This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Many years ago, two researchers at Harvard
noticed something interesting at their university's
Peebadi Museum of Natural History.
It was a description about a pair of 19th century German
glassmakers.
It read, descended from a long line of Bohemian glass
artists, Leo Pol Blaschka and his son Rudolf,
were gifted with such extraordinary skill and passion
for their work that one might argue these attributes
were indeed in their blood.
The researchers, Qiajang Sai and Mazarin Banaji
were curious.
When we say someone is gifted, does it
matter whether they're talent as the result of hard work
or natural ability?
Would we see Leo Pol and Rudolf Blaschka differently
if their skill and passion was not in their blood?
In an experiment, the scientists
asked more than 100 musical experts whether any talent or hard
work was the more important factor when
it came to musical ability.
The expert said, no contest.
What matters is hard work, hours of practice.
But when the musical experts were asked to compare two
pieces of music, one of which featured a pianist who
was said to work very hard at her craft.
And another from a musician who was just naturally gifted,
the experts gravitated to the piece of music
said to come from the performer who was naturally gifted.
They thought her music was more beautiful.
In truth, both the performances that the experts heard
were by the same pianist, but the music
seemed more impressive when it came from someone
who was described as a natural talent,
rather than someone who was described as a striver.
Today, we explore our love affair with brilliance
that's in the blood.
And we examine how these beliefs shape
the organizations where we work and study and play.
The genius trap, this week, on Hidden Brain.
Many episodes of this program
explore the gaps between our perception and reality.
What is true for individuals is also true for organizations.
Schools, nonprofits and companies
want to encourage excellence and spur success.
But what they think they are saying
to encourage those things is often not what's heard.
At Indiana University, Bloomington,
psychologist Mary Murphy studies how one set of beliefs
has come to exert a powerful hold
on organizations around the world.
She explores how the set of beliefs can work
at cross purposes with what many organizations
want to accomplish.
The mismatch has profound effects for institutions
and the millions of people who live, work, and study in them.
Mary Murphy, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you, Shankar.
It is such a pleasure to be here with you.
Mary, when you first arrived at Stanford University
to go to graduate school, you picked up
on something that many people at the school
call the Stanford Duck Syndrome.
Describe the syndrome for me, Mary.
Yes, this is the idea that the most successful people
at this elite high-pressure institution,
those people who can look like ducks,
who can glide gracefully across the water,
any hardship or struggle they might have,
simply rolls off your back.
But if you look right beneath the surface,
you see that people are kicking like crazy to keep up.
And I could see this among undergrads.
I would see that around them like lounging
in the student union, listening to music,
as if people didn't have a care in the world.
No one seemed to have to try hard
in order to do well in this environment.
But when I talked to my undergrads in my lab,
I noticed that students were really paying
a high price to embody this cultural value
of effortless genius, right?
They were exhausted.
They had a lot of anxiety and stress trying to keep up.
And I think that this syndrome, this Stanford Duck Syndrome,
really came from this belief that effort and ability
are negatively correlated.
That if you have to try hard,
that it means that maybe you don't have
natural ability or skill to be there.
So some years later, you found yourself
at your first job at Indiana University,
and you discovered that the school had a procedure
to distribute merit raises to professors.
It involved a certain letter that got dropped in your mailbox.
What was it like to receive this letter?
Yes, a department merit review committee
would review every faculty member
is what we call an APR.
It's like a annual productivity report.
And it has things like how many papers we wrote,
how many students we advise, how many grants we get.
And what they would do is that they would rank
and rate each individual professor.
And then to my horror, I learned that each faculty member
would then get a letter in their mailbox
showing every person's rank from the highest to the lowest.
And your personal position would be brightly
highlighted in yellow.
And I have to say that this day, the day
that the letters would arrive in everybody's mailbox
was the day of the year that a lot of our faculty
simply drotted.
Mary soon noticed that it wasn't just the professors
who were being rated in this manner.
I was walking by a really large auditorium,
our large teaching auditorium.
And I noticed several sheets of paper
taped on the wall outside of the entrance to that auditorium.
And when I went to look more closely,
I saw that these papers contained
the grades of all students that were enrolled
in our introductory psychology class.
And they went from highest to lowest.
And what I noticed was that as the students were streaming
by, different students took different strategies.
Some did like a wide art to avoid these papers on the wall.
Some people gathered around, running their fingers down
the list, trying to look for their ID,
hoping to find it on the first or second page
and not on the sixth or seventh page.
