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The Growth Mindset Myth: Why Half of Corporate Australia Is Doing It Wrong

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Look, I'm going to say something that'll probably get me uninvited from a few corporate Christmas parties: the way most companies are implementing "growth mindset" training is absolute rubbish. After 18 years running leadership development programs across Melbourne and Sydney, I've watched this concept get butchered more times than a Sunday roast.

Carol Dweck's research was brilliant. Her corporate consultants? Not so much.

Here's what really gets my goat - every second company I walk into has some motivational poster about "embracing failure" stuck next to the coffee machine. Meanwhile, their performance review system still punishes anyone who takes actual risks. It's like putting up a "wet paint" sign then getting angry when people don't touch the wall.

The problem isn't growth mindset itself. It's that we've turned it into another tick-box exercise.

I watched this play out spectacularly at a tech startup in Surry Hills last year. The CEO - lovely bloke, genuinely meant well - spent $40,000 on a growth mindset workshop series. Complete with breakout sessions, vision boards, the whole nine yards. Three months later, he fired two team leads for a project that didn't hit targets. Not because they were incompetent. Because they "failed to deliver results."

See the contradiction?

The uncomfortable truth most trainers won't tell you: growth mindset without psychological safety is just expensive cheerleading.

I've been guilty of this myself. Back in 2019, I delivered a two-day workshop for a manufacturing company in Geelong about "learning from setbacks." Brilliant engagement scores. Everyone loved it. Six weeks later, their production manager told me nothing had changed because people were still terrified of admitting mistakes. The culture hadn't shifted one millimetre.

That's when I realised we've been approaching this backwards. You can't install a growth mindset like software. It's not a training module you complete and tick off. It's a fundamental shift in how organisations respond to uncertainty, mistakes, and learning opportunities.

The companies that get this right - and there aren't many - do three things differently:

They measure learning, not just outcomes. A client in Brisbane tracks "intelligent failures" alongside their regular KPIs. They literally celebrate productive mistakes in their monthly all-hands meetings. Sounds cheesy, but their innovation rate has tripled since 2022.

They promote people who've failed spectacularly, not just succeeded. Amazon does this brilliantly with their "failed successfully" principle. If someone took a calculated risk that didn't pay off but generated valuable insights, they're more likely to get promoted than someone who played it safe.

They build learning time into job descriptions. Not the fake "professional development" budget that everyone forgets to use. Actual time. Google's 20% rule isn't just marketing fluff - it's built into their operational planning.

Most Australian companies think growth mindset means being positive about feedback and "bouncing back" from setbacks. That's resilience training dressed up with buzzwords. Real growth mindset is about fundamentally changing how your organisation views capability, intelligence, and potential.

Here's what that looks like practically: when someone struggles with a task, the question isn't "are they capable of this role?" It's "what support do they need to develop this capability?" The difference is subtle but transformative.

I've seen finance teams in Melbourne completely transform their recruitment approach using this principle. Instead of hiring for existing skills, they hire for learning agility and provide intensive support for the first 90 days. Their employee retention improved by 40% and their problem-solving capability went through the roof.

But here's the thing that really separates the pretenders from the genuine practitioners...

Most growth mindset training focuses on individuals when the real work happens at the systems level.

Your organisational structure either supports learning or it doesn't. Your reward systems either encourage risk-taking or they don't. Your communication patterns either normalise vulnerability or they don't. No amount of individual mindset training can overcome toxic systems.

I worked with a law firm in Adelaide that spent two years trying to implement growth mindset principles. They ran workshops, brought in external speakers, even redesigned their office space to be more "collaborative." Nothing stuck until they changed one simple thing: they stopped billing junior lawyers purely on hours worked and started factoring in learning objectives.

Suddenly, people started asking questions instead of pretending they knew everything. Senior partners began admitting knowledge gaps instead of bluffing. The whole dynamic shifted because the system rewarded learning instead of just productivity.

The irony is that the organisations most likely to invest in growth mindset training are often the least equipped to implement it successfully. They're looking for a quick fix to deep cultural problems. They want the benefits of innovation and adaptability without the discomfort of genuine change.

Real growth mindset work is messy, slow, and requires leaders to model vulnerability first.

That means admitting when you don't know something. It means sharing your own learning failures openly. It means creating space for others to experiment without career consequences. Most executives I meet aren't ready for that level of authenticity.

Which brings me to my final point - and this one really divides opinion in HR circles. I think we need to stop calling it "growth mindset training" altogether. The label has been so diluted by corporate speak that it's lost all meaning. Instead, let's talk about building "learning cultures" or "adaptive organisations."

Because at the end of the day, growth mindset isn't something you teach in a workshop. It's something you build into the DNA of how your company operates. It's reflected in your hiring decisions, your project planning, your meeting structures, and your celebration rituals.

Companies like Canva and Atlassian understand this. They've built learning into their operational rhythms rather than treating it as an add-on program. They invest in developing skills that help teams explore complex problems, and their approach to professional development is integrated into daily work rather than separate from it.

The next time someone tries to sell you a growth mindset program, ask them one question: "How are you measuring the learning, not just the satisfaction scores?" If they can't give you a clear answer, you're looking at another expensive feel-good exercise.

Trust me, your budget deserves better than that.