How do you treat high achievers? How do you react when others disappoint you?
My guess is that no matter how much you embrace the idea of growth mindset, you often default to a fixed mindset. At least, this is the case for Carol, Marty, and me. All of us know how we’d like to react when, say, someone we’re supervising brings us work that falls short of expectations. We’d like our knee-jerk reflex to be calm and encouraging. We aspire to have an Okay, what is there to learn here? attitude toward mistakes.
But we’re human. So, more often than we’d like, we get frustrated. We show our impatience. In judging the person’s abilities, we allow a flicker of doubt to distract us momentarily from the more important task of what they could do next to improve.
The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.
So what should we do? A good first step is to watch for mismatches between our words and actions. When we slip up—and we will—we can simply acknowledge that it’s hard to move away from a fixed, pessimistic view of the world. One of Carol’s colleagues, Susan Mackie, works with CEOs and encourages them to give names to their inner fixed-mindset characters. Then they can say things like “Oops. I guess I brought Controlling Claire to the meeting today. Let me try that again.” Or: “Overwhelmed Olivia is struggling to deal with all the competing demands, can you help me think this through?”
Ultimately, adopting a gritty perspective involves recognizing that people get better at things—they grow. Just as we want to cultivate the ability to get up off the floor when life has knocked us down, we want to give those around us the benefit of the doubt when something they’ve tried isn’t a raging success. There’s always tomorrow.
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I recently called Bill McNabb for his perspective. Since 2008, Bill has served as the CEO of Vanguard, the world’s largest provider of mutual funds.
“We’ve actually tracked senior leaders here at Vanguard and asked why some did better in the long run than others. I used to use the word ‘complacency’ to describe the ones who didn’t work out, but the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that’s not quite it. It’s really a belief that ‘I can’t learn anymore. I am what I am. This is how I do things.’?”
And what about executives who ultimately excelled?
“The people who have continued to be successful here have stayed on a growth trajectory. They just keep surprising you with how much they’re growing. We’ve had people who, if you looked at their résumé coming in, you’d say, ‘Wow, how did that person end up so successful?’ And we’ve had other people come in with incredible credentials, and you’re wondering, ‘Why did they not go further?’?”
When Bill discovered the research on growth mindset and grit, it confirmed his intuitions—not just as a corporate leader but as a father, former high school Latin teacher, rowing coach, and athlete. “I really do think people develop theories about themselves and the world, and it determines what they do.”
When we got to the question of where, exactly, any of us begin formulating these theories, Bill said, “Believe it or not, I actually started out with more of a fixed mindset.” He chalks up that mindset, partly, to his parents enrolling him, while he was still in elementary school, in a research study at a nearby university. He remembers taking a whole battery of intelligence tests and, at the end, being told, “You did really well, and you’re going to do really well in school.”
For a while, an authoritative diagnosis of talent, in combination with early success, boosted his confidence: “I took great pride in finishing tests faster than anyone else. I didn’t always get one hundred percent, but I usually came close, and I took great pleasure in not working that hard to achieve what I did.”
Bill attributes his switch to a growth mindset to joining the crew team in college. “I’d never rowed before, but I found I liked being on the water. I liked being outside. I liked the exercise. I sort of fell in love with the sport.”
Rowing was the first thing Bill wanted to do well that didn’t come easily: “I was not a natural,” he told me. “I had a lot of failures early on. But I kept going, and then eventually, I started getting better. Suddenly, it began to make sense: ‘Put your head down and go hard. Hard work really, really matters.’?” By the end of his freshman season, Bill was in the junior varsity boat. That didn’t sound so bad to me, but Bill explained that, statistically, this placement suggested there was no chance of ever making varsity. That summer, he stayed on campus and rowed all summer.
All that practice paid off. Bill was promoted to the “stroke seat” of the junior varsity boat, making him the one who sets the pace for the other seven rowers. During the season, one of the varsity rowers was injured, and Bill had the opportunity to show what he could do. By his account, and also the team captain’s, he did terrifically well. Still, when the injured rower recovered, the coach demoted Bill again.
“That coach had a fixed mindset—he just couldn’t believe that I’d improved as much as I did.”
There were more ups and downs, but Bill’s growth mindset kept getting affirmed. “Because I’d come so damn close to quitting and yet hung in there, and because things eventually did work out, I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them. You need to step back, analyze them, and learn from them. But you also need to stay optimistic.”
How did that lesson help Bill later in life? “There have been times in my career where I felt discouraged. I’d watch someone else get promoted before me. I’d want things to go a certain way, and they’d go the opposite. At those points, I’d say to myself, ‘Just keep working hard and learning, and it will all work out.’?”
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“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” Nietzsche once said. Kanye West and Kelly Clarkson echo the same sentiment, and there’s a reason we keep repeating it. Many of us can remember a time when, like Bill McNabb, we were confronted with challenge and yet emerged on the other side more confident than when we began.
Consider, for example, the Outward Bound program, which sends adolescents or adults into the wilderness with experienced leaders, usually for a few weeks. From its inception a half century ago, the premise of Outward Bound—so named for the moment a ship leaves harbor for the open seas—has been that challenging outdoor situations develop “tenacity in pursuit” and “undefeatable spirit.” In fact, across dozens of studies, the program has been shown to increase independence, confidence, assertiveness, and the belief that what happens in life is largely under your control. What’s more, these benefits tend to increase, rather than diminish, in the six months following participation in the program.
All the same, it’s undeniable that what doesn’t kill us sometimes makes us weaker. Consider the dogs who were shocked repeatedly with no control. A third of the dogs were resilient to this adversity, but there was no evidence that any of the dogs in the uncontrollable stress condition benefited from the experience in any way. On the contrary, most were much more vulnerable to suffering in the immediate aftermath.