decision making.
Are we going to have a problem finding leaders in the future? You can’t pick up a magazine or turn on the radio without hearing about the problem of praise in the workplace. We could have seen it coming.
We’ve talked about all the well-meaning parents who’ve tried to boost their children’s self-esteem by telling them how smart and talented they are. And we’ve talked about all the negative effects of this kind of praise. Well, these children of praise have now entered the workforce, and sure enough, many can’t function without getting a sticker for their every move. Instead of yearly bonuses, some companies are giving quarterly or even monthly bonuses. Instead of employee of the month, it’s the employee of the day. Companies are calling in consultants to teach them how best to lavish rewards on this overpraised generation. We now have a workforce full of people who need constant reassurance and can’t take criticism. Not a recipe for success in business, where taking on challenges, showing persistence, and admitting and correcting mistakes are essential.
Why are businesses perpetuating the problem? Why are they continuing the same misguided practices of the overpraising parents, and paying money to consultants to show them how to do it? Maybe we need to step back from this problem and take another perspective.
If the wrong kinds of praise lead kids down the path of entitlement, dependence, and fragility, maybe the right kinds of praise can lead them down the path of hard work and greater hardiness. We have shown in our research that with the right kinds of feedback even adults can be motivated to choose challenging tasks and confront their mistakes.
What would this feedback look or sound like in the workplace? Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism. Maybe it could be praise for not needing constant praise!
Through a skewed sense of how to love their children, many parents in the ’90s (and, unfortunately, many parents of the ’00s) abdicated their responsibility. Although corporations are not usually in the business of picking up where parents left off, they may need to this time. If businesses don’t play a role in developing a more mature and growth-minded workforce, where will the leaders of the future come from?
One of the key things that the successful businessperson must be good at is negotiation. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how a business could thrive without skilled negotiators at the helm. Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn have shown that mindsets have an important impact on negotiation success. In one study, they taught people either a fixed or a growth mindset about negotiation skills. Half of the participants read an article called “Negotiation Ability, Like Plaster, Is Pretty Stable Over Time.” The other half read one called “Negotiation Ability Is Changeable a Can Be Developed.” To give you a flavor for the articles, the growth mindset article started by saying, “While it used to be believed that negotiating was a fixed skill that people were either born with or not, experts in the field now believe that negotiating is a dynamic skill that can be cultivated and developed over a lifetime.”
The participants were then asked to select the kind of negotiation task they wanted. They could choose one that showed off their negotiation skills, although they would not learn anything new. Or they could choose one in which they might make mistakes and get confused, but they would learn some useful negotiation skills. Almost half (47 percent) of the people who were taught the fixed mindset about negotiation skills chose the task that simply showed off their skills, but only 12 percent of those who were taught the growth mindset cared to pursue this show-offy task. This means that 88 percent of the people who learned a growth mindset wanted to dig into the task that would improve their negotiation skills.
In their next study, Kray and Haselhuhn monitored people as they engaged in negotiations. Again, half of the people were given a fixed mindset about negotiation skills and the other half were given a growth mindset. The people, two at a time, engaged in an employment negotiation. In each pair, one person was the job candidate and the other was the recruiter, and they negotiated on eight issues, including salary, vacation time, and benefits. By the end of the negotiation, those with the growth mindset were the clear winners, doing almost twice as well as those with the fixed mindset. The people who had learned the growth mindset persevered through the rough spots and stalemates to gain more favorable outcomes.
In three final studies, the researchers looked at MBA students enrolled in a course on negotiation. Here they measured the mindsets the MBA students already had, asking them how much they agreed with fixed mindset statements (“The kind of negotiator someone is is very basic and it can’t be changed very much,” “Good negotiators are born that way”) and growth mindset statements (“All people can change even their most basic negotiation qualities,” “In negotiations, experience is a great teacher”). Similar to before, they found that the more of a growth mindset the student had, the better he or she did on the negotiation task.
But does a growth mindset make people good just at getting their own way? Often negotiations require people to understand and try to serve the other person’s interests as well. Ideally, at the end of a negotiation, both parties feel their needs have been met. In a study with a more challenging negotiation task, those with a growth mindset were able to get beyond initial failures by constructing a deal that addressed
Finally, a growth mindset promoted greater learning. Those MBA students who endorsed a growth mindset on the first day of the negotiation course earned higher final grades in the course weeks later. This grade was based on performance on written assignments, in class discussions, and during class presentations, and reflected a deeper comprehension of negotiation theory and practice.
Millions of dollars and thousands of hours are spent each year trying to teach leaders and managers how to coach their employees and give them effectivefeedback. Yet much of this training is ineffective, and many leaders and mangers remain poor coaches. Is that because this can’t be trained? No, that’s not the reason. Research sheds light on why corporate training often fails.
Studies by Peter Heslin, Don VandeWalle, and Gary Latham show that many managers do not believe in personal change. These fixed-mindset managers simply look for existing talent—they judge employees as competent or incompetent at the start and that’s that. They do relatively little developmental coaching and when employees
Managers with a growth mindset think it’s nice to have talent, but that’s just the starting point. These managers are more committed to their employees’ development, and to their own. They give a great deal more developmental coaching, they notice improvement in employees’ performance, and they welcome critiques from their employees.
Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers. Heslin and his colleagues conducted a brief workshop based on well-established psychological principles. (By the way, with a few changes, it could just as easily be used to promote a growth mindset in teachers or coaches.) The workshop starts off with a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning. As with our “Brainology” workshop (described in chapter 8), it’s always compelling for people to understand how dynamic the brain is and how it changes with learning. The article goes on to talk about how change is possible throughout life and how people can develop their abilities at most tasks with coaching and practice. Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance.
The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protege about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they
