Stop for a moment and ask yourself: how do you respond to feedback? Do you get sensitive, interpreting the comments as attacks on your ability, intelligence or performance? Or do you welcome the remarks as opportunities to grow and improve? If a critique gets your hackles up, you may have what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset”—a belief that your intelligence or talents are static, locked in place, and impervious to change. But if you relish the feedback, you likely have what she calls a “growth mindset,” a belief that your abilities are dynamic, and can increase and develop over time. Dweck’s research suggests that our mindset is a key component in determining how we react to obstacles, criticism and setbacks in our lives.
Life in the legislature is filled with a myriad of challenges. If we face those challenges with a fixed mindset, research shows that we are more likely to ignore useful feedback and to give up more easily when times get tough (as they surely are now!). But if we can switch to a growth mindset, we find that our effort, persistence, and acceptance of criticism actually increase when we encounter obstacles, helping us to improve our overall performance. In a study at West Point, a growth mindset was found to be far more predictive of a cadet’s success than either their IQ or physical ability. Cadets with a growth mindset demonstrated far more resiliency and perseverance, or what psychologist Angela Duckworth calls “grit.” This is because a growth mindset focuses our attention on process and strategy instead of outcomes or achievements. We come to see setbacks as opportunities, rather than disappointments. And as we improve our processes over time, we find that—voila!—our performance improves as a result. This is true whether we are trying to craft a difficult piece of legislation, or trying to solve a complex constituent problem.
So how do we cultivate a growth mindset within our legislative institutions? Research suggests three techniques are effective at switching our mindset from “fixed” to “growth”:
- Take an inventory of your current mindset. Ask yourself how you feel about your ability to perform various aspects of your job—how you write, research, lead the caucus, or speak in public. Where is your answer on the spectrum between fixed (“I’m terrible/pretty good at that”) and growth (“I could get better with some extra help”)? Our mindset may be different across various functions of our work, so identifying where you might be fixed is a crucial first step to changing it.
- Change the way you praise yourself, or others. Dweck’s research shows that we improve more when we praise effort, strategy and process rather than intelligence, talent or results. Struggling math students made significantly higher gains when praised for the way they approached a problem, rather than receiving praise based on their correct answers. In the legislature, focus your praise on the committee or bill drafting process in order to improve strategies for future success.
- Conduct regular After Action Reviews, detailed post-mortems of completed legislative, organizational or personal projects. For legislative staff, instead of waiting for formal evaluations like mid-year performance appraisals, make After Actions Reviews a continuous part of your legislative routine. Focus praise or criticism on things that are dynamic, like strategy and process, rather than things that are static, like products or results.
A high school in Chicago instituted a strategy where students who were unsuccessful on an assignment received a grade of “not yet.” The point of the policy was to shift the focus—the mindset—of both teachers and students from a fixed entity (the score) to a growth entity (the process). Rather than viewing performance through a static lens, they began to see achievement as changeable over time. And the overall grades and scores improved. Dweck calls this “the power of yet.” The legislature is the ultimate dynamic environment. Circumstances change constantly, obstacles emerge unexpectedly, and criticism is a daily fact of life. Yet despite those inherent challenges, we can unlock the effort, resiliency and grit of both legislators and staff alike by adopting a mindset that thrives within this reality—a growth mindset. And when we do that, we unlock our own legislative power of yet.