Growth Mindset at the Top: The Paradox of Learning in Leadership
I recently explored an apparent paradox in an article for Executiva: the more senior we become, the more important learning is, yet the harder it can become to learn openly.
Early in our careers, not knowing is expected. We ask questions, seek advice, experiment and make mistakes. Learning is part of the job.
At senior levels, the expectations change. Leaders are expected to provide clarity, make decisions, hold positions and inspire confidence. A CEO saying “I don’t know” can be interpreted very differently from someone saying the same thing earlier in their career.
Changing one’s mind may be seen not as learning, but as inconsistency. Hesitation may be confused with weakness. And yet, these are precisely the roles in which learning becomes most important.
When Growth Mindset Meets Power
Carol Dweck’s distinction between fixed and growth mindsets is well known.
With a fixed mindset, intelligence and competence are treated as qualities we need to demonstrate and protect. Being wrong becomes threatening. Not knowing becomes something to hide.
A growth mindset assumes that capability develops. Mistakes provide information, feedback matters and changing our thinking is part of becoming better at what we do.
This sounds straightforward until power enters the equation.
At the top of organisations, decisions are more visible, mistakes can be expensive and uncertainty has political consequences. Leaders are not simply managing their own learning. They are also managing the confidence that others place in their judgement.
The question therefore changes.
It is no longer simply: Does this leader have a growth mindset?
It becomes: Does the system around this leader allow learning to take place?
The Cost of Too Much Certainty
Leadership systems tend to reward certainty, speed and simplification. For understandable reasons, organisations want leaders who can make sense of complexity and decide.
The danger begins when certainty becomes the default.
Questions close too early. Alternative interpretations receive less attention. People learn which doubts are welcome in the room and which are better kept outside it.
Meetings can then become very effective at producing decisions, while becoming progressively less effective at improving the quality of the thinking behind them.
For an executive committee or a board, some uncomfortable questions may therefore be worth asking:
Are we more interested in being right, or in improving our collective judgement?
Do our conversations reward good answers or good questions?
When something goes wrong, do we look first for who failed, or for what the situation can teach us?
Do we converge quickly because we have understood the problem, or because disagreement has become uncomfortable?
These are not arguments for indecision. Accountability remains essential. They are arguments for keeping learning alive while exercising authority.
Not Everyone Pays the Same Price for Uncertainty
There is another dimension to this paradox. The consequences of showing uncertainty are not necessarily the same for everyone. Women in senior leadership positions, for example, can still face greater scrutiny around authority, confidence and consistency.
This can create a particularly difficult tension: continuing to learn is strategically necessary, while visibly showing the process of learning may sometimes carry a reputational cost.
The result can be that learning continues, but becomes increasingly private.
Where Can Your Thinking Be Unfinished?
This may be one of the less discussed challenges of senior leadership. Every leader needs at least one place where a thought does not yet need to be a position. A conversation where an executive can say:
“I am not sure.”
“I may be looking at this in the wrong way.”
“There is something here that I still don’t understand.”
“What if my original assumption is wrong?”
That space may exist with trusted colleagues, a chair, a mentor, an executive coach or sometimes simply within a leadership team that has developed sufficient trust and maturity.
What matters is that it exists.
Without it, leaders do not necessarily stop making decisions. They risk stopping learning before those decisions are made.
A Final Reflection
Perhaps mature leadership is not about becoming increasingly certain. It may be about becoming better at distinguishing between the moments that require conviction and the moments that require curiosity.
Authority does not require us to know everything. It requires us to take responsibility for the quality of our judgement, including our willingness to revise it.
So perhaps there is a useful question for anyone in a senior leadership position:
Where, in your current role, are you still allowed to think out loud before you know the answer?
This post builds on an article I originally wrote in Portuguese for Executiva.
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