Mary Murphy: Cultures of Growth

Carol Dweck:
Mary Murphy was a graduate student at Stanford at the time. She made an appointment to talk with me. I was really excited, what was she going to say? She came in and she was very respectful, but also, I could tell she had kind of a renegade idea.
So she said to me, "I like your work. It's important. I respect your work, but you have treated mindset just as something that's in the mind of the individual. Can't a whole culture or context or classroom or organization have a mindset too? A mindset that is embedded in the beliefs and practices and policies of the organization. And can't that be really powerful?"
And boy, have her words come true as she has studied and we've followed in her footsteps, studying the cultures, the context, the setting. I do this little dance when I'm excited and I said to her, "Let's do it. Let's do that initial research and see where it goes." And she has taken it to amazing places.
Guy Kawasaki:
The voice you've just heard is Carol Dweck. Carol is the Stanford professor who is the mother of the growth mindset. She's talking about Mary Murphy. Mary is the guest on today's episode of the Remarkable People Podcast.
Mary is a professor at Indiana University and the founding director of the Institute on Diversity at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She's also the author of the book Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations.
If you are a fan of Carol Dweck's work and Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, trust me when I tell you, you'll love Mary Murphy's book too. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Mary Murphy. What is a growth culture and what is a genius culture? Explain those two concepts.
Mary Murphy:
Absolutely. So a fixed mindset culture, what I have been calling in my work a culture of genius, is really going to be focused on star performers. It has this belief at the core of it that there are some people who have it and some people who don't.
There are some people who are inherently more capable, they have superior intelligence, superior talent, superior ability, and the culture of genius looks for those people, gives them power, and then they create the environment. And everything kind of revolves around those genius individuals.
So it has this fixed mindset idea. You either have it or you don't. I'm a math person or I'm not, I'm a creative person or I'm not. And that's the belief at the core of the team or the organization or the family that has one of these cultures of genius embedded in it.
And then the growth mindset culture, what I call a culture of growth, has as its core belief, the growth mindset belief, which is that given the right support, everyone can develop and contribute, that our intelligence, talent, and ability is a potential, and that we can grow that over time.
And in these cultures of growth, supports are given to people in order to be able to grow and achieve their potential. And the reality is that most contexts, most cultures aren't going to be just one or the other. Mindset culture exists on a continuum, and most mindset cultures are a mixture of the two.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, this is a very subtle but important point because prior to your work, I think most people who understood the growth mindset thought that it's all in the person's head, it's Guy believes he's a growth kind of person or Guy believes he's fixed mindset kind of person.
And now, if I interpret you right, you are introducing another variable that it's not just what's in your head, it's what environment you exist in. Did I get that right?
Mary Murphy:
100 percent. You got that right. I think that there are several mindset misconceptions that we've had. As mindset, Carol's ideas have been transformative, and how they have changed education, they've changed workplace environments. And as they have been interpreted and applied in these contexts, I think they've been largely misunderstood.
And so we start with this mindset reset. And just to your point, exactly what you said, there are three major mindset misconceptions. One is, and you're going to see the irony of this in a minute, is that there are just two mindsets.
The fixed and the growth mindset, and you have one or the other, and there's not much. There are some things you can do to move yourself towards your growth mindset, but it's this false dichotomy idea. It's either one or the other. It's a very fixed way, ironically, to think about the fixed and the growth mindset.
And so to correct that, we go back to the very beginning of the way mindset was even measured and used in the literature years and years ago, forty years ago. And that's that mindset is on a continuum. We all have both the fixed and the growth mindset in us, and we're going to move between our fixed and growth mindset based on what?
Context, the situations that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes I'm going to be inhabiting my fixed mindset, sometimes I'm inhabiting my growth, and we can know what those mindset triggers are, what are those common predictable situations. And that's where the book really focuses, and the last part of the book is really on those mindset triggers for individuals.
But even beyond that, those situations are located in a larger culture. The teams, the divisions, our organizations, our schools all have a mindset culture that is impacting the people in them. The question is do we know what those cultures are? And do we know how to move ourselves towards growth at the cultural level, not just at the individual level?
Guy Kawasaki:
So, dumb question. You were a doctoral student under Carol Dweck, right?
Mary Murphy:
That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
So one day did you go and say, "Sensei, you are wrong, or you're at least incomplete, Sensei Dweck. You're thinking it's all in a person's head. I'm telling you it's also in the environment." What was that moment? Did she slap you on the side of the head and say, "Speak when spoken to"? Or did she say, "My God, the scales are removed from my eyes"?
Mary Murphy:
You're going to have to ask her, but I will tell you it from my perspective, the mindset culture origin story.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would just like to point out that I did in fact ask Carol, and you heard it in the introduction.
Mary Murphy:
So I was in my last year of the PhD program. Carol had moved from Columbia to Stanford, so she was relatively new to the faculty. And I am sitting there in a seminar supporting a friend of mine because the tradition at Stanford is that every PhD student presents in front of their faculty the research that they've been conducting for the year and what's going on.
So I'm sitting there in this seminar and I'm watching my friend present his life's work, what he's been working on for the last four years of the PhD. And all of a sudden, this faculty member sitting in the audience raises his hand. I don't even know that he raised his hand actually.
He just blurted out, "It's clear the fatal flaw is XYZ." And then over to my left, another faculty member shouts out, "no, the problem isn't XYZ, it's ABC. It's very simple. This is a fatal flaw and this work has no merit."
And then I watched my friend. They started fighting amongst each other, these faculty members, to show who was the smartest in the room, and I saw what it was doing to my friend, and he was basically falling apart.
