Those who adopt a growth mind-set – believing that intelligence develops through effort – view mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve. Those who have a fixed mind-set – who believe that intelligence is a stable attribute – tend not to learn from their mistakes.[1]
“By paying attention to mistakes, we invest more time and effort to correct them,” says study author Jason Moser. “The result is that you make the mistake work for you.”
Growth mind-set leaders think like this:
“What a wake-up call! Let’s see what I did wrong so I won’t do it again”
Fixed mind-set leaders think like this:
“Forget this; I’ll never be good at it.”
The latter mind-set is, of course, what we need to do battle with as we age… “I’m too old to change now…”
When I am tempted to think like that, I try to remember people like Man Kaur, the 101 year-old athlete from India who took up track and field at the age of 93 and won the gold medal at the Masters Games in Auckland for the 100 metres, 200 metres and shot put.
I recently worked with an organisation where the chair of the board believed that the CEO of the organisation could not change his fundamental outlook. “A leopard cannot change its spots!” was his firmly-held belief. By taking this view, he locked the CEO into the prison of continuing to behave as he had done previously. Believing that people can change and enabling them to do so, is liberating for them and for their organisations.
As they were growing up, I used to say to our own children: “Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what we do to fix them that counts”.
In a recent article Dr Travis Bradberry[2] identifies ten mistakes that leaders do not repeat – if they have a growth mind-set.
1 – Believing in someone or something that’s too good to be true.
2 – Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
3 – Failing to delay gratification.
4 – Operating without a budget.
5 – Losing sight of the big picture.
6 – Not doing your homework.
7 – Trying to be someone or something you’re not.
8 – Trying to please everyone.
9 – Playing the victim.
10 – Trying to change someone.
In our practice as leaders and managers we will recognise these mistakes in ourselves and in others.
Our job as leaders is not to lock others into being unable to change but to unlock the prison door. We do this by having a growth mind-set for them as well as for ourselves.
[1] Moser, Jason S; Schroder, Hans S; Heeter, Carrie, Moran, Tim P.and Lee Yu-Hao (2011): Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterror Adjustments, Psychological Science 22(12) 1484 –1489.
[2] Bradberry, Travis (2017): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/10-mistakes-smart-people-never-make-twice_us_5900de50e4b06feec8ac92c2
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