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The way you think about your own abilities may matter a lot. Business leaders who believe their skills and intelligence are fixed traits tend to avoid risk, resist feedback, and struggle to adapt. Meanwhile, those who believe in their own capacity to grow tend to build stronger teams, navigate challenges more effectively, and drive better results.
These two orientations are known as a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, respectively, and understanding the difference between them could reshape the way you lead.
Key Points
• Someone with a growth mindset believes that intelligence, talent, and skills can be developed over time through hard work, practice, and a willingness to learn from feedback.
• A person with a fixed mindset holds that intelligence and talent are largely innate traits — qualities you are essentially born with — leaving little room for improvement or new skill acquisition.
• Psychologist Carol Dweck introduced these concepts in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” arguing that a growth mindset fosters a love of learning and transforms challenges into opportunities.
• Adopting a growth mindset helps businesses stay resilient, embrace iterative thinking, identify market gaps, and build teams that collaborate more effectively through interpersonal trust.
• Developing a growth mindset as a leader means embracing challenges and failures as learning opportunities, staying curious, keeping an open mind, and valuing process over outcomes.
What Is a Growth Mindset vs a Fixed Mindset?
When it comes to growing a business, your mindset may matter more than you realize.
A person with a growth mindset believes that intelligence, talent, and skills can be learned over time through hard work. For example, say you feel that you’re terrible at public speaking. If you have a growth mindset, you’d believe that you can improve that skill by getting feedback and practicing. Someone with a growth mindset generally tends to believe that if they aren’t good at something, it’s just that they aren’t good at it yet.
Someone with a fixed mindset, on the other hand, holds that intelligence, talent, and skills are largely innate – essentially traits that you’re born with. If you have this mindset, you may believe that if you aren’t good at public speaking already, you never will be, and therefore you may pursue only activities or jobs that don’t require it.
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The Origins of Mindset Theory
Psychologist Carol Dweck developed the concepts of growth and fixed mindsets in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” In the book, she posits that understanding mindset should be considered an important business fundamental, arguing that a growth mindset is the key to success in most areas of life as it fosters a love of learning and the ability to see challenges as opportunities.
People with a fixed mindset may avoid challenges, which can hinder their personal and professional growth.
How a Fixed Mindset Shows Up in Leadership
A fixed mindset can be a drag on leadership performance exactly because it includes little room for the improvement or acquisition of new skills. Some of the ways fixed mindset can show up in leadership include:
• Shying away from unfamiliar things: A person with a fixed mindset may tend to “stick to their lane” rather than try things that may challenge the status quo. In business, this can limit areas of growth.
• Resistance to feedback. Feedback may not be seen as constructive or as something that could lead to improvements. Those with a fixed mindset might get defensive, taking feedback as criticism or an attack on their abilities.
• A belief that talent is static. A leader who believes in a fixed mindset may not feel that those around them are able to grow either. As a result, they may not foster a culture of encouragement and continual learning.
• Micromanagement. Poor management is one of the reasons that small businesses fail. If you don’t believe that other people’s skills can change, you may not trust them to do their tasks well. As a result, you might delegate inefficiently or become unnecessarily involved in projects.
• Aversion to failure. Failure often feels painful. However, it can be an important growing tool, helping you learn which paths not to pursue. Leaders with fixed mindsets may avoid situations that could lead to failure, which can cause stagnation. Or worse, they may punish failure as a flaw in others.
How a Growth Mindset Drives Business Performance
Changing your mindset could potentially be a way to improve your business performance. While a fixed mindset can stifle performance, a growth mindset may drive success.
For one thing, a growth mindset allows you to explore new fields and different paths for growth. It can help you identify gaps in the market, for instance, and acquire the skills required to address those needs.
A growth mindset helps you make the most of iterative thinking. A lot of what makes a business successful is trying things, seeing what works, and dropping what doesn’t. Feedback and constructive criticism can be used to make products and services stronger. And when you hit a dead end, a growth mindset can give you the capacity to pivot from that business model to another that works better.
A growth mindset helps you remain resilient in the face of challenges. Knowing that you can learn from a mistake, and even develop new skills to avoid missteps in the future, helps ensure that difficult situations can be learning opportunities rather than catastrophes.
Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset in Team Building and Culture
Unsurprisingly, a growth mindset is beneficial in company culture as well. It means that teams are more likely to develop interpersonal trust, which allows them to take more calculated risks and improves collaboration.
A key step is for business leaders to model growth mindsets for their employees. Building a company environment that encourages constructive feedback and treats failures as learning opportunities enables workers to feel comfortable acting on their growth mindsets.
How to Shift from a Fixed Mindset to a Growth Mindset
One of the benefits of being an entrepreneur is being able to take your business in new and exciting directions. You can start by developing your growth mindset. Consider the following:
• Embrace challenges: People with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges. Learn to embrace them as opportunities that could lead to greater things. Start small, looking for little ways to get out of your comfort zone.
• Reframe failures and mistakes: An important tip for small businesses: Instead of viewing failure as a dead end, consider it a learning opportunity. Take a close look at what went wrong, figure out what you can do differently in the future, and pursue the skills you’ll need to get there.
• Stay curious: Continual learning helps you remain adaptive. Cultivate curiosity, whether that’s reading industry reports, asking employees for feedback, or looking for inspiration in complete unrelated fields.
• Value process over outcome: Work to become less focused on outcomes. Celebrate efforts that you put in along the way, as this is often where development and skill building truly take place. It’s all about the journey, not the destination.
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The Takeaway
Your mindset has real implications for how you lead, how your team performs, and how your business grows. A fixed mindset can quietly limit potential, while a growth mindset turns challenges into opportunities. The good news is that mindset itself isn’t fixed. With intention and practice, leaders can shift the way they think, and in doing so, change the trajectory of their business.
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FAQ
What is the main difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset?
A growth mindset holds that intelligence, skills, and talent can be learned, while a fixed mindset considers them to be innate traits.
Can a business leader have both a fixed and a growth mindset?
Fixed and growth mindsets exist on either end of a spectrum. That means there’s a lot of area in the middle. So a business leader could certainly exhibit one type of mindset in some situations but lean toward the other in different circumstances. Becoming aware of each type of mindset, however, can help you identify when you might be slipping into each mode and whether it’s serving you.
How does a fixed mindset affect company culture?
A fixed mindset vs. a growth mindset can have negative effects on company culture if it stifles employees’ ability to learn and grow or makes them unwilling to take calculated risks working in teams.
What are some practical ways to develop a growth mindset as a leader?
To develop a growth mindset as a leader, learn to embrace challenges and failure, taking them both as learning opportunities. Stay curious and keep an open mind. And learn to value process over outcomes.
Is a growth mindset always better than a fixed mindset in business?
Not necessarily. In some cases, there can be benefits to a fixed mindset vs. growth mindset. For example, it can help you focus on responsibilities that involve systems, routings, and controls, which require a narrower, less creative type of thinking. A growth mindset can be seen as a type of broader thinking that may not help as much with set, precise tasks.
Photo credit: iStock/Rowan Jordan
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