“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
Not something you’d expect to hear from a CEO. But it captures something that separates the leaders who keep growing from those who stop.
In her groundbreaking book Mindset: The Psychology of Success, Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck argued that people have either fixed or growth mindsets. Those with fixed mindsets believe their abilities are essentially set: they focus on what they’re naturally good at and tend to give up prematurely on things they’re not, to avoid failure. Those with growth mindsets believe that failing is part of the learning process, and persist until they get better.
Dr. Eve Grodnitzky, who extended Dweck’s work, has found that people with fixed mindsets can develop growth mindsets by systematically seeking out feedback. Successful organizations create cultures that actively encourage people at every level to welcome constructive criticism and provide it to each other. To assume not that they are right, but that they are wrong, and the goal is to be less wrong.
A useful frame: don’t call them failures. Call them experiments. What did you learn? What would you do differently? What’s the minimum-viable next test?
The goal, as Grodnitzky puts it, is to “fail better each time in pursuit of awesome.”
The question for you and your organization: Are you creating a culture where people bring you their failures as fast as they bring you their wins? If not, what are they hiding, and what is that costing you?
These are the conversations we have in every Vistage room.
If this post hit home, the next step is to start a conversation.