He couldn't engage in the answering the questions, he had a lot of disfluencies like trying to remember everything about his own work. He's the expert on his own work, but yet he can't engage in this. And more importantly, I noticed what it did to him over time.
After that seminar, it really took him out. He didn't want to touch his work for weeks because he was so taken down and didn't believe in his ability to actually be able to be successful and finish the PhD.
And then two weeks later, I'm in a different seminar and it's equally eminent faculty members, but they're taking a totally different approach to the PhD students' talks. They're still finding the fatal flaws and the mistakes, but they're not fatal in this context.
They're really competing with each other to see who could build up the experiments and the studies the most, "What she needs to do is include this new measure." "This manipulation should be in a different way." And they're brainstorming. And I saw the way that it affected students.
Students were able to answer questions, participate in the brainstorming themselves. And when they left the seminar, they were motivated to get going right away, and they had strategies to be able to apply to do that.
And so as I was sitting here thinking about these two different environments I'd just been in, I thought, "What is different about these two environments?" And it occurred to me there are two different ways that people set up environments that they think are motivating.
One is this harsh prove-and-perform environment, you're only as good as your last performance, show yourself to be a star. And the other one is about learning and development and growth together and where experts are really helping novices get better with their ideas and to improve over time. And so I thought, "I think mindset is at the core of both of these."
And so I go down the hallway, I knock on Carol's door and I say, "Carol, I have an insight and I'm not sure it's correct, but I don't think mindset just exists in the mind. I think mindset can exist as a group phenomenon in teams, in organizations, in school settings, in companies.
And mindset culture could be the thing that actually impacts whether or not people are able to be in their fixed or their growth mindset at any given point." I said, "Carol, has anyone looked at this? I know most people think of mindset as a quality of the mind. Has anyone looked at it as a quality of the context?"
And she said, "No, Mary. No one's ever done that before, but we should do it together. Let's go." And within six months, we had done the initial five studies that we published in 2010 that really talked about a culture of genius and a culture of growth. And since then, the work has exploded in organizations and schools around the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
That is a great story. So as I'm reading your book and I'm digesting this, and I'm obviously a fan of both of you and in agreement, I have to say that I went back to my Macintosh division experience. And, Mary, let's just cut to the chase. The Macintosh division was a culture of genius on steroids.
Now, people, if they just heard that, they might be thinking, "Culture of genius? That's a great thing. Everybody wants to be a genius." But the way you use it, it's a culture that only geniuses survive and they're born like that, et cetera. So it's a negative the way you're using it. And I'm telling you, the Macintosh division was a culture of genius led by a genius, Steve Jobs.
And so my head was exploding, I'm like, "How the hell did we pull anything off like this? Was that a mere aberration?" I don't think if you asked anybody at the Macintosh division, "Did Steve Jobs foster your growth?" He fostered our growth by intimidation. Help me put my head back together again. What happened there?
Mary Murphy:
Yes, I want to hear more about that experience because you were there on the ground. One of the things is that a lot of times, these cultures of genius, by the way, they're not great for the geniuses themselves either. A culture of genius actually puts straight jackets on those deemed to be the genius. There's very little room for mistakes, very little room for learning and growth.
And if you are dethroned in a culture of genius, you're nobody, right? So you're always watching your back. It's always about, "Am I the smartest in the room? How can I show it?" Proving and performing. There's a lot of information hoarding oftentimes because information is power, and a lot of focus on the status quo, trying to maintain my status in a particular organization and setting.
But how I understand Apple is that there's probably many different microcultures within Apple. My understanding of the R&D division, for example, is that they really embody this culture of growth. It's all about prototyping, fast failure, it's about learning from their mistakes, it's about trying a new way, and that really embodies the culture of growth.
But when it came to this almost messianic view of this leader that embodied sort of everything about genius, and when you look at genius and you look at the Google images, you're going to see pictures of Steve Jobs among Albert Einstein and many others, including sometimes Elon Musk even. But what was it like while you were at Apple? Did you experience growth in any way, the growth mindset? Or was it really just proven perform, no failure is acceptable?
Guy Kawasaki:
On that continuum, the way I remember it anyway is that the concept was we only hire A players or A+ players. We never hire B players. And right there summarizes the whole attitude. It would be different if we hire B players. We can help them grow and become A players. I never heard that uttered at all. It was like you took a urine test and you tested positive or negative and that was it. So within your frame, it's hard to explain the success of Macintosh.
Mary Murphy:
I think that some cultures of genius can be successful, but what we find in our research is that there's a cost to that. There's a people cost, and then there's also oftentimes the work is not optimized in the way that it could possibly be.
And so it might take longer, or it might burn people out along the way, or it might cause terrible rifts in relationships where people are jockeying to be seen as the genius when they should be cooperating, right? They start to compete against each other.
And this can take down friendships, it can take down relationships between divisions of an organization that should be working together rather than competing against each other. And it doesn't mean that success is foreclosed, it just means that it's going to be much less effective, it's going to be much less efficient, and it's probably going to burn people out along the way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, in that sense, maybe Tim Cook saved Apple, not Steve Jobs.
Mary Murphy:
Certainly, changed the culture, right? Around some of these ideas. And really, I think from what I understand about Apple today is that it really is trying to focus on this growth idea at the center of really trying to understand mistakes, trying to understand grow people from within, take people in and build them up throughout the organization, give them opportunities to learn, grow, and develop so that they can actually rise within the organization and make change within it.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's been several decades since I worked for Apple, so I cannot tell you I have insights into the current Apple. My God, I used to tell people that Apple's continued survival and success is proof there is a God because there is no other explanation. So this kind of fits into what you've just said.
