixed mindset about you and how you've tried to move from that to more of a growth mindset. You know, anytime you have two or more people that interact with each other, you're going to have a mindset culture, right, about how you think about each one of your skills and abilities. So my husband, Victor, and I have really tried to notice where we're putting ourselves and each other into these kinds of fixed minded boxes and to do some small experiments that kind of challenge these assumptions and showing ourselves, reminding ourselves that we're fully capable of growth and change.

So one of my fixed mindset beliefs about Victor is that he's too modest, he's self effacing, but he's also, frankly, in his own right, a badass. The work he does in his job as a law professor is really to transform courts and judicial systems nationally. So what I've done is to really work, to notice and highlight for myself and for him different places where I see him putting forward his findings and his contributions in a way that makes him feel comfortable, but also in a way that he shows what he has discovered. For his part, Victor's fixed mindset belief about me is somewhat accurate, that I enjoy systems and really being in control. And so he's made a lot of efforts to say something to me when he notices that I'm sitting back and encouraging other people to call the shots.

I'll also share that. This summer, Victor noticed that I'd really developed an interest in the cello. So he encouraged me to find a teacher here in Bloomington, and he's done a million little things to really take things off my plate so I can go to lessons and practice at home. And so I think that in personal relationships, when we can support the aspirational selves we really like to be and who we'd like to become, can inspire in us a courage to kind of seek out more of those cultures of growth and create those cultures of growth for ourselves. How good are you at the cello right now?

Well, I will tell you that I just graduated from being able to pick Mary had a little lamb and twinkle, twinkle to bowing. And it is a revolution. It is so fantastic. I'm really looking forward to where it's going to take me. Will you share some of your playing with us, Mary?

Absolutely not.

I do have the cello in the other room, but still. No, it's too embarrassing.

Shankar Vedantam

I was gonna let it go, but then I remembered Mary had spent the last 45 minutes telling me that we all needed to have a growth mindset. The essence of having a growth mindset, to have the courage to be a beginner. I reminded her of her own lesson? Oh, gosh, Shankar, have we created a culture of growth that's not going to judge this performance? Absolutely.

Okay. We'll see how this goes.

Shankar Vedantam

Mary Murphy is the author of Cultures of Growth, how the new Science of Mindset can transform individuals, teams and organizations. Mary, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar. It's been such a pleasure.

Okay, that was that. I hope you enjoyed it. It was fun for me. Bye.

Shankar Vedantam

Hidden brain is produced by hidden brain media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy, Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brains executive editor. Next week, we continue our innovation 2.0 series with a look at a secret superpower that we all have.

It might make you rethink your interactions with the people around you. You have these two people interacting with one another, and they're both so focused on their own personal anxieties and insecurities and concerns with embarrassment that they don't realize that the other person is feeling that way, too.

If you're enjoying our innovation 2.0 series, please share it with two or three people who might find it useful. Maybe that's a co worker or your spouse or a friend in your book club. No matter who you choose, your word of mouth recommendations make a huge difference in helping us connect new listeners to the ideas we explore on hidden brain. We really appreciate your support. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

See you soon.

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Shankar Vedantam

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Innovation 2.0: Multiplying the Growth Mindset

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1: The Genius Trap

2: Cultures of Genius

3: Implementing Growth Mindsets

4: Personal Insights on Growth

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