Growth Mindset

When American psychologist Carol Dweck published her book “Mindset” in 2006 it made waves in the education world and beyond. Drawing on her work developing mindset theory, it offered a shift in perspective: instead of assuming that someone’s ability was fixed, it invited us to see ability, intelligence and competence as things that could be developed over time, through effort, feedback and sometimes struggle. Her work sits within a broader school of psychological thought that recognises how strongly our beliefs shape our behaviour, and, ultimately, our lives. In the case of “growth mindset”, the claim is that what we believe about our abilities and intelligence profoundly influences how we respond to challenge, the effort we make and therefore the opportunities we have to learn and grow

As Dweck puts it:

“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work – brains and talent are just the starting point.”

For many educators, this felt hopeful and also perhaps a little confronting. It asked us not to locate difficulty or failure in the student and instead to look more closely at the beliefs shaping the learning environment – both our own and theirs. Rather than asking “What’s wrong with this student?”, we were encouraged to ask “What messages are they receiving about effort, ability and failure?”

School student with her hand raised in a classroom, smiling

Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva

Perhaps because I came across Dweck’s work on mindset fairly early in my career, when I was thinking a lot about how to orient myself and be in work and education, it undoubtedly shaped my own world view. When my three-year-old gets frustrated because she can’t write her name perfectly, I remind her that she can’t do it yet. I make a conscious effort to praise her for effort rather than “cleverness” (despite my entirely biased view of her intelligence!). Not because I necessarily think praise alone changes outcomes, but because I do want to reinforce the idea that it’s good to keep trying at things that are hard.

Are psychological safety and growth mindset connected?

So when, recently, I started to hear more organisations and businesses talk about growth mindset, my ears pricked up. I was asked by a couple of people how psychological safety connects with growth mindset, and my initial response was pretty positive: the two concepts support each other, they’re complementary.

Much of what we’re doing when we talk about fostering psychologically safer workplaces is creating the conditions for people to learn together. Teams that can share ideas, ask questions, raise concerns and admit mistakes are teams that can adapt and improve.

And these behaviours are exactly the sort of behaviours we would expect and hope to see when someone has a growth mindset. If we see people asking questions, admitting uncertainty, sharing half-baked ideas and trying things that might not work, they’re all reasonably good indicators that the person has a growth mindset – they believe they can learn and get better. But we also need to remember that every one of those behaviours carries interpersonal risk: the risk of looking foolish, being judged, losing status or being blamed for trying something that didn’t work.

Psychological safety lowers that risk. In a sense, psychological safety reduces the interpersonal cost of learning together enough for people to act on their growth-oriented beliefs. Even if we have a growth mindset, and believe deeply that learning is possible, without psychological safety we may well still decide it’s not safe to “learn out loud” here.

There’s a second, subtler connection too – we know that fostering psychological safety often means we need to do the difficult work of changing our behaviours and approaches, even unlearning behaviours we previously thought were helpful. If instead, we adopt an entrenched view about our abilities, something more akin to a fixed mindset, perhaps telling ourselves we’re just “not a team player,” or “not cut out for leadership,” or as I heard recently “bad at communication,” then we miss the fact that all of this is learnable too.

So a growth mindset, at its best, can support the work of building psychologically safer environments, and sustaining that over time. If we genuinely believe that people, ourselves included, can grow through effort and feedback, then interpersonal risk-taking has a purpose. Believing in the possibility of growth and improvement gives us a reason to share feedback rather than avoid it, and even more importantly, a reason not to write someone off after a single mistake.

One way I sometimes frame the distinction is this: psychological safety is about our beliefs regarding the environment we’re in; growth mindset is about our beliefs regarding the people in that environment, including ourselves.

The problem with growth mindset

Where things start to go wrong is when “growth mindset” is lifted out of its original context and used in ways that stretch, or outright distort, Dweck’s work. It’s not uncommon to see organisations urging employees to “adopt a growth mindset” as the business scales or targets become more demanding. And this is where things get tricky from a psychological safety perspective.

Growth mindset was never about relentless positivity, believing harder, or insisting that everything is possible if you just try hard enough. It’s grounded in effort, struggle, feedback and learning over time. When it gets reduced to “just be positive” or “push through”, the term becomes a flimsy platitude, and one that can easily be weaponised. “You’re struggling because you don’t have enough of a growth mindset,” is not helpful feedback; it’s dismissal. When growth mindset is misrepresented in this way, it is all too often used to judge people for not performing at 100% (or more) all the time, or manipulate them into accepting unreasonable workloads or demands.

Used this way, growth mindset rhetoric can damage psychological safety, much like toxic positivity does. It risks creating spaces where only good news and confident updates are welcome.

This is especially true when organisations talk about growth mindset without attending to power, context or collective responsibility. Behaviour does not arise in a vacuum; it is shaped by the conditions people are working in. When that context remains unchanged, growth mindset language can feel hollow and even coercive. Responsibility shifts from the organisation “we need to listen better and make it safer” to the individual “you need to be bolder, braver and more ambitious.”

And I have noticed that doggedly insisting everyone adopts a growth mindset can easily slide into the moralistic or judgemental. Even the way the concept divides people into two camps – those who have a growth mindset and those who have a fixed one – can be quite damaging. I once heard a headteacher say they would never employ a teacher who talked in their job interview about helping students “meet their potential”, reading the phrase as evidence of a fixed mindset. Now, you might reasonably want to explore what the teacher meant – whether they were imagining potential as a ceiling or an open-ended capacity – but dismissing someone’s entire professional capability on the basis of a single phrase uttered at an interview feels somewhat harsh, and leaves little room for discussion, nuance or learning.

The thorny ethical bit

There’s also a broader ethical issue here about organisations seeking to “change people’s mindsets”, rather than recognising an important boundary, which is people’s right to cognitive sovereignty. What organisations ultimately need is behaviour: people doing the work well, and also speaking up, experimenting, learning and improving so the work can be done better next time. But is it appropriate for employers to stray into employees’ inner worlds – into their beliefs, attitudes and ways of making sense of themselves?

As psych safety community member Paul Tevis puts it:

“I think that mindset and beliefs are a perfectly reasonable focus for your own development, but it’s the wrong thing for managers and organizations to try to affect… what organizations should actually care about is behavior, because that’s what drives performance… and your employer doesn’t own your brain. They only rent it.”

This is where work on psychological safety offers an important corrective. It helps guard against the risk of overreach – of making psychological judgements or attempting interventions we’re neither qualified to make nor entitled to impose. It helps keep us focused on the environment, not on “fixing people”.

And although we define psychological safety as a “shared belief”, what we’re really talking about is the perceived interpersonal risk of a situation. We don’t shift that by trying to implant different beliefs into people’s minds. We shift it by changing the environment – by ensuring that we provide consistent social proof that it really is safe to speak up, to question, to make mistakes and to learn.

I think where I land is this: mindset doesn’t override context and we can’t simply will our way into growth if the environment punishes learning behaviours. If it’s a choice between asking how we can change our behaviour to make workplaces safer for everyone, and asking everyone else to change their mindsets, I’ll choose the former every time.