Mary Murphy:
That's right. The anomaly that proves the point is what you're saying.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's get beyond my PTSD. People listening to this are probably asking, "From the outside looking in, what are the cues and tells that this is a culture of genius as opposed to a culture of growth?" So how do I tell what I'm getting into?
Mary Murphy:
Absolutely. This goes back to very early researchers and the godfather of organizational culture. His name was Edgar Schein, and he developed this idea of this organizational culture triangle. At the bottom are what's called the base, right? It's called core beliefs or assumptions. And there've been very few of those core beliefs or assumptions that have really been identified in the research literature.
But we have shown that mindset are beliefs about intelligence and ability are those core beliefs. And then the next middle part of the triangle are these values, espoused values. And you can look at those on mission statements, you can look at those on websites, you can look at those in CEO speeches, you can look at that in leaders directives.
And then at the very top of the triangle are called cultural artifacts. And these are the things that we can look at. It's at the very tip of the triangle, right? But if you drill down into those artifacts, you can see how it aligns with the values of the organization and then these core beliefs.
And so we look at some of those espoused values and then we look at some of those artifacts to understand if right now we are in more of a culture of genius or more of a culture of growth. We're not going back to that false dichotomy of individual mindset.
It's on a mindset culture continuum. And so to identify where a team or a division or an organization is along that continuum, we look and see the extent to which all of the interactions and all of the tasks that are being assigned, how much of it is aligned to learning and development.
And so you can think about this in terms of the way tasks are assigned in an organization, the way that evaluation and promotion is set up, what actually counts when it comes down to it on the ground. Is it about someone's learning and development, their contribution, the way that they build up themselves and others over time, their willingness to develop?
Or is it about just the outcome? Is it about the process or is it just about the outcome? Did you check the box and that's it? Then we know we're in more of a culture of genius.
We also look at the way that people recruit team members, right? To your point around looking at stars or looking at people who have a proven track record. What is the journey people have taken? What's the distance people have traveled, knowing that distance traveled is going to be a good predictor of distance going forward? And so you're still looking for people.
One of the things that I think many organizations misunderstand about this is that they think that cultures of growth are just soft, easygoing places, right? All about rainbows and sunshine and growth and development. They're actually much more rigorous, and oftentimes annoying than some of these cultures of genius.
Why? Because they're always expecting people to be taking that next step towards growth and development. Sometimes that's annoying, sometimes it's exhausting.
We've looked at this in college classrooms when faculty have more growth mindset and have more growth mindset practices built in to their course. Students learn more, they do better, but they get annoyed. It's like, "All right and already. I'm done with my learning and growth and development."
They're more rigorous too because they're actually going to use data to figure out whether or not they're on track rather than in a culture of genius. They're going to rely on gut instinct of those geniuses.
What does the genius say we should do? And what does the genius's gut say we do versus looking at the data and actually having an eyes wide open approach to the decisions we're going to make strategically in an organization.
That's another big tell is the extent to which we rely on these gut beliefs, gut attitudes of the leaders, the geniuses in the context versus whether we look at this data, make it available to everyone.
Everyone makes decisions in a data-informed way and are willing to take small experiments setting up these risks that they're going to take in the organization so that we can get a sense of the extent to which those experiments over time are actually moving us to our goal that we have for the organization or the team.
Guy Kawasaki:
So maybe you have solved my Macintosh division problem for me because superficially, maybe the Macintosh division was a culture of genius, but deep down inside, it was a culture of growth. And Steve Jobs wanted to just have high growth, high achievers, people constantly improving and all that. And as you say, a culture of growth can be more rigorous than a culture of genius because if you are declared a genius, you can rest on your laurels, right?
Mary Murphy:
That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
So maybe in the culture of growth, it's just that Steve Jobs had such a manner of him that the culture of growth wasn't this Kumbaya sitting around in Birkenstocks sipping white wine, completing each other's sentences, and watching the Coca-Cola ad of We Are One. So maybe his culture of growth was just a harsh culture of growth, and those who survived grew.
Mary Murphy:
I could see that, for sure. And then we had these different levels of culture, right? It's why on my book, I have these circles that kind of go out over and over because we're embedded in so many different kinds of cultures. We have the culture that we have between our partner and our family, we have the culture that we have in our workplace teams, then in divisions of the organization, then the whole organization, then our societal cultures.
And it's not surprising to me that very well we could be holding onto this genius mythology because there's so much power in that genius mythology, right? It covers all manner of sins, right? It allows me to make all kinds of decisions and a lot of power and leeway in that. It's why, I think, it's persisted over time, this mythology of the genius.
But then when it actually comes to doing the work, if you're not embodying that growth mindset, you're not collaborating, innovating, taking risks, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, sharing that learning throughout the organization, you're just not going to be competitive.
We did this great study with over 200 early stage entrepreneurs and startup companies, and we looked at how these founders and their mindset actually influenced how they hired and how they grew their organization from the very beginning.
And we started to understand that those who embodied more of a growth mindset and built those into their founding principles and practices, they were more likely to reach their fundraising goals and exceed their fundraising goals. They were more likely to actually scale and have successful exits than other entrepreneurs who embodied more of the traditional Silicon Valley fixed mindset culture of genius kind of culture.
Guy Kawasaki:
I started this with the cues and the tells, right?
Mary Murphy:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
And one of the things you mentioned was mission statements. So give me some examples of mission statements that you would read and you say, "That's a culture of genius," and then some mission statements, "Hallelujah. That's a culture of growth." What is it in the mission statement that makes you come to those conclusions?
