Growth mindset is based on the idea that our personal qualities (intelligence, empathy, creativity) can be cultivated. But cultivation takes time and effort. For better or worse, we have spent our entire lives becoming the people we are today. Undoing or refocusing a lifetime of behaviors is not as easy as flipping a switch, but time and again I encounter people who think that’s the case.
Early in my career, I was asked to talk with Darnell, an executive vice president for a large bank, about one of his direct reports. The potential coachee, Jack, was a rainmaking senior vice president with a rather large ego and a reputation of demeaning female colleagues.
Darnell told me about the time Jack was walking through the office and passed a female co-worker. He stopped and commented, “I see you got your hair cut.” She smiled and thanked him for noticing. As Jack turned his back and walked away, he replied “Well, it was about time.”
Darnell told me he had spoken with Jack about the incident but the conversation hadn’t gone very well. Jack countered with a combination of denial and defensiveness. Darnell asked me to describe what the coaching process would look like with Jack.
I described Balance Point Group’s five-phase coaching process. I briefly touched on adult learning as a way to introduce how long the process usually took, which I said was six months. All the while, Darnell sat expressionless and when I finished, he looked at me and said, “Oh. I thought you could just take him out to lunch.”
Not surprisingly, I did not get this coaching engagement. I reflected on what went wrong (taking comfort in the fact that in doing so I was nurturing my own a growth mindset) and arrived at a couple conclusions.
First, I clearly had not done a good job educating Darnell about the intensity of the coaching process in advance of our meeting. If I had, he would have understood that there was not going to be a quick and easy fix for Jack’s behavior.
Second, Jack’s ego pointed strongly to a fixed mindset. Can people with a fixed mindset be coached? Of course. But they must want to make the effort and Jack did not fall into that category.
Carol Dweck likens fixed mindset and growth mindset to two separate worlds. As she says, “In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.”
I end this blog encouraging you to answer a two-part question for yourself. How do you view effort, and are you willing to put forth the effort needed to cultivate a growth mindset?
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