How team collaboration shapes a culture of growth mindset

Executive overview

Most organizations apply growth mindset wrong: treating it as a fixed trait you either have or don't, locating it only in the individual, and reducing it to "try harder." Mindset is actually a continuum shaped by the environment around you.

Mary Murphy's research shows that culture — not personality — is the primary driver of whether people operate from a fixed or growth mindset. Leaders can deliberately design that culture.

The most powerful lever is collaboration: how you structure it, incentivize it, and measure it determines whether your team learns or competes.

Three ways we get mindset wrong

• Fixed vs. growth is a continuum, not a binary — everyone carries both
• Mindset isn't only internal; the environment around you shifts where you land on that continuum
• Effort alone isn't the answer — effective effort means checking whether your direction is right and seeking help when it isn't

Cultures of genius vs. cultures of growth

• Culture of genius: belief that talent is fixed; produces internal competition, information hoarding, risk aversion, unethical shortcuts
• Culture of growth: collaboration is incentivized; mistakes are normalized and treated as learning data; good ideas can come from anywhere
• Cultures of growth consistently outperform on innovation, resilience, and financial results — including revenue, market share, and fundraising
• In cultures of genius, strategy swings with the gut of the "resident genius" rather than shared data
• Cultures of growth are more data-obsessed, not less — metrics are shared widely and reviewed continuously, not just at year-end

Four mindset triggers

Research identified four predictable situations that shift people along the mindset continuum:

• Evaluative situations (being assessed or ranked)
• High-effort situations (stretching beyond current capability)
• Critical feedback
• The success of others

How collaboration is structured overrides all four — it can amplify or dampen fixed-mindset responses depending on whether it's set up as internal competition or shared learning.

Common leadership mistakes

• Asking "how do we avoid hiring fixed-mindset people?" — wrong framing; everyone has both mindsets
• Giving the most challenging, prestigious assignments only to identified "high potentials" signals a ceiling to everyone else
• Reserving stretch work for stars triggers disengagement, frustration, and subtle unethical behavior in the rest of the team
• Well-intentioned differentiation creates the exact internal competition that undermines growth culture

Running a cues audit

• Culture is what people actually say and do on the ground — not what's in mission statements
• A cues audit examines policies, practices, norms, meeting structures, praise language, and how mistakes are handled
• Individuals from underrepresented groups are often the sharpest observers of actual culture — start with them as expert informants
• Compare what people at different levels of the hierarchy identify as cultural cues — the gaps are the signal
• Use findings to identify practices that unintentionally communicate "you either have it or you don't," then revise or clarify them

Recasting internal competition

• Don't eliminate competition — recast it: compete on learning and contribution, not on who's the resident genius
• Tie incentives (financial and non-financial) to collaborative behaviors, not just individual output
• At Pepsi, annual bonuses are partly tied to what individuals did to help others succeed
• Non-financial incentives (e.g., curated reading resources) signal that continuous learning is a core organizational value
• When praising performance, tell the story of the journey — distance traveled, strategies used — not just the outcome; this inspires rather than threatens others

Redesigning performance ratings

• Stack ranking is re-emerging in tech — it reliably produces cultures of genius with all the associated downsides
• Dean Carter at Patagonia replaced the standard evaluation cycle with an opt-in, employee-driven tool focused on individual and organizational goals
• The shift: from extractive (what we take from people) to regenerative (what we invest back into people)
• Result: more relevant performance data, freed-up manager time, and a system employees actively welcomed
• The framework doesn't have to be Patagonia's exact model — the principle is designing ratings around learning and development goals, not proof-and-perform dynamics