And I just think that this shows how these regular routines
and practices can really stoke interpersonal competition.
Make you feel as though you're learning
and your productivity is really going to depend
on how you do relative to others.
So Mary, the same approach to performance
that you saw when you first came to Indiana
was also showing up in the corporate world.
The idea of stack ranking, as it's called,
was popularized at General Electric in the 1980s.
Tell me the story of stack ranking and Jack Welch.
Stack ranking is a performance evaluation practice
that's pretty common in many organizations.
This practice is colloquially called rank and yank.
And it was made popular in the early 80s by Jack Welch,
who was at that point, CEO of GE.
And at GE, what they did was they created three different tiers,
employees in the top 20%, those in the middle 70%,
and those in the bottom 10%, who are more likely to be let go.
In an article published in 2013, Jack Welch said,
yes, I realized that some believe
the bell curve aspect of differentiation is cruel.
That always strikes me as odd.
We grade children in school, often as young as nine or 10,
and no one calls that cruel.
But somehow adults can't take it?
Explain that one to me.
Stack ranking has spread to many other firms
since Jack Welch and GE practiced it 40 years ago.
Mary says that includes the coworking company, WeWork.
The company WeWork adopted some of this stack ranking,
and they would let go up to 20% of their workforce annually.
And in WeWork, these were called infamously genocides
because it would refer to the attorney, Jennifer Barrett,
who was in charge of all of these layoffs.
And what's important to know about stack ranking
is that people say, well, it's okay for the 80%
who's gonna be left in the organization.
But I have to say that being left inside of an organization
is not gonna be a walk in the park, right?
We know that it breeds competition within each organization
and it creates a lot of confusion for employees, right?
Should we team?
Should we compete?
Which can breed a lot of cynicism and distrust?
So it doesn't take a genius to notice that people respond
to the incentives around them.
If you tell people that the bottom 20%
are going to be fired, the goal might be to get everyone
to focus on excellence, but in practice,
it gets everyone to focus on each other.
So the people at the top of the rankings,
they don't want to be displaced.
And the people who are lower in the rankings,
just want to make sure that there's someone else
who does worse than them.
Absolutely.
There's this constant fear of a loss of status, right?
Of falling below that line.
And those in the top tier are gonna be forced
to defend their position, right?
They're less likely to share resources
to help their colleagues for fear
that they're gonna be overtaken in the rankings.
And they're gonna dedicate more energy
to watching each other, keeping an eye on their competition,
instead of focusing on how and where they can keep growing.
You know there's the old joke about the two people
who see a tiger.
The first one starts leasing up his shoes
and the second one says,
you're not going to outrun a tiger.
And the first person says,
I'm not trying to outrun the tiger.
I'm just trying to outrun you.
Now, stack ranking also has found its way
into many schools and not just colleges and universities,
but even primary schools.
The psychologist Carol Dweck has stories of stack ranking
or its equivalent in elementary school.
She shared with me the story of growing up
in her elementary school classroom,
where back in the day in her class,
they would seat students in order of their IQ score.
So students who were the highest on the IQ score
were always seated in front.
And those who scored lowest, well,
they were placed all the way in the back, right?
And they would retake these exams
and then they'd get reshuffled based on how they performed
on these exams.
So there was always this threat of losing that status
of being the good student and the smart student
in this environment.
So Mary, you say that there is an underlying set of beliefs,
a mindset in all of these examples that we've discussed.
You call it a culture of genius.
What does this term mean?
In a culture of genius, as I call it,
the focus is really on star performers
and the belief that these people are inherently more capable
and superior due to innate intelligence,
ability, skills, things that just come naturally,
effortless and perfect performance, right?
Is the goal in a culture of genius?
And so we look for people and we look for individuals
who are going to embody that culture of genius,
who are the stars?
And how do we get more of those individuals
into our organization onto our team
so that we can build even more this culture of genius?
And so when we have this culture of genius,
whether that's at an individual level
or at a collective level,
what that basically says is some people know how to
swing a baseball bat,
some people know how to play chess,
some people know how to do math,
those are the people who are going to be good
at doing those things.
Absolutely, the culture of genius wants genius,
and they believe in genius very strongly.
And so they're going to look for people
who really seem to have these innate talents and gifts,
and they're going to try to recruit
and retain those individuals.
Those are going to be the individuals
that are lifted up and that are promoted
and that are going to be invested in
in a culture of genius.
