How to promote a growth mindset in your business.

by | Nov 12, 2021 | Founder guides, management, ScaleUp

Over the 200+ boards and teams I’ve worked with, I keep meeting two types of leaders.

Fixed-mindset leaders think ability is set. You’re either “a natural” or you’re not. They praise talent, avoid coaching, deflect blame, and shut down ideas that don’t fit their view. Feedback (if you get any) is about who’s smart, not what to try next.

Growth-mindset leaders assume skills can be built. They coach, they’re curious, they take responsibility, and they hire for hunger to learn. Feedback is specific, actionable, and about progress.

How to spot them (fast)

Fixed-mindset leaders:

  • Divide people into “competent” or “incompetent”.
  • Hire for pedigree, not potential.
  • Treat mistakes as personal failings and discourage dissent.
  • Praise intelligence over effort, strategy and improvement.

Growth-mindset leaders:

  • Eyes light up at new ideas; they ask, “Tell me more.”
  • Embrace challenges and experiment openly.
  • Use failures as case studies, not witch hunts.
  • Give feedback that builds skill, not ego.

The impact on your team

In growth-mindset organisations, people trust each other more, feel a sense of ownership, and push further. They try harder, recover faster, and contribute more. Carol Dweck’s research consistently shows that teams with a growth mindset report higher levels of trust, ownership, support for smart risk-taking, and a stronger innovation culture. The pattern is obvious: invest in learning and you unlock performance.

Build a growth-mindset workplace

What it looks like:

  • Effort, discipline and perseverance are valued above “talent”.
  • Coaching is normal; critical thinking is a skill that is trained, not assumed.
  • Experiments are encouraged; learning is more important than being right.
  • Failures are analysed, not buried.
  • People are trusted to take responsibility and speak up.
  • Feedback is specific, timely, and focused on improvement.

Core belief: talent is a starting point; effort and good strategy turn it into results.

Questions worth asking yourself (and your team)

  • Do people feel judged or developed?
  • How are mistakes handled—defence or diagnosis?
  • Are promotions and praise tied to outcomes only, or also to effort, learning and better strategy?
  • Do we encourage building new skills, cross-team collaboration and healthy dissent?
  • Are high performers celebrated for team impact—or tolerated despite toxic behaviour?
  • When feedback lands, do we apply it?

If those answers make you uncomfortable, good. That’s the point.

Three manager moves (start this week)

1) Give growth-oriented feedback
Tie feedback to behaviours and next steps. Praise effort, smart persistence and better strategy—not IQ theatre. Keep people in control of their improvement: “Here’s what to try, here’s how we’ll measure it, here’s when we’ll review.”

2) Normalise experimentation
Not every initiative will land. Create lightweight tests, short feedback loops, and a simple decision framework:

  • What problem are we solving?
  • Why now?
  • What’s the cost of not acting?
  • What’s the smallest useful test?
  • How does it rank versus other priorities?

3) Treat mistakes as assets
Run quick post-mortems (five whys, root cause, next experiment). Share your own mistakes; managers who model vulnerability create teams that learn quickly instead of hiding.

Three leadership moves (set the tone)

1) Create learning opportunities
Budget for skills that compound: communication, conflict handling, estimation, decision-making, prioritisation—not just technical depth. Push cross-domain learning; the best ideas often live in the next trench over.

2) Message it right
Stop selling “best and brightest”. Sell growth, development and standards. Reward the behaviours that produce results at scale—effort, strategy, collaboration, intelligent risk. Zero tolerance for toxic stars.

3) Defeat groupthink
Bake in dissent: rotate a devil’s advocate, run structured debates, and collect anonymous input before meetings. Independent thinkers can still be great team players—if you design for it.

Summary

Fixed-mindset cultures worship talent, punish mistakes, and drift into politics and corner-cutting.
Growth-mindset cultures reward learning, experimentation and ownership, and outperform over time.

If you want help shifting your culture from “prove you’re smart” to “get better every week,” that’s exactly the work I do with founders: diagnose the current state, train managers, rewire feedback and incentives, and set up simple systems that make learning the default.