Mary Murphy:
We did a study where we actually used technology to scrape the mission statements of the entire Fortune 1000. And then we used an algorithm that was the smart algorithm that was able to actually identify more fixed and more growth mindset language within these mission statements. So we actually know quite well which mindsets are really embedded in some of these mission statements.
So the fixed mindset mission statement is, "We're an atmosphere best, the best people, the best leaders, the best work, the best strategies, right? We're a proven performer organization, right? We're going to make sure that we meet the mark every single time. We're in an environment where we allow geniuses to come in and be the geniuses that they were meant to be."
Literally, this comes from a Fortune 1000 company mission statement. We see this, a culture of growth talks about developing people. It sometimes will tell stories about people who rose throughout the organization, really got to know the organization from within, and then was able to rise to the leadership.
It talks about passion, it talks about purpose, it talks about learning, how it invests in its people, how it invests in its clients to get to know what the clients actually need, and then learn everything that they need to do to be able to provide the services at the highest level of competence that they possibly can.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let me suggest a possible improvement to that.
Mary Murphy:
Yes, please.
Guy Kawasaki:
Having been inside many organizations, the assumption that the mission statement accurately reflects the sentiment of the company is dubious at best, right?
Mary Murphy:
100 percent.
Guy Kawasaki:
So it may reflect what McKinsey was paid to say.
Mary Murphy:
What a company paid McKinsey to say.
Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly. Or we took our fifty top people, and over two days, they crafted a mission statement, and everybody got to put one word into it. And so finally, we came out with this mission statement, none of which we believe, but it just sounds good on an annual report.
Mary Murphy:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I think another variable you could look at is not only to analyze the mission statement, but to determine from, I don't know, polls of employees, "Does this mission statement actually reflect the reality of this company?" Because that's an impressive variable.
Mary Murphy:
Yes, it absolutely is. And there is this debate among organizational culture people, is culture what people say, mission statements, websites, CEO messages, annual speeches that are being made? Or is it what we do? And I come down on the side that's about culture is really what's going on the ground, and you have to really ask people on the ground to know the extent to which these organizational values and beliefs are actually widespread and are being used in their day-to-day interactions and their work.
So in that same study that we analyzed these mission statements, we actually pulled other data, Glassdoor data, which is organizational surveys of people within the organization, and we look to see which parts of those data was predicted by the mindset culture described in the mission statements.
And what was predicted was not everything. These companies are rated on benefits in HR, they're rated on whether they got good feedback, they were rated on culture, and what these mission statements mindset predicted was really that culture variable.
And then when we dig in and we look at the extent to which the culture on the ground matches what people are saying and doing, it's mixed, right? There's going to be some places where the mission statement, and especially now people are listening to this podcast, they're going to know the right words to say in the mission statement, right?
We're going to have to be more dubious of that now. And we have to get down on the ground, how are people evaluated? How are people brought in? How are people promoted? What are the ways in which people are actually investing in individuals?
Dean Carter at Patagonia talks a lot about using this idea of regenerative agriculture practices within the organization. So many companies think of their people in this extractive way, what can I do to get the most out of people? The nice way to say it is, we're in an environment where you can be your best as if you're just going to magically just be your best yourself by yourself.
And they really had this idea that they have to actually think about the soil, and they have to be putting things back into their people, putting things back into the development and the potential of people. And so if you look at their practices and you look at how they actually implement that, that's where you see real culture of growth policies and practices, norms and interactions. That's where, I think, the power of culture really is, not just in the mission statements.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now give us examples of some mission statements that whether they actually prove to be true or not, but from the outside looking in, you'd say, "That company gets it. They paid McKinsey extra to get a growth culture mission statement."
Mary Murphy:
So the mission statements that we see talks about offering the highest growth potentials, emphasizing employees' motivation and their hard work that we focus on results and we also focus on the process, right? You're going to be as happy with the process as you are with the results because we're really going to be paying attention to that process along the way, and we're going to make sure we hit those targets for you.
It's an atmosphere that fosters a love for learning, passion, creativity, resourcefulness, and we are going to make sure you have everything you need to become the best version of you. So it talks about becoming rather than just an atmosphere of best instincts, best people, best ideas, right?
That you have to be fully formed before you arrive. And the truth is that we're all in a state of becoming, in a process of becoming. And the question is, is this going to be something that's supported by the environments we spend 50 percent or more of our time and life in or are we going to have to do that on the side for ourselves?
Guy Kawasaki:
I want you to know that every day I think about how I can help Madisun become the best person she can be.
Mary Murphy:
I love that.
Guy Kawasaki:
That was a paid political announcement and I approve of that advertisement.
Mary Murphy:
Of that message.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's say that you're a job hunter and you have found this mission statement and it ties in with Glassdoor. There's no sort of warning signs, and now you're talking to the company you're interviewing. What are the key messages that you pass along to prove to them, "I'm a person you want to hire. I have the growth mindset and I'm looking for a growth culture"?
Mary Murphy:
I think at that stage, a lot of people get this idea, this misconception that you have to trade off this idea of rigor and high performance, right? If you think about ability and performance and then you think about mindset and you think about them as this grid, this cross section, every company is going to want people who are high performers above the line, right?
The question is, as an organization that's hiring, do you want someone who has a fixed mindset belief about their high level of skills and abilities, someone who really thinks, "Listen, this is just what I'm good at. I'm the star at this. I've always been good at it. I'm a natural. It just comes easy"?
What happens when that person comes up against challenges or gets assigned to a new division and now has to master an entirely new product line, services, resources? Right? What if now they get promoted and they have to manage people instead of being the best coder, now they're managing a team of fifteen coders? Right?
