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GrowthGroup

My Thoughts

Why Growth Mindset Training is Actually Sabotaging Your Team (And What to Do Instead)

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The phrase "growth mindset" makes me want to throw my laptop out the window. There, I said it.

After seventeen years of consulting with Australian businesses - from mining companies in Perth to tech startups in Melbourne - I've watched this well-intentioned concept get butchered beyond recognition. Every second manager I meet now thinks they're Carol Dweck because they stuck a motivational poster on the wall and told their team to "embrace challenges."

But here's the controversial bit: most organisations implementing growth mindset training are actually making their teams worse. Not better. Worse.

The Growth Mindset Gold Rush

Around 2019, I was running leadership workshops for a major logistics company (I won't name them, but let's just say they move a lot of parcels). The CEO had just returned from a conference where some keynote speaker had evangelised about growth mindset. Within three months, every meeting began with someone talking about "learning opportunities" and "the power of yet."

Productivity dropped 23%. Staff turnover increased. The worst part? Management couldn't understand why their shiny new mindset wasn't working.

That's when I realised we'd fundamentally misunderstood what Dweck was actually saying.

What Everyone Gets Wrong

Most growth mindset training focuses on the individual. "Change your thinking! Embrace failure! Be resilient!" But this completely ignores the environment where that thinking is supposed to flourish.

You can't plant seeds in concrete and expect them to grow. Similarly, you can't tell someone to have a growth mindset while your organisation punishes mistakes, hoards information, and promotes based on politics rather than performance.

I've seen companies spend thousands on mindset coaching while maintaining performance review systems that literally rank employees against each other. It's like trying to teach swimming while keeping people in straightjackets.

The Australian Context Problem

Here's something that bugs me specifically about how growth mindset gets implemented in Australia. We've got this cultural tendency to cut down tall poppies, right? But then we import American-style "you can achieve anything" messaging without adapting it to our context.

In my experience working across Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne, successful growth mindset implementation looks different in each city. Melbourne teams respond well to collaborative learning approaches. Sydney prefers competitive growth challenges. Perth values practical, no-nonsense skill development. Brisbane likes relationship-based mentoring.

Yet most training programs deliver identical content everywhere. It's mental.

What Actually Works (Based on Real Data)

After tracking outcomes across 47 different implementations, here's what moves the needle:

Environment First, Mindset Second Before anyone talks about growth mindset, fix your systems. Can people actually take risks without career suicide? Do you reward learning or just results? If your promotion criteria don't include "experimented and learned from failure," you're wasting everyone's time.

Micro-Failures, Not Epic Journeys The best growth cultures I've observed focus on tiny, frequent failures rather than grand transformational stories. Let people mess up small things regularly. A sales rep trying a new approach with one client. An admin testing a different filing system. Small bets, quick feedback, minimal consequences.

Make Learning Visible Companies like Atlassian (and yes, I'm name-dropping because they actually do this well) have "failure parties" where teams share what didn't work. Not in a punishment way - in a "this information is valuable to everyone" way.

But most organisations? They say they want innovation while keeping their "lessons learned" sessions private and blame-focused.

Psychological Safety Beats Positive Thinking You know what's more powerful than teaching someone to embrace challenges? Creating an environment where they feel safe to voice doubts, ask stupid questions, and admit when they're struggling.

I worked with a manufacturing team in Adelaide where the supervisor started every shift by asking "What are you unsure about today?" Production quality improved 31% in six months. Not because people suddenly developed better mindsets, but because they felt safe to highlight problems before they became disasters.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Individual Responsibility

Here's where I'll probably lose some readers: most growth mindset training places unfair responsibility on individuals to overcome systemic problems.

Telling someone in a toxic workplace to "see setbacks as opportunities" isn't empowering - it's gaslighting. If your team lacks growth mindset, look at your leadership first. Are you modelling curiosity? Do you admit your own mistakes? When was the last time you changed your opinion based on new information?

I remember working with a general manager who complained his team wasn't "growth-oriented enough." During our session, I asked him to name three things he'd learned from his team in the past month. Silence. Complete silence.

How can you expect your team to be open to learning if you're not?

The Training That Works

When I design growth mindset programs now, 70% of the content focuses on leaders and systems, not individual employees. We start with questions like:

  • What happens when someone makes a mistake here?
  • How do you celebrate learning that doesn't lead to immediate results?
  • What information are you hoarding that could help others grow?
  • How do your promotion criteria reflect growth values?

Only after addressing these do we talk about individual mindset shifts.

The best session I ever ran was for a construction company where we spent the first half identifying every way the organisation punished curiosity and risk-taking. Brutal honesty. Then we redesigned their processes to reward different behaviours.

Results? Six months later, their safety incidents had dropped 40% because workers felt comfortable reporting near-misses and suggesting improvements.

Making It Stick

Growth mindset isn't a training course - it's a cultural shift that requires constant reinforcement. Here's what actually creates lasting change:

Weekly Learning Check-ins Not performance reviews. Learning reviews. What did you try this week? What didn't work? What will you experiment with next week?

Failure CVs Some of the best leaders I know can articulate their failures as clearly as their successes. Make this normal in your organisation.

Cross-Training Everything Want growth mindset? Stop keeping people in narrow silos. Let your accountant shadow a salesperson. Have your marketing team attend client service calls. Curiosity thrives when people see the bigger picture.

Question Rewards I know a CEO who gives out $50 gift cards for the best question asked in team meetings. Not the best answer - the best question. It completely changed how people engaged.

The Bottom Line

Growth mindset training fails when it tries to fix individuals while ignoring broken systems. It succeeds when it transforms how organisations operate, reward, and respond to learning.

If you're considering growth mindset training for your team, start by auditing your own leadership behaviours. Are you curious? Do you admit mistakes? Do you reward learning that doesn't immediately translate to results?

Because until you model the mindset you want to see, all the training in the world won't make a difference.

And honestly? That's probably why most of these programs fail. We're trying to teach what we don't practise ourselves.

For more insights on building psychologically safe workplaces, check out our Managing Workplace Anxiety training and Building Leaders programs.