When we come back,
the psychological origins of the culture of genius,
and its effect on people and organizations.
You're listening to Hidden Brain,
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Have you ever been in a school or organization
where you felt that people wrote you off?
Where no one believed in you,
and people communicated that you didn't belong?
If this has happened to you,
you know it doesn't feel good.
But more than the problem of how it feels,
something profound happens in our minds
when we come to believe that there is a ceiling
on what we can accomplish, what we can learn,
and what we can do.
At Indiana University, Bloomington,
Mary Murphy studies the effects of these mental
ceilings on organizations,
and the people who live and work inside them.
Mary the Stanford Psychologist, Carol Dweck,
was your mentor, and she developed an idea
known as growth mindset.
Could you explain what a growth mindset is
as well as its opposite of fixed mindset?
Yes, the growth mindset is oftentimes
characterized as a belief that talent,
and ability, and performance,
all of these skills, they're potentials
that we can grow with the right support,
asking for help, trying new strategies,
and the opposite of the growth mindset
is the fixed mindset.
And this is the belief that talent, ability, skills,
these are things that are fixed.
They're like traits.
You either have them or you don't.
And so it's impossible to significantly grow,
change, or develop those skills and abilities.
And so the point of that fixed mindset
is to figure out what you're good at,
and then just do those things.
I mean, in some ways, this seems to be partly
about the age-old debate between nature and nurture,
is ability merely something that's inside of us,
or is it something that we can learn and cultivate?
Growth mindset seems to emphasize the role of effort
and hard work and perseverance in developing skills,
whereas a fixed mindset might emphasize
innate ability in a talent.
Yes, that's the big difference between the fixed mindset
and the growth mindset.
How does a culture of genius fit with these two ideas?
In some ways, it seems to be connected
to what you described as the fixed mindset.
For about 25 to 30 years, this idea of the fixed mindset
and the growth mindset, were traditionally
studied as individual differences.
What's your belief, Shankar, and what's my belief?
And how does that influence our motivation, our engagement,
the way we respond to challenges, whether we hide mistakes
or whether we relish mistakes and learn from them?
And the insight I had, oh, maybe about 12, 13 years ago now,
was that the fixed and growth mindset isn't just inside our minds.
It's not just a belief that you or I have,
that it actually can be a feature of an environment.
It can be a feature of teams, of groups,
of divisions, of organizations.
It can be a feature of families.
Anytime two or more people are together,
we can have a mindset culture that really communicates,
whether we believe as a group that intelligence, skills,
and ability are fixed, you either have them or you don't,
or it's possible to grow, develop, and learn,
new skills, intelligence, ability, and other aspects of ourselves.
Now, a focus on brilliance can seem like a good thing.
You know, what can be wrong with being brilliant?
But the philosophy of a Sarah Jane Leslie
and the psychologist, Andrei Simpian,
once analyzed how much people in different fields
believe that success is about innate ability.
Can you tell me what they found Mary?
This is one of my favorite studies.
What this group of researchers did was survey
more than 1800 faculty, postdocs, and graduate students
across 30 different disciplines at universities
across the United States.
And then at the same time, they gathered data
from the National Science Foundation
about the percentage of women and students of color
who went to pursue PhDs in each one of these disciplines.
And what they found in that survey of faculty,
postdocs, and graduate students
was that there seemed to be some consensus
around different fields.
Some fields really believed that what it took
to be successful in that field required brilliance
and genius for success, whereas other fields were thought
to require more empathy or hard work
or persistence through challenges.
And what they found was that math, physics, economics,
some parts of music, music composition in particular,
were thought to require brilliance.
And others that were thought to have other aspects
that were important for success, things like empathy
and hard work were other of the social sciences,
psychology, many of the humanities-based work,
although philosophy was one of those
that was really thought to require brilliance and genius
for success.
And what they found was that when those fields were thought
to require more genius and brilliance for success,
the less number of women and people of color
were included in those disciplines as pursuing PhDs.
So in your own work with these two researchers,
you've explored why messages about brilliance
might undermine women's interest in certain fields.
Why does this happen, Mary?
Yeah, one of the biggest problems that we see
with cultures of genius is that we have a specific prototype
of who is a genius.
We have a prototype of who's going to be successful
in these different environments.
And what we've seen across decades of our work now
is that while these prototypes can vary by industry,
we find that most people when you put in the word genius
into Google Images, the images that come to mind there,
are people like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk,
Bill Gates, right?