Do you want your person who's the top person, who has the most ability and the most intelligence and talent? Do you want them to have a fixed mindset of their ability, or do you want them to have a growth mindset?
And so now as a person who's sitting there interviewing for a job, a growth mindset individual is going to talk about their successes, but they're also going to talk about the ways and the challenges that they came across and what they did to overcome those challenges, showing that I'm resourceful, I'm creative, I'm innovative, I'm motivated by those challenges.
They don't stop me. In fact, here are the six different ways I got around the most challenging thing I ever encountered in my previous job. And I'm going to put that resourcefulness, that creativity and that growth mindset to work in your company.
And so they talk about the distance traveled, the journey taken in their own career, and you'll see that, recruiters will see that, that people are not afraid of talking about mistakes that have been made in their previous organization because they're also talking about how they were able to overcome those mistakes, learn and grow from them, and actually make an even better product, service or outcome for the organization than existed before.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would say that anybody's listening to this, who's a former Aternos or Twitter employee should say to start off their interviews with, "I worked at Aternos, I worked at Twitter. I understand a culture of genius, and how destructive that is. And I've seen the light and I want to work for a company with a culture of growth that will help me be the best person I can be, as opposed to Twitter or Aternos where I supposed to be a bona fide genius forever."
Mary Murphy:
That's right. And when you're in a culture of growth, you're not learning alone. The entire organization is tuned to learning and development. And from a leader perspective, it makes it less lonely. Not everything rests on my shoulders.
I can actually have faith in my team that they're going to be proactively looking for ways to innovate, ways to try new things, ways to grow and develop our organization, and they're going to bring good ideas in a culture of growth come from everywhere. And that's just a place that people thrive in.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now let's suppose that I am a director or a CEO of a company and I'm listening to this podcast and I'm having this religious experience about, "Holy shit. We got to stop this culture of genius. We got to get to this culture of growth." And they contact Mary or they contact Carol and they say, "We need help. What do we do?" So what do you do?
Mary Murphy:
What do you do? Ironically, the first place to start is to get to know and normalize and get to working with your fixed mindset because we all have it within us. And the truth is that as growth mindset has permeated organizations and cultures, there's been this sort of idea that fixed mindset is not to be spoken of, not to be acknowledged, something to ignore.
And actually, there's power in understanding what are our fixed mindset triggers, what are the places, the situations, the context that I know on a regular basis move me towards my fixed mindset and which ones are the context and situations that move me to my growth mindset.
So the first place to start as a leader is to understand your own mindset triggers. What we have in the book, these four mindset triggers, evaluative situations, high effort situations, critical feedback, and the success of others, and which of these really move me more to my fixed mindset or my growth mindset?
And then it's important as a leader to know the mindset triggers of those you lead, those people that are direct reports, those people who are team leaders under you, right? Which one are their mindset triggers?
Because then you can, the next time you're giving an assignment that's going to be an evaluative situation, you've asked someone to write a report, you've asked someone to do a deck, you've asked someone to make a speech, you've asked someone to engage in a new client development process, right?
They know they're going to be evaluated on that. If that's someone's fixed mindset trigger, how do you do that in a way that actually moves them towards growth? Now, in that relationship, you've created a microculture of growth in that relationship.
If the success of others is someone's fixed mindset trigger that every time you praise so-and-so on the team, you can see so-and-so cringe. They feel left out, they feel passed over, they wonder whether or not they're going to be as good as this other person who's being praised on the team or gets an award, right? Or a promotion or a bonus.
How do you as a leader create that success of others in that praise practice in a way that actually moves everyone towards growth is inspirational rather than competitive? How do you actually help people understand the strategies and the approach that made that person successful that got the award? How is that unearthed and spread across the team so that now everyone can understand what are the right strategies and they can take them up in an authentic way that works for them? Right?
So that's the power of these culture creators, leaders, individuals who really exist in an organization and work with many other people across the context. How do we know when we're moving towards our fixed and growth mindset? What are these mindset triggers? And how do we shape them to shift everyone towards growth? That's the first place.
Guy Kawasaki:
What if you're working for an organization, you're not the CEO, and clearly it is a culture of genius organization.
Mary Murphy:
Yep.
Guy Kawasaki:
So can a microculture of growth survive inside the macroculture of a culture of genius?
Mary Murphy:
Yes, it can. There are many examples of this. One example that I like to talk about is Melinda Gates at Microsoft, right? So Melinda became a leader within Microsoft, and she was struggling against the dominant culture of genius that existed at Microsoft at the time. And she was fed up. She tells the story that she thought about leaving multiple times, and she got this promotion, and she had the power to create a team around her.
And she said, "I'm going to do this the way I want to do it. And if I get fired, okay, I'm ready to go anyway." So she took a risk and she created this microculture of growth on her team, and suddenly they were working together to solve problems. They were unearthing mistakes and figuring out how to work around those mistakes, how to learn from them.
They were able to be more creative and innovative than any other team, and she started to attract the most talented engineers at Microsoft that there were. And suddenly her team was growing and growing because people were just asking and begging to be part of her team.
And she became known as really an evangelist for this culture of growth approach within this larger culture of genius. And sometimes that's what it takes. Now, if you're not a leader who gets the power to create your own team, you can always, as an individual contributor, find other people who are really motivated to create this kind of culture of growth for themselves, right?
Finding your culture of growth pod is a strategy that you can do. You can do it within your organization, you can do it outside of your organization. People who are in similar roles but aren't in your organization, that can be a place where you can practice moving towards your growth mindset more of the time.
