Four Mindset Traps Holding You Back at Work
How to push past a fear of failure, a fixation on appearances, and other self-sabotaging ways of thinking
A couple years ago, I got a weekend gig managing a fresh pasta stand at my local farmers market. It was supposed to be laid-back; the extra money was nice, but I was really in it for the conversation. I work from home, and I had been missing social interaction.
The pasta stand was also the first time I was in charge of other people — and in hindsight, I was decidedly not laid-back about it. In fact, I quickly became the market’s resident tyrant, utterly convinced that I knew the best way to do everything and frustrated that my fellow employees didn’t agree. If I had a nickel for every time I muttered “Just let me do it,” I could have bought out all the pasta we had.
The result, of course, was that we were an operational mess, and I went home from what should have been a fun weekend job drained and annoyed. The problem wasn’t that my fellow employees weren’t capable. But as a leader, I was stuck in what Christopher S. Reina, an assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at Virginia Commonwealth University, calls an “implemental” mindset: I was so focused on just getting things done that I refused to open myself up to new ideas or…