This is a pretty homogenous group.
And what we see is that when we're in these cultures
of genius, we look for people who are going to match
our genius prototypes.
And these are going to be the people who we seek out,
who we hire, and who we promote in different organizations.
And it's really why cultures of genius often overlook
and miss out on identifying and recruiting people
from diverse groups.
And it's why in our own work, we started
to see that anytime these messages really
suggest that these areas require brilliance,
it undermines women's interest because they expect
to be stereotyped more in these environments
as not being innately gifted, having those genius qualities.
They don't really match this prototype and they know it.
And they think they're going to be judged for it
in these environments.
I think some people might say, isn't it true
that some people in some fields, like mathematics,
for example, are really brilliant?
And in some ways, it comes really easy to them
that they are able to pick up on things very quickly.
I think that this is a bit of a myth,
more than what we want to acknowledge
in a society that really values independence
and natural talent and ability.
I think there's many, many cases
where we have told ourselves the story of genius,
of an individual, the apple just falls on the head
and suddenly you have this brilliant idea
and this equation comes to mind.
We know these stories.
And but the truth is, like in Thomas Edison's case,
for example, we like to hold him up as this genius.
But of course, he had teams and teams and teams of people
working for him and with him to test
many, many iterations of his technologies.
And there were many more failures
than there were successes.
And so we really don't give enough space
for the way that talent and ability is actually created
and how we become the people we do over time.
Is there any space in your vision and philosophy
marry for innate differences between people?
Absolutely.
I do think that there's probably some innate characteristics,
some personality traits, some inclination
towards different kinds of interests that can come
when people are born and certainly when people are socialized
by their parents, by their teachers
and by important people in their environment.
But the truth is that we're all going to develop.
Nobody is born knowing how to read out of the womb.
No one is born, understanding how to solve important math
equations.
I do think that people have different kinds of starting
places and interests.
The question is, I think, whether you
want people to have a growth mindset about that inclination
or do you want them to have a fixed mindset and make it real?
I think what I'm hearing you say is that it's not
that there are no innate differences between people,
but that the more we focus on innate differences
that we cannot control, the less we'll
be able to focus on the things that we can control.
So to pick a completely different domain,
I'm a keen amateur swimmer.
You're not saying that if I really worked at it,
I could out swim Keri Ladecki.
But you are saying that to the extent
I believe that Keri Ladecki's ability is purely innate
and not the result of tons of hard work,
it makes it less likely that I'll put in the work
to become the best swimmer I can be.
That's absolutely correct, so well said.
In your surveys of college students, Mary,
you find that they often get messages, usually implicitly,
but often explicitly, that some people have what it takes
and others do not.
What are some of the things that students have reported to you?
So some of the things, the infamous things
that people will say, say at the start of a difficult math class
or a very large chemistry, 400-person auditorium class,
they might say, look to your left, look to your right,
only one of you is going to be here
at the end of the semester.
I couldn't think of anything more zero sum than that.
My professor said 30% of you will fail,
20% of you are going to get d is at the end of the term.
It happens every year, and it will happen this year to you.
A neuroscience professor who says,
if students aren't confident about your ability,
you should consider transferring to another instructor.
A chemistry professor who says,
if you don't get it early and quickly,
you just don't belong in this class.
So you found that students who perceive
that that professor endorses a fixed mindset,
experience a number of things, including feelings
of being in posture.
So even if they do well, they tell themselves,
it can't be true because I'm not a genius.
That's right.
We do find over and over that the students who see
that their instructor endorses this belief
that only some students have it and some students don't,
look to your left, look to your right,
only one of you is going to be here at the end of the term.
If they find themselves struggling,
if they find themselves making mistakes,
if they find themselves not getting things effortlessly
and perfectly right, immediately in the class,
they can often feel as though they're an imposter
in that classroom.
And that can really set them back in terms of seeking help,
asking questions, finding a study group to work with,
and all of the things that we know actually
contribute to student success.
One of your studies examined differences between men
and women to signals that their company had a fixed mindset
or a growth mindset.
Can you tell me what you found?
This was a set of studies that I conducted
with my former PhD student, Kathy Emerson.
What we were really looking at was the question
of why women remain underrepresented in leadership positions
around corporate America, right?
And our theory was that women are going to be really vigilant
to queues in the environment,
that signal to them whether they're valued and respected
or whether or not they're going to be
devalued and disrespected.
