Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations

💡 “The culture surrounding us is one of the biggest influences on our beliefs, motivations, and behavior. This mindset culture exists at the group and organizational level.”

The environment you’re in can have its own mindset culture. It can be a culture that believes in and values the development of all people’s ability. Or it can be a culture that believes in and values fixed ability, a culture that expects some people to have more of it and some people to (permanently) have less of it.

Mindset refers to our beliefs about the malleability of intelligence: whether it’s largely fixed, or whether it can be developed. Fixed mindset beliefs assert that people either “have it” or they don’t, while growth mindset beliefs suggest that intelligence is something you can develop and expand.

Fixed mindset organizations—or Cultures of Genius—believe and communicate the idea that people’s abilities are unchangeable, or fixed. People either “have it” or they don’t, and there’s little anyone can do to change this. “Star search” and “stack ranking” evaluation practices are a common outgrowth of fixed-minded Cultures of Genius.

organizations often end up putting an inordinate amount of focus on what employees bring to the table and not enough on how that table is constructed.

My research shows that an organization’s mindset culture consistently influences five common ways people work well together (or not): collaboration; innovation; risk-taking and resilience; integrity and ethical behavior; and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

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