Talking about when you got that critical feedback, you've got that negative performance evaluation, how do you respond from your growth mindset? How do you actually talk to your manager or supervisor in a way that's going to move them towards their growth mindset when they're interacting with you?
Practice some of those skills and strategies together. So there's a lot of power in these microcultures of growth to be able to shape people's experiences and their motivation and their performance on a day-to-day basis.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can I give you a thought?
Mary Murphy:
Please.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I give it to you only in the spirit of one author to another and one worshiper of Carol Dweck to another, which is when I read that example of Melinda Gates and Patty Stonesifer, I knew her when she was at Microsoft. I think that example would be more powerful if you anonymized her, right? Because a skeptic would say, "She could have a culture of growth inside Microsoft because she was dating Bill Gates. Nobody else could." Right?
Mary Murphy:
Yeah. I guess that's one way you can view it. I don't remember when she was building her team if she had yet started to date Bill. I actually think it predated her relationship with Bill Gates, but we could look into it. But I think you're right that there's power in anonymizing, particularly in that kind of context.
I know there's many other contexts and other places where people have really been able to make change within very notorious, should we say, cultures of genius, that Silicon Valley best, I feel. Where are the places in Silicon Valley that really embody the culture of growth and buck the dominant culture of genius? What would you say?
Guy Kawasaki:
There are no cultures of growth in Silicon Valley.
Mary Murphy:
Wow. That is a powerful statement.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm scratching my head. Listen, I am living in Silicon Valley. That doesn't mean I understand the culture of every companies, but the way you described it. You describe Uber and all that, and it's a bunch of white bros, frat brothers, and maybe they're self-proclaimed, but they think they're geniuses, and then venture capitalists are even more so like that. Maybe this is calling the kettle black.
Mary Murphy:
In our study of entrepreneurs, we actually found that when entrepreneurs and founders perceived VCs, venture capitalists and other investment groups to endorse more of these cultures of genius, they felt less confident that they'd be able to raise their funds, and it had a bigger impact on women founders and entrepreneurs.
They felt that because they don't fit this model, this cultural model that we have of genius, right? How do you know what a cultural model of genius is? You go to Google images, you put in genius, and you look at Google images and you see the faces that emerge, right? You're going to be hard-pressed to be able to find women, people of color, LGBTQIA, people with disabilities, right? You're going to be hard-pressed to find anyone with any difference. And people know this.
So when you have VCs, when you have companies that really endorse these strong cultures of genius, women and people of color know that they're unlikely to fit that prototype. They're unlikely to fit that mold in other people's eyes.
And so they anticipate that they're going to do worse, fair worse when it comes to investment, when it comes to relationships and mentoring. People are going to not be their sponsors in the way that they're going to sponsor the white guy with the hoodie who matches our genius prototype. And I think this can explain why we have so much inequality, right?
So much inequity in this world of entrepreneurship. And yet when we look at these companies, who's actually successful? It's not the cultures of genius, it's the cultures of growth. So we've got it wrong, right? We're actually not right in our predictions, and I'm hoping that we can start some change here together, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
You brought up gender. So do you think there's a fundamental difference between the kind of cultures that men and women create?
Mary Murphy:
No, I don't. And I think the reason is because there's a larger socialization in industries that really impact the extent to which people embody a culture of genius or a culture of growth, especially founders and entrepreneurs, right?
The dominant industry culture is really hard to buck. And we see some women able to do it, some people of color able to do it, but also some white guys that are able to do it, right? And so I think that dominant mindset culture in an industry actually trumps the effects of gender most of the time.
Now, I will say that what we have seen is that many of the companies that are on the far end of the mindset culture continuum, most closely to the culture of growth, like a pure culture of growth, those do tend to be more women and people of color because they acknowledge and see the extent to which collaboration, innovation, risk-taking, making mistakes, having to invest in people and develop them over time, what that kind of investment actually affords in terms of people's productivity, their trust, their commitment to the organization, right?
Their willingness to go the extra mile. We have seen a lot of companies really at that far end of the culture of growth continuum often being held by women and people of color.
Guy Kawasaki:
You brought up the name Adam Neumann in your book, the founder of WeWork.
Mary Murphy:
I do. Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
So he gets thrown out of that company, and then in this culture of genius called Silicon Valley, he gets funded again to build another company.
Mary Murphy:
Guy, why do these guys fail up?
Guy Kawasaki:
I mean, how do you explain that? Does that make your head explode? Adam Neumann gets funded again, and now he's even talking about buying back WeWork. What does that tell the world?
Mary Murphy:
I think that it tells the world that the culture of genius is powerful, that it's influential, that it is moneyed, and that we are committed to the status quo.
And people see more risk even though they know what the consequences are of investing with this person and with the kind of orientation that he had for developing WeWork, people know what they're getting into, and yet they feel that is somehow less risky than someone who's really going to grow their folks and grow themselves as a leader like Katrina Lake, for example, a very growth-minded oriented person failed and failed again until she got her company.
Decided not to take every piece of investment that was offered to her, really work to be sure that the growth and the values were going to be aligned for her work, and then her story kind of speaks for itself. And so it's interesting, I think. What do you make of it, the fact that he gets to re-up and fail up in this Silicon Valley culture of genius?
Guy Kawasaki:
What do I make of it?
Mary Murphy:
Yes. What do you make of it? How do you make sense of it living in this world?
Guy Kawasaki:
I think one of the most plausible explanations of that, and Elon Musk, for example, is that we are living in a simulation controlled by God, and God has a sense of humor. And she's sitting up there, she's saying, "Let's get Adam Neumann another round of financing, and let's make Elon Musk the richest man in the world, and let's see what these dumb-asses called humans do with that." That's my only explanation.