And so what we did in this study was men and women
looked at company mission statements and websites
that contained either fixed or growth mindset messaging.
And what we found across these three different experiments
and studies was that women more than men
trusted that fixed-minded company less
than the growth-minded company.
And then we also found that the mistrust
was actually driven by women's expectations
that they were going to be negatively stereotyped
by that company's management.
They know what the prototype for brilliance and genius
is in business.
And they thought that the management
and the leaders in that organization
would really compare them to that prototype
and find them lacking.
And then finally in our last study,
we found that mistrust of these companies
actually led women to disengage more
following negative feedback from that company.
Yeah.
Another effect of a culture of genius
is that it can cause people to decline new opportunities.
Why might this be Mary?
Yes, we have found this over and over in our work
in terms of thinking about engagement and interest.
We did these studies across many different institutions
and many different contexts.
And what we found was that when students perceive
their instructor to endorse more fixed mindset beliefs
when they feel as other in this culture of genius,
we find that these cultures of genius
lower students' interest not just in this particular chemistry
class or that particular biology class,
but it actually also lowers interest
in the professors' discipline more generally.
So now I'm less likely after finishing this class
to take Chem 201 or Biology 201.
And I start to close doors to different kinds
of opportunities and paths myself
because I simply notice I'm feeling this way in the classroom.
Now, cultures of genius can also lead to high stakes disasters,
because of course, when you are knowing someone a genius,
you stop being able to question if they could be wrong.
And how it might be connected to this culture of genius?
I do think that Elizabeth Holmes serves as a model
for the really the extremes of this fixed-minded behavior.
Holmes set out to really create this device, which maybe not
incidentally was dubbed the Edison,
another famous genius.
That would perform hundreds of tests
on a very tiny sample of blood.
And people were really trying to raise the bell
and suggest that maybe this isn't possible,
or maybe we need a different strategy,
or this simply isn't working, right?
But what she did was she would ignore the naysayers,
and she found individuals who really believed in her,
who compared her to geniuses that said
that she was like baithoven.
And soon she became this darling of the tech world.
And she found herself in really high-stakes situations
where she had to make good on hundreds of millions
of dollars in venture capital funding.
The problem was that, of course, the device didn't work.
And so instead of coming clean and asking her prestigious board
members or her mentors for help,
she lied to investors and employees, right?
She lied to the board and to federal regulators.
And also she pushed workers to falsify test results,
and workers sent blood samples to regular blood testing
labs for analysis, and then pretended
that the samples had been analyzed by the TheraNose machines.
The solution to the problem seems easy.
Just tell students and employees to have a growth mindset.
When we come back, why let approach does not always work,
and marries insight into how to bring about real change?
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Mary Murphy is the author of Cultures of Growth,
how the new science of mindset can transform
individuals, teams, and organizations.
She's interested in what schools, companies, and organizations
of all kinds do and don't do to get the best out of students,
employees, and citizens.
So Mary researchers have been trying for a while
to change some of the negative outcomes
we see with fixed mindsets.
Many of these interventions focused
on students or employees and try to get
them to see their own potential as malleable rather than fixed.
I'm wondering if you can give me a flavor
of the kinds of interventions that have been explored,
as well as what can be fairly described
as the mixed bag of results that came from these interventions.
So the kinds of interventions that had most often
been studied in the last 10 to 15 years
present students or employees with different kinds
of science-based materials that show individuals the brain's
ability to grow new connections, to create new pathways,
to actually generate new cells when people are really
in the process of learning.
When people are making mistakes and communicating really
how our intelligence, talents, and abilities
can shift over time by trying hard,
by trying new strategies when we get stuck,
by seeking help and the support of others,
that it really seeks to then instill that growth mindset.
And I would say that these direct to student
or direct to employee interventions
at first had a lot of success.
But as they have grown and as different groups have tried
to replicate them, they take different kinds of strategies
in that replication, they might try different kinds
of outcomes, and we are seeing variability in these results
over time, where some studies are replicating these effects.
And in others, there's finding challenges
and in finding effects or as large of effects
as some of the original studies had shown.
Hmm.
I want to talk a moment Mary about how some people
have taken this mixed bag of results
and drawn the conclusion that growth mindset as a whole
are not real or that they don't exist
or that interventions are completely ineffective.
Is that an accurate characterization
of the body of research?
I don't think that it is.
My research and the research of others
on this idea of the cultures of growth
actually can explain why we see some of this variability
in the results.
The truth is that our capacity to use our talent and our ability
is really going to depend on the people
and the context around us, right?
This is a social endeavor, learning and development.
And students and employees can have the strongest growth
mindset at the personal level, but if they find themselves
in these fixed-minded cultures of genius,
they're not going to be able to use or benefit from
that growth mindset.
So what I'm hearing you say Mary, is that when it comes
to changing a fixed mindset, it's not enough
just to focus on individuals.
You actually have to think about the culture
around that individual.
And there have been a number of studies now
that have looked at this question.
In 2021, you and a number of other researchers
ran a study that explored why growth mindset interventions
sometimes work and sometimes don't work.
You were looking at teachers and students.
Can you describe what the study did and what you found?
This study included a nationally representative sample
of more than 12,000 students.
And what we found in the study was that students
who participated in an online program
really designed to instill that growth mindset
we talked about earlier.
We did find overall that they earned higher grades
and they were more willing to take on challenges
by enrolling in more advanced classes over time.
However, we also looked at where this program did not work.
And where it didn't help students was when teachers
were in their fixed mindsets.
And when they were engaged in teaching practices
consistent with those fixed mindset beliefs,
or in other words, where they were creating
these cultures of genius.
And this is why cultures of growth are really crucial
for helping us get into, stay in,
and then maximize the benefits of our growth mindset.
If we have a strong culture of genius around us,
there's going to be very few opportunities
for us to actually engage in the process of learning
to make mistakes, to raise our hand and say,
I don't understand, can you tell me again?
We're not going to feel comfortable really
engaging in the behaviors that increase learning
and development and growth.
So in some ways, what we're doing
is we're really moving from perhaps the fixed mindset,
growth mindset dichotomy to really the idea
of a culture of genius and a culture of growth,
as sort of saying, this is not just about the individual.
It's about the world in which the individual
finds herself situated.
You once ran a study at a large multinational bank,
and you discovered that the mindsets of managers
played a very powerful role in how they behaved
toward employees and how employees then behaved themselves.
Tell me about the study.
We looked at measuring people's individual mindsets,
and then we looked at the mindset culture
that was being communicated in regular practices
and policies at the organization,
and in their routine interactions
that managers would have consistently with employees.
And what we found was that above and beyond the effects
of anyone's personal mindsets on the ground,
and terms of predicting their performance outcomes
and predicting their experiences in the organization,
how motivated they were, how satisfied,
how much they trusted the organization,
how committed to it they were,
we found that it was actually that mindset culture
as communicated in the way culture is
through these policies, practices, norms,
and leadership messages,
that the way in which managers gave feedback to individuals,
the way that they praised individuals, right?
Were they just signaling out individuals
who are already seen as high performers
and only giving those individuals praise?
Were they giving stretch assignments
to individuals who are only considered geniuses,
or did they really focus on developing
everybody on their team over time?
We saw that these kinds of manager, policies, and practices,
and the way that they ran their team meetings
to really sort of emphasize learning and growth, right?
Reflect on our mistakes and then brainstorm together
how we're gonna address them versus only talk
about the good things that are happening on our team
and hide mistakes.
That culture is the thing that predicted people's experiences
in that organization above and beyond
individuals' personal mindsets.
So of course, organizations and individuals
are not either entirely growth mindset,
entirely fixed mindset, entirely culture of genius,
entirely culture of growth.
They reside on a spectrum,
but I think what I'm hearing you say is that
there are a number of things that leaders, managers,
and teachers can do to deemphasize
the importance of innate brilliance.
And the first might be to simply stop talking
about brilliant geniuses.
Do you think that might be a first step, Mary?
I think that is important.
I also think that it can be important to tell stories,
real stories of how brilliance and geniuses
developed over time.
I don't know if you're familiar.
I bet that you are with Andrews Erickson's work,
where he sort of followed people in their trajectories
of the most talented and brilliant and gifted musician
and basketball player and artist, right,
across all these different disciplines.
And when you ask and you look at these people's life,
histories, what you see over and over
is that everyone close to them when they were little,
oftentimes wouldn't have predicted the trajectory
that they ultimately found themselves in, right?
That these kids were not distinguishable
from their peers most of the time.
That it actually took development
and their parents, teachers and coaches
and others really investing time, energy, and resources
to help those individuals become who they became.
And I think that that kind of story around genius, right,
is one that actually can give people the motivation
and some of the strategies that actually might be useful
to achieve their potential.
