Collective Mindsets : How Culture Shapes Performance
Are you part of a system in which a fixed mindset culture prevails? We often hear about the need to embrace the growth mindset. However, in an organisation, who is ultimately responsible for adopting the growth mindset: individual employees, their managers, or the company as a whole?
Dr Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, collaborated with the consulting firm Senn Delaney to access the data of multiple Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies to study if organisations indeed had collective mindsets and if yes, how these mindsets influenced employees’ engagement, collaboration, and innovation potential.
Collective Mindsets in Action
The study shows that companies that play the “top talent” game make it harder for people to practice growth-mindset behaviours. Employees feel that in fixed-mindset cultures, only “star workers” are valued: they are less engaged, more concerned about making mistakes and reluctant to engage in innovation and intellectual risk-taking.
The study also reveals that growth-mindset organisations give rise to very different behaviours:
Collaboration and information sharing
Seeking improvement feedback
Admitting errors and collective learning
Focusing on achieving excellence instead of reducing failures
Cultural Norms Define Our Behaviours
Dr Dweck’s study establishes the “organisational mindset” as a set of core beliefs fundamental to the company’s overall growth and success factors. These core beliefs shape the cultural norms – influencing how people feel and act, and how engaged they are within the organisation. Company culture directly results in employee levels of trust and commitment and affects their collective performance in such key dimensions as (1) collaboration, (2) innovation and (3) ethical behaviour.
The Agents of the Growth-Mindset
Dweck’s research suggests that people managers need to become aware that the company culture impacts organisational performance. Performance-focused companies turn on our personal fixed-mindset triggers: for example, when faced with criticism or compared poorly to others, we may become defensive and insecure, and this will inhibit our drive to grow.
Shifting from a performance mindset to a growth mindset involves understanding top performance as a result of continuous growth policies for both, individuals and the organisation. This means moving away from the emphasis on hiring and promoting the top 5 to 10% "star" employees, towards focusing on maximising the potential of every team member, including the remaining 90 to 95%.
Building a truly innovative organisation relies on creating an inclusive "everyone" culture—a space where both individuals and the company are expected to learn, grow, and develop at the highest pace.