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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 approaches.
“The leader’s not the hero,” Reina says. “A good leader is more humble.”
If you’re struggling at work, Reina notes, your mindset may be to blame. In a new paper in the journal Leadership Quarterly, Reina and his co-author, the California State management professor Ryan K. Gottfredson, explore four common mindset traps that get in the way of leadership development. If any of these sound familiar, it may be time to do some honest self-reflecting.
The fixed mindset
A fixed mindset is the belief that people are largely incapable of improving themselves, because skills and abilities are innate rather than malleable. In a leadership context, “it’s when leaders have the mindset that they have so much experience and knowledge that they’re always right,” says Steve VerBurg, president of the Orange County office of the leadership-training organization Dale Carnegie. “They shut…