Hmm.
You told us earlier in this chat, Mary,
how your current institution in Indiana University
used to use this ranking system to award merit raises.
Are those lists still in practice today?
They are not that kind of stack ranking practice.
That went out the window many years ago.
We had a brilliant chair in our department
who decided that instead of that,
we're going to model the extent
to which faculty collaborate with each other
on papers and grants and projects.
And so he used this sophisticated modeling program
to actually produce a diagram
that would show all the interpersonal connections
within our department.
And he printed that out
and our department's collaboration network diagram
has now been posted in our front office.
So right by the faculty mailboxes,
every day when you walk in and you pick up your mail,
you're reminded about that value
as an organization, as a department.
I think this goes to how important it is
to really challenge the dominant
and competitive culture of genius
that exists in so many of our fields
and certainly in academia.
Hmm, we talked earlier in this conversation
about your survey of college students perceptions
of their instructors' mindsets.
There were a lot of fixed mindset comments,
but the survey also provided examples of messages
that teachers could send
that students perceived as growth oriented.
Can you read out some of them as well, Mary?
Sure.
Some of the examples that we found in this data
was students saying things like,
I had one math professor who described a student
from a previous semester who said,
he was not naturally good at math,
but the student regularly attended office hours
as questions and ended up getting the highest grade
in the class.
He, the teacher, told the story to encourage us,
the students to ask questions and attend office hours.
Another example that we saw in the data,
the students in my class had no idea
how to write a scientific paper,
but the professor had a 72 hour policy
where all students could turn in their paper 72 hours
before it was due and the TA would read it
and give them comments.
This helped teach us what you did write,
what you did wrong, and how to fix it
before it was submitted for a grade.
Another example is, my math teacher says,
you're all smart enough to get an A.
However, you're gonna find a few topics
difficult across the term.
If this is the case, please come to my office hours
so we can discuss the topic more in depth.
I'm here to help you.
And then finally, my professor always gave the class advice
about how to improve and do better in the course.
Especially after the class got their grades back from test,
he always told us how we could improve.
And I understand that in corporate settings,
there are company-wide practices
that can also be designed to convey a growth mindset.
I understand that Microsoft was once notorious
for having a fixed mindset culture.
It used to practice the stack ranking procedure
that we talked about earlier.
What was it like to work at Microsoft then and now?
In 2012, a reporter did an in-depth investigation
into Microsoft and interviewed a bunch of current
and former employees, and every single one of them
who were interviewed, cited stacked ranking
as the most destructive process inside Microsoft.
They said it was driving untold numbers of people out.
And so the practice at Microsoft required managers
to really grade employees against each other
and rank them on a scale of one to five.
And so if you had a team of 10 people,
even if that team was the highest performing
and most innovative team within the organization,
you still knew that no matter how good everyone was,
two people were gonna get a great review,
seven people are gonna get the mediocre review,
and one was going to get a terrible review.
And of course, as we've talked about,
this led employees to really focus
on competing with each other so much though
that when such a Nadella became CEO,
he pointed to this infamous cartoon
and it has an organizational chart showing guns
pointing in every direction.
And he said, this is the Microsoft that he inherited.
So in this system, even if you achieved your goals,
even if you achieved everything that was on your plate
and everything that was expected of you,
it didn't guarantee safety
because it was always possible that a colleague, right,
could achieve better than you.
And so what the experience was like in that company
was that employees were really focused
on suppressing their colleagues,
gaming the system with holding information, right?
In 2013, Microsoft threw out their stack ranking system
and instead, Sacha Nadella's wife actually shared
with him, Carol Dweck's book on mindset
and he was so inspired by this, he decided,
I'm really gonna take this mindset idea
and see if we can shift the mindset culture
of this organization through a lot of these practices
and policies that we've been talking about today.
So stack ranking goes out the door.
Now there's a new evaluation system
that has just been unrolled,
looking at people's potential,
looking at the opportunities,
a manager has been giving to individuals
and people's responses to those opportunities
for growth and development.
One of the things that they did was also revamped
the talent identification system within Microsoft.
And by doing that, it involves multiple days
of the CEO and his executive team
sort of sitting down with all the leaders
of the different arms of the organization
and talking about individuals who are seen
as having growth potential,
who really seem to be able to be benefited
by stretch assignments and by moving to different teams
taking on new roles within the organization
or actually getting different resources
in order to go deeper with the things
that they seem to be developing.
And by doing this, they really get a sense
of how the organization can actually support
a larger set of individuals
than what otherwise be recognized
in a traditional culture of genius.
I'm wondering, Mary, if one concern about encouraging
a culture of growth is that people will say,
you know, you're being too soft or lenient
and that these things will not produce success.
Do you hear that worry among the institutions you work with
that moving from, you know, this fixed mindset
to our culture of growth mindset
will create a culture of leniency?
I do hear that we are quote unquote lowering standards
when we are creating these cultures of growth.
But actually our research shows just the opposite
that actually high performers perform better
in cultures of growth because these environments
are more rigorous and more supportive.
They expect more from individuals, right?
And they expect more from a broader swath of individuals
than a culture of genius does.
We see, if you imagine this in a classroom context, right?
What we see in the data from very large introductory
STEM classes is that when students perceive their instructor
to have more of a growth mindset,
it's not that it's rainbows and sunshine, right?
And unicorns all day long, students actually report
a good amount of frustration
and a good amount of annoyance sometimes in those classes
because the instructor holds everyone
to such high standards of continuous growth and development.
So even if you're already doing well,
even those individuals should show some growth
and development in their trajectory.
And it can be really rigorous and difficult
in these environments.
And so this is one of those myths about mindset culture
that cultures of growth are soft and always affirming
and less rigorous, dumbing down the standards.
And actually we see just the opposite in the data.
So all of us can be culture creators in our own lives
and in the lives of our families and workplaces.
And I understand that you and your husband Victor
have thought about these questions
in the context of your marriage.
Can you describe one domain for me
where you had maybe a fixed mindset about Victor
and he had a fixed mindset about you
and how you've tried to move from that
to more of a growth mindset?
You know, anytime you have two or more people
that interact with each other,
you're gonna have a mindset culture, right?
About how you think about each one of your skills
and abilities.
So my husband and Victor and I have really tried to notice
where we're putting ourselves and each other
into these kinds of fixed-minded boxes
and to do some small experiments
that kind of challenge these assumptions
and showing ourselves, reminding ourselves
that we're fully capable of growth and change.
So one of my fixed mindset beliefs about Victor
is that he's too modest, he's self-effacing,
but he's also, frankly, in his own right, a badass.
He, the work he does in his job as a law professor
is really to transform courts
and judicial systems nationally.
So what I've done is to really work to notice
and highlight for myself and for him different places
where I see him putting forward his findings
and his contributions in a way that makes him feel comfortable
but also in a way that he shows what he has discovered.
For his part, Victor's fixed mindset belief about me
is somewhat accurate, that I enjoy systems
and really being in control.
And so he's made a lot of efforts to say something to me
when he notices that I'm sitting back
and encouraging other people to call the shots.
I'll also share that this summer,
Victor noticed that I'd really developed
an interest in the cello.
So he encouraged me to find a teacher here
in Bloomington and he's done a million little things
to really take things off my plate
so I can go to lessons and practice at home.
And so I think that in personal relationships,
when we can support the aspirational selves
we really like to be and who we'd like to become,
it can inspire in us a courage
to kind of seek out more of those cultures of growth
and create those cultures of growth for ourselves.
How good are you at the cello right now?
Well, I will tell you that I just graduated
from being able to pick, Mary had a little lamb
and Twinkle Twinkle to Boeing
and it is a revolution.
It is so fantastic.
I'm really looking forward to where it's gonna take me.
Will you share some of your playing with us, Mary?
Absolutely not.
I do have the telem in the other room, but still,
no, it's too embarrassing.
I was gonna let it go, but then I remembered,
Mary had spent the last 45 minutes telling me
that we all needed to have a growth mindset.
The essence of having a growth mindset,
to have the courage to be a beginner.
I reminded her of her own lesson.
Oh gosh, Shankar, have we created a culture of growth?
That's not gonna judge.
Not gonna judge this performance.
Absolutely.
Okay, we'll see how this goes.
Mary Murphy is the author of Cultures of Growth,
how the new science of mindset can transform individuals,
teams and organizations.
Mary, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Thank you, Shankar, it's been such a pleasure.
Okay, that was that, I hope you enjoyed it, it was fun for me. Bye.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul,
Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick,
Nick Woodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
Next week, we continue our Innovation 2.0 series
with a look at a secret superpower that we all have.
It might make you rethink your interactions
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We have these two people interacting with one another,
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