Mary Murphy:
I think that there is something to this, right? That if we invest in enough chaos, making the only solution in this time, moment of truth around technology, moments of truth around energy, moments of truth around earth and sustainability, it just shows to me that the only way forward is going to really be these cultures of growth that people are going to have to find in order to build within these larger dominant cultures of genius in order to solve our problems today.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that the only way forward is to let women control the world, seriously. I really do. I think men has screwed it up for 2000 years. Let's let women try. And then if women fail, let's just let AI run everything.
Mary Murphy:
Let's let AI.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's my theory.
Mary Murphy:
I am afraid that the culture of genius is baked into many of our base algorithms that sort of motivate AI. So we're going to have to do some work there too, around reprogramming, around a culture of growth.
But I think women and people of color have shown themselves to be focused in cultures of growth and committed to their development more so than dominant groups like white men who have really benefited for centuries from this genius mythology and this genius culture that they've created to sustain power and sustain privilege. I'm with you.
Guy Kawasaki:
So now, it seems that, not seems, it is that companies that have DEI programs and support diversity and inclusion and all that, they're all been slapped on the face and they're retrenching. And in the state of Florida, you can't even say those three letters. Look, what's going to be the long-term effect of all this anti-DEI, anti-woke philosophy?
Mary Murphy:
I think that the future is yet to be written on this. I do think that there are more and more. I am seeing companies really having to be the bellwether and the beacon for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
When schools and colleges across these different states are being told they can no longer teach, they can no longer have policies and practices that have a diverse student body attract and then graduate a diverse student body, what I am seeing, and especially in STEM, that a lot of these tech companies are telling these schools, "Listen, we need a diverse STEM workforce.
And if you aren't going to be training them, we're going to be getting our workers from other universities that will, and other states that will."
And so I think there's a lot of power that companies and organizations have to put pressure on schools and universities and legislatures and others to really say, "We know the power of having a diverse workforce. The data are pretty clear. It's not always easy to work in a diverse context.
There's going to be a lot of cultural differences. It can be stressful. We can have misunderstandings, but the ultimate outcomes of creativity, innovation, product design, when it comes to actual success with fundraising and market share, we know that diversity of a workforce predicts those things."
And so it's going to be up to companies, I think, to put pressure on schools and legislatures and others to say, "This is a value we have to make the American workforce competitive globally. And if you can't do this, we're going to go to the few states that are going to be producing this workforce."
Guy Kawasaki:
My fingers are crossed that what you said is true. But to take one real solid example, what happens if Ron DeSantis defeats Disney? Isn't that a big tell?
Mary Murphy:
Yeah. I think that we're waiting to see. I think that Disney has had some wins when it comes to this fight, and other companies are locking arms, right? Other companies are pushing back, I think, in many different ways, powerful companies are pushing back because they see the value of diversity, equity, inclusion for their own workforce and for their products and services.
Now, I also think there are many other reasons to support diversity, equity, inclusion besides the bottom line. I don't think that the strongest, even justification for DEI is the bottom line, though that exists. I also think that there's a lot to be said about really creating a solid middle class and upper class that's able to actually rise over time and be able to recreate society in this way.
I do think there's a whole bunch of reasons for this. We'll see what emerges in this. I think you're right. The Disney DeSantis fight is one that really, I think, powerfully shows what's at stake here.
Guy Kawasaki:
For the record, my money is with the mouse.
Mary Murphy:
Never bet against the mouse. Come on. You come from the mouse.
Guy Kawasaki:
Never bet against the mouse. Mice are going to be here long after man disappears.
Mary Murphy:
I'm with you.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you had a great discussion about the benefits of high effort challenges. Now, many people might believe, "God, if it's high effort, it's not worth it. I'm going to fail. I'm going to be defeated, and I need to look for the low-hanging fruit, etc." So tell us why high effort challenges are in fact a good thing.
Mary Murphy:
This is great. High effort situations are one of the most popular fixed mindset triggers for people. This is what I'm asked to do, something I've never done before. I have to master a whole new area, a new kind of division or task or a role that I've never had before. And what we have seen, actually, the research on this comes from neuroscience where people looked at brain activation of people who do a whole bunch of different tasks.
And what they found was that the more challenging the task, the more effort it required, the more parts of the brain were recruited to help. So not only did it develop new neural pathways and cells, which it did, but it actually recruits different parts of the brain to work together functionally.
Connectivity across the brain actually increases. And this means that we're activating higher level functions like complex problem solving, working memory, abstract reasoning, all the things we need in order to solve the problems that we're trying to solve, right? And to be the most creative when doing it.
And so one of the things we've seen is that it's not just any effort though. I think that when people think about high effort situations, they're thinking about just banging their head against the wall over and over again, just trying hard, I'm just trying hard. We see this in kids, right? With teachers who say that they're teaching with a fixed mindset.
They oftentimes will talk about, "Just try harder. This kid just needs to try hard. He gives up too easily," right? But what we know is that if you just keep pounding your head over and over against the wall, what happens? Right? It's your head that's going to bust open, not the wall.
And so when it comes to high effort situations, what's really important is what I call effective effort. And that is effort that moves us in the right direction, effort expended in the process of learning.
And that's more complicated because if I'm in an organization and I am really asking people to put high effort into a new situation that they've never been before, I have to understand where they are, I have to understand the kind of effort they're putting in, and I have to understand the extent to which it's actually moving them towards the goal that we have.
A lot of times people talk about solving these crossword puzzles, The New York Times crossword puzzles or Sudoku, right? As a way to keep their brain going. And what I would say about that is that these activities can serve up to a point in terms of effort and applying our brain in new context, but only so long as they remain challenging.
The key is that it's got to be challenging, and that the effort we're expending is effective effort moving us in the right direction. And that means we have to know each other better, we have to know the kinds of effort we're putting in, and we have to know process, not just outcome. We have to know the extent to which it's actually helping us develop better processes and moving us in the right direction over time.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I have two more questions, and then I'm going to ask you a series of short questions. So we're almost at the end.
Mary Murphy:
Okay. Let's do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
So my first of two bigger questions is this. So you're from Indiana, right?
Mary Murphy:
I live in Indiana and I live in California. Yes, both.
Guy Kawasaki:
How long have you been in Indiana or when did you live in Indiana?
Mary Murphy:
Since 2012. Yep, about twelve years.
Guy Kawasaki:
And was Bobby Knight there still alive?
Mary Murphy:
No, Bobby Knight was long gone by the time I came, but his legacy and his reputation remain to this day. And in fact, he was there at IU, at Indiana University making a comeback and really being valorized in his last few years, actually, before he passed, pretty recently. So I saw some of that happen. Tell me about Bobby Knight.
Guy Kawasaki:
Give me an analysis about Bobby Knight. Was he culture of genius or culture of growth?
Mary Murphy:
I think that he embodies this mixed mindset culture. I think that he believed in some stars. He believed in putting certain stars in certain positions in order to maximize the potential of the team. But he also was really a taskmaster when it came to the growth and development. He was forcing people in those practices to engage in mastering their particular role, their particular practice.
He reminds me a lot of the way that Michael Jordan took on his approach when he was rejected from his high school basketball team because they thought he was too short where he would go after school to the courts and he would take shots from each different part of the court from various locations, but he would only count the shot as making the basket.
He had a certain number he had to do every day. He would only count it when it went in and it didn't hit the rim. It was just the swoosh. That was one, right?
Bobby Knight applied that kind of philosophy, I feel, to his development of his players. Now, he also did other things that I would say embody a little bit of this culture of genius, right? In terms of sidelining people when they made mistakes. But then afterwards, there was a real analysis of each game to say, "Where did we get this right? Where did we get this wrong?"
And the next week's practice would focus on doubling down on the places that they could grow and develop. So if you talk to the teammates, if you talk to the students who learned from Bobby Knight, they will talk about how he made them a better player and better people with this kind of ethic.
I think it's a mixed mindset culture, but one that had growth and development at the core of what they were doing in interaction with each other.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last big question is, it's not a question, it's an opportunity for you. I want you to pitch your book, why people should buy your book. This is it. This is your free ad. Go for it. Tell people why they should buy.
Listen, if you're listening to this podcast, Obviously, if you're not listening, you wouldn't hear me say this, but I'm telling you, you should buy this book. If you bought Carol Dweck's book Mindset, you will love this book. This should be a two-volume bound set. So that's Guy telling you, but now I'm going to let the author tell you.
Mary Murphy:
I think that everyone in every interaction that they have has a mindset culture. The way that we talk about mistakes around the kitchen table with our kids, the way that we talk about their potential and their talent. When we go into the workplace and we're interacting with coworkers and colleagues, when we are taking on leadership roles and management roles, right?
And we actually now are in charge of forming those teams and making sure that they're doing the work that we need them to do, right? And also growing and investing in people over time. How do we do that in a way that's going to motivate people, engage people, and also contribute to the bottom line?
And what I think this book does is it resets our whole idea about mindset, and it gives really actionable strategies, tools, questions to ask, there's a quiz on the book website that you can take to understand your mindset triggers, and then built-in strategies about how to do this, stories of individuals and organizations that have done this successfully, right?
How do we move from this fixed-minded culture of genius that boxes everyone in and as people who are in these cultures of genius in fighting and watching their back? It's not surprising to me that is a less successful context than one that's more collaborative and really investing in people's growth and development and places where people frankly want to be. So if you want to create these kinds of environments and understand how mindset is at the heart of all of it, buy the book.
Guy Kawasaki:
So the bottom line is you have to grow your growth mindset. It's not just what's in your head, it's also the environment. And if you're responsible for an environment and you want people to grow, you need to provide them an environment that makes that growth possible too. I want to thank the Remarkable People team. But wait, let me stop right there. Listen to this whole episode to the very end because Carol Dweck is coming back.
Now, where was I? Back to My thanks. Thanks to Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, sound design. Tessa Nuismer, Researcher, Madisun Nuismer, my co-author and producer of the show, Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura, and Fallon Yates. And finally, my thanks to Angela Duckworth and Katy Milkman. They made me aware of the amazing book that Mary Murphy has written. Frankly, in my humble opinion, Angela Duckworth, Katy Milkman, and Mary Murphy are the future of psychology.
And I would be remiss if I didn't tell you and remind you that Madisun and I have published a new book, it's called Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. Just get Carol's book and our book, you'll be good to go. And now I'm going to give the final word to Carol Dweck.
Carol Dweck:
Before Mary's work when mindset was just thought of it, something inside the individual's head, it was up to the individual. It was their responsibility to put it into practice. So teachers could just define what a growth mindset was and expect the students to live according to the credo of the mindset.
Managers, CEOs could just have workshops given to the employees, and then it was their responsibility to carry forth in a growth mindset, challenge seeking and persistent way.
It kind of absolved the people creating the culture. It absolved them of the responsibility for creating a culture that supported growth, mindset, beliefs, and behavior. Mary's work really brought forth that responsibility of the culture creator.