The Performance Paradox: Turning Mindset into Action with Eduardo Briceno & Mahan Tavakoli

Eduardo Briceño, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you so much, Maham, as this is one of my favorite go-to podcasts, so it's a real honor to be here.

It is an honor for me, Eduardo, both because I love your work and your book, The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action, and most specifically I have fallen in love with your example as a leader that doesn't only talk about growth mindset, but lives it. So can't wait to have a conversation around that. But first, would love to know about you, Eduardo. Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact the kind of person you've become?

I grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and I think my upbringing Impacted me in a few complex ways. First of all, I grew up in a high middle-class family and my parents always made me and my sister their highest priority. So they provided everything they could think of. They signed us up for different music classes with different instruments and sports. My mom drove us to school and back every day and to everywhere. And I think that provided a sense of safety and unconditional love that gave me the sense that in one hand I could try anything and succeed at anything. And on the other hand, I think they were overprotective. And so I didn't develop a sense of agency and entrepreneurship until I was an adult. So I took the world around me for granted as it was, whether I liked it or not. And I largely didn't like it, but I just had to put up with it and just do what I was supposed to and navigate it. I also grew up as a male, cisgender, straight, with brown but relatively light skin. And so I didn't know it at the time, but I had a lot of privilege from that. I didn't know what kind of race or gender were as social constructs until I was well in my 40s. It wasn't until early 2019 that I realized how I had advantages that other people didn't have and how important it was for me to do things about that. And I guess the last thing that comes to mind is one thing that I learned from my parents that I think also had mixed effects on me was my dad in particular. He taught me the importance of hard work and how hard work was critical to succeed in life. And I think that served me well in a lot of ways, but it also led me down some like dark alleys because he didn't really enjoy his work. He just worked really hard to succeed so that he could provide for his family. And he started his career with no money in the bank and he just made his career. He started from working in the oil fields to being the executive of a company. And so he just believed if you just work hard, you can succeed and you just have to grind it out. And what I didn't develop as a child was a sense of purpose or meaning or being interested into things and doing things that were going to impact other people's lives. And so I went to school and I thought it was really boring and irrelevant, but I just grinded it out, right? I just got the grades to get to the next level and then to get a job. And when I went to university, I picked majors that just would get me stable jobs. So chemical engineering and finance, and ended up working in investment banking in New York City and then venture capital in Silicon Valley. And I was amazed that I ended up working these kind of prestigious jobs in society that paid very well. And I didn't know what else to do. I wasn't really interested in anything. I didn't feel like I was impacting anybody's life because in venture capital, I felt there was so much capital in the industry that whether I worked in it or not, all these great companies were going to get funded and I wasn't really going to make a difference. I didn't have the experience to be giving valuable advice. So that led to stress for me. I was always in the mindset of, I just wanna be sprinting every day and working really hard, even if I don't enjoy it, just grinding it out. And my muscles were physically tense as if I were sprinting. I, I could have done all those things relaxed and having fun, but I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to generate positive emotions from within myself. And I got sick. I got a repetitive strain injury called myofascial pain.

Mm-hmm.

syndrome, and I was losing the ability to use my hands, which kind of gave me a sense of mortality because I didn't know how to do anything without my hands. And it led to a very dark place, a crisis in my life that led me to figure out, okay, how do I live healthily? How do I eat healthily? What do I need to do to change my lifestyle to be healthy? And part of that was I realized I needed a sense of purpose. If I didn't know that I was going to have my hands Then I needed to figure out how do I do something worthwhile with my hands while I have them? And so I went to grad school to figure out how to change my trajectory to do something that I felt meaning from. And over there I met Carol Dweck. That led to what I do today. But that's a little bit how some of my upbringing affected me.

What a beautiful way, Eduardo, to describe how you have ended up being this thought leader on growth mindset. And my audience now has also fallen in love with you the way I have over the years getting to know you better, because you are both a deep thinker, having reflected on what has contributed to who you have become, and you have genuine authenticity and vulnerability in terms of the struggles that you went through to get to this point. And one of the things I find is many of the executives that I'm dealing with and interacting with now, maybe it's part because of the pandemic and the anxieties that produced for some, part because of acceleration of change in the environment, are experiencing some of what you were going through. Are you sensing some of that same thing in the business world?

Yeah, I think that can happen to people at any point in their life. For me, that crisis happened When I was 27 years old. So at the time it felt like it was the worst thing that could be happening to a 27-year-old. I was feeling like I was on my way to become disabled. And I thought that was a really horrible thing. But one thing that I would offer to people is looking back, I think that it was such a great thing that happened to me because I had to go through a very hard time. But it led me to learn not just how to live more healthily, but also I realized I need to make life count. I need to have fun and be doing things that I think are making me a good steward of my life. And I'm in such a much better place now because I went through that crisis. So whether it's because of a pandemic or other things that are happening in our lives, I think when we're going through struggle, Uh, in the middle of it, it can feel like a really bad thing, but if we take it as an opportunity to explore and to learn and to think about, kind of learn about other people who've gone through similar things and have acquired wisdom from it, we can end up in a much better place. And I think that a lot of people are going through it, but I hope that it's going to be for the better at the end.

So as you were going through it, you interacted with Carol Dweck and became fascinated with and studied growth mindset. What about that appealed to you most, Eduardo?

Yeah, so when I met Carol Dweck at Stanford, she was looking for somebody with a business background to partner with to start an organization. We co-founded a company called Mindset Works, which helps schools foster growth mindset cultures. But when I first learned about her work and I read her book, what appealed to me was that it really explained how some of my fixed mindset had gotten in the way of my goals. In the past, I realized that I had been focused on proving myself all the time rather than on improving. And so when I was, for example, in venture capital, most of the people I was working with were decades older than me. But yet I thought that what people wanted, whether it was entrepreneurs or my colleagues, the investors, I thought people wanted me to know, to have the answers rather than to ask questions and to continue to improve myself. And so I was always pretending and trying to prove myself rather than in thinking of myself as a work in progress, as somebody who is developing as an investor and developing as somebody who understands the world better and who's changing. So I realized whether it was in my work or in my relationships and my ability to make new friends or to deepen my friendships or to deepen my relationship with my wife, or in sports, I was playing soccer at the time. I never thought that I could get better at those things. I thought, for example, social skills were fixed in people. not something you develop. So I realized how this fixed mindset was getting in the way of my goals. And first it led me to work on myself and those beliefs. And then because it has such a big impact on me, then I was very excited to partner with her to help other people develop growth mindsets as well.

As you've been working on helping others and now through your additional work and this book, the Performance Paradox. What is the paradox that you see in putting this power of the mindset into action?

So the Performance Paradox is kind of the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we care about performance and we want to perform very highly, if all we do is perform, we actually hinder our performance. We lower our results if all we're doing is trying to perform. And performance is to work really hard, Trying to do the things we know how to do, trying to minimize mistakes, as opposed to trying new things and things that might not work, things that might lead to failure. So if you think about, for example, an athlete, if you are playing a championship final and it's a game, that's the time to perform. We are doing the things that we do best. If we are having trouble with a particular move, we try not to do that move during the match. But then after the game, we go to our coach and we say, coach, I have to work on this particular move that I'm having trouble with. And so that's a very different activity than what we do during the match. And sometimes we have the idea as we go about life that if we just work hard, we'll get better. In order to get great at doing something, we just have to do that a lot. And that's actually not true. That leads to stagnation. In order to get better at something, we have to do something different than doing the activity. We have to work on improvement, and that involves Working on the things that we haven't mastered yet, or the things that we could do better, and trying different things that some of them will work, some of them will not. It'll involve soliciting feedback, thinking about mistakes, experimenting, things that are different than just getting things done.

So, Eduardo, I have interacted with a lot of leaders who nod and would agree with that statement. Yet part of what they say is that We are in fill in the blank. We are in the public policy arena, or we are dealing with customers that expect the best from us, or we are dealing with funding of organizations that deliver services worldwide. So we can't therefore afford to make mistakes. So while they agree they want their team members to have a growth mindset and to take chances and embrace Failure, they come up with reasons why that they can't do that in their teams and organizations. So how do you balance the fact that there are certain expectations from the team and organization where on the other hand, you are saying that it takes experimentation and making mistakes in order to learn and grow?

Yeah, there are times where we don't want to make mistakes. We want to try to avoid mistakes because the stakes are high. And so we want to get clear about when are those times where we want to put our best foot forward and play it safe, and when are the times where we want to do something different. So for example, if it is a high-stakes meeting with a customer where that customer is 50% of our revenues, and if we make a mistake there, we could lose the business, it's very reasonable to say, hey, in this meeting with this customer, let's do what we know works. Let's not take any risks. We're just going to play it by the book. We know we're not going to improve from that, but that's okay. We're going to keep the customer. But what are the ways that we could get better at these meetings? Maybe it's with smaller customers, or maybe it's role-playing within ourselves, or maybe it's having a board of advisors and asking them for ideas on what we can test and iterate from. And so what are the time spaces? How do we want to improve? What are the learning zone strategies we want to engage in? And when are we gonna engage in those things either by ourselves or with our colleagues? Sometimes, like you're saying, we think about mistakes as either all good or all bad. And I think that's just confusing because there's all kinds of different mistakes. In the book, chapter 5 is about these 4 different kinds of mistakes. And I talk about the stretch mistakes are the mistakes that we do because we are going beyond what we know. We're trying new things. And so we're gonna be making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. Those are really positive.

Yeah.

Types of mistakes, but we want to make sure that we're not doing those things in high-stakes situations where we're going to create a lot of collateral damage. Then there's the high-stakes mistakes, which really do create a lot of collateral damage. We want to try to minimize those. We want to play it safe in high-stakes situations. There's the sloppy mistakes that a lot of people are familiar with, which is when we make mistakes that we should know better. We already should know how to do these things. There are a lot of opportunities to take these mistakes lightly and just have fun, like they're just not important. Whether I spill my smoothie all over me because I was thinking about something else. If it's not important, I just laugh about it. I share it with other people. But if it is important, then I think about, okay, how can I avoid this sloppy mistake in the future? And often the answer is I wasn't focused on the right thing. I wasn't paying attention to the right thing, or I didn't have the systems in place, the checklists or the systems in order to make sure that this mistake wouldn't reoccur. And then finally, there's aha moment mistakes where we do something as we intended to, but then we realized it was the wrong thing to do. We realized that it had different consequences than what we were expecting. And that's a precious source of mistake that leads to often very powerful learning. And so when that happens, we need to pay attention to it and treasure it as the great gift that it is.

The way I think about it, Eduardo, is If, for example, I don't prepare or make mistakes in preparing for a conversation, that is not in the learning zone. That is mistakes of sloppiness. However, if I take a chance in recording the conversation with a new tool or transcribing the conversation with a new tool because I want to learn whether that works better or not, And that fails and doesn't work well, and I have to apologize to Eduardo and record the conversation again, that is a mistake where there is learning opportunities involved. And if I am interviewing the President of the United States, I don't want to take those chances and use a new system in that environment. So there is a difference in terms of the sloppy mistakes with mistakes of Experimentation, where there is learning, and environments where you choose that you don't want to take a chance. I find one of the challenges with a lot of leaders I interact with is they assume every chance is one where their team members cannot take chances. So it's as if every interview is with the President of the United States. And from what I'm hearing from you, That's not a way to learn and grow.

Yeah, this is a great example, and I completely agree with you. I think your example raises 2 additional kind of insights. One is, I think one of the dynamics that leads us to feel like everything is high stakes is a human bias toward the present. We tend to overvalue the short term and undervalue the long term. And then there's societal dynamics that exacerbate that, like the public markets, are very focused on the current earnings, and the CEOs are very focused on maximizing current income rather than investing for the future. So they feel pressure to perform right now, and that pressure cascades down the organization and to people's families and society more broadly. And so if we are trying to maximize performance this week, it is reasonable to just focus on performing and not focus on learning, because learning in a way is an investment in the future. You'll learn how to do something better, and then you'll be able to get greater results in less time going forward. But if this week is so important that you just have to make your numbers and maximize them, then it's reasonable to say, I'm just going to perform this week and not worry about learning. But if we do that every week, which often happens, then we stagnate. We don't improve. So that's one thing that your example brings up for me. The other thing that it brings up is the value of integrating the learning zone and the performance zone so that we're doing them at the same time. So we can engage in the learning zone by itself. Like, for example, in deliberate practice, we might say, I'm gonna spend the next 30 minutes practicing a particular speech or my golf swing. And that's just pure learning zone, observing what mistakes we make and learning from that. And that's very valuable. But I think the greater opportunity for most of us to increase our engagement in the learning zone is to Change the way we do our work so that as we get things done, we are also generating improvement and insights along the way. And the example you brought up is an example of that where you might be doing an interview, you might be recording a podcast, and before that you say, I'm gonna try this in this particular podcast. So you're gonna get it done, you're gonna do what you need to do, but you're also going to generate insight whether it works or it doesn't work. You're gonna generate a new lesson from that. And, and how to do that, how to engage in what I call learning while doing rather than learning by doing, because we don't learn just from doing, but we can learn at the same time that we do. But in order to do that, we can't just do things the same way we did yesterday or last week. We have to be tweaking things and doing things a little bit different and paying attention to what surprises us, the mistakes that we make, and what we're learning along the way.

What are some examples of teams or organizations you've come across, Eduardo, that balance this well in terms of the learning zone that you talk about and the performance zone?

There are many examples in the book about organizations and teams that do this well. The biggest organization that has transformed its culture and been very successful at building a growth mindset culture and engaging in the learning zone is Microsoft. And there's a bunch of examples on that. But there's lots of examples of lots of other organizations as well of all sizes. One that I love is called Clear Choice Dental Systems. They do dental implants for people who have very serious issues with their teeth and they need new teeth. Often these people are hiding their teeth so they don't smile. That affects their emotions and that affects their relationships, that affects what they eat. So it actually has a big impact on their health. They do a lot of different things to improve learning at their organization, but one example is they use videos with patient consent. They record interactions between their staff and the patients, and in between patient consults, the staff reviews their own video and goes to a section of the video that they were working on where they were trying something different, and they observe how the patient Responded, or they think about what they could have done differently. So as they're seeing patients, they are practicing something new, just like you described, and then they're taking a minute or two to review how that went and then iterate on the next consult with the next patient. And what they found is the most successful people in their staff are those that engage in watching their videos most often as well. And that's what we see across companies because sometimes people think like we don't have time to engage in the learning zone. We have all these things to do. We have all these results to create. But what's the paradox? What's the counterintuitive thing is that actually the highest performers are the ones that engage in the learning zone the most frequently.

Yeah, I love that example because that's exactly one of the challenges I hear most often. People say, if we only had time, but this is an opportunity to incorporate it in the work that you're doing. Now, another challenge that I hear, Eduardo, is a lot of leaders of teams and organizations, have difficulty with accountability. And whenever we have conversations around growth mindset and the willingness to experiment and make mistakes, they say, how do I then hold my people or my teams accountable? How do the best go about holding teams and organizations accountable to both be in that learning zone when necessary and perform when necessary as well?

That's exactly right. I think we need to be accountable both to our performance And also to our learning. And so the best organizations have shifted their performance management systems from just performance goals to performance goals and also learning goals. Here's what I'm working to learn. Here's what I'm working to improve. Also not just doing it just once a year, but maybe like once a quarter with more frequent conversations in other less formal ways. In performance and accountability, We want to automate systems that lead to great performance and that make both performing and learning the easy default. Whether it is in our weekly meetings, we go through a standard agenda where we at the end, like, need to identify who's gonna do what and then keep people accountable. So if people don't do those things, whether it's in the learning zone or the performance zone, we need to understand why that is, how we can better support them, and just keep one another accountable in both of those areas.

So as we do that and you talk about the benefits of this growth mindset, is there ever value for a fixed mindset, both for individuals and in organizations?

Yes. So sometimes we think growth mindset is the only valuable thing and fixed mindset is always a bad thing, but a fixed mindset is valuable when it's true. Now, we can never be 100% sure that it is true, but I'll give you an example. I would love to be able to listen to the Partnering Leadership Podcast while I am reading a book, right? I love your podcast. I listen to a lot of the episodes, but I can't listen to all the episodes. I just don't find the time for it. And I don't find the time to read all the books that I would like to read. I would like to do those 2 things at the same time. I don't believe that I can learn how to do that. That's a fixed mindset, right? A fixed mindset means that I can't improve in a particular area. And I believe that science shows that there's data and evidence for this fixed mindset that the brain can't actually have 2 conversations at the same time. And that's helpful to me because if I ask myself, how can I learn more, or how can I perform more, how can I be more effective, I'm going to say, okay, what I'm not going to try to do is I'm not going to try to listen to Partner in Leadership and read a book at the same time. I'm going to try something else. And so that's helpful because it can lead me to more effective strategies. The problem is that most of the things we tend to see as fixed We see them that way just because of assumptions we have learned from society, from our parents, from our workplaces, and from the media, from movies. And we think those things are true, and we actually have experience that validates that because a fixed mindset creates self-fulfilling prophecies. If I believe that I can't become better at conversing with people, I won't do anything in the learning zone to try to get better at that, so I won't get better at it. And that's evidence of a fixed mindset. I believe that I can't get better because I haven't gotten better in the past, but I haven't gotten better in the past because I haven't tried. Or same thing if I believe that a colleague is fixed in a particular way and they can't change, I'm not going to share useful feedback with them, and as a result of that, they won't change because they won't know there's an issue to change. So the fixed mindset creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that creates evidence to reinforce a fixed mindset. So we need to really become acquainted with our fixed mindsets. We all have fixed mindsets and are in fixed mindsets sometimes, and so we need to be able to observe them, increase our self-awareness, and then think critically. Is this really true, or am I creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? And that is the first step in building a growth mindset. The other key step is to identify how to improve. What are the learning zone strategies that are different from just working hard that lead to improvement? And it is a combination of those 2 things that leads us to both foster a growth mindset and be able to change and improve.

And as we do that, Eduardo, one of the things I learned from you is that it's not that you have growth mindset or you have fixed mindset. You can have growth mindset on certain things or certain areas and have very fixed mindset on others.

Absolutely. And it's also not binary, so it's a spectrum. We can be somewhere in the middle and a little bit confused. A lot of us are confused. We don't really know whether something is fixed or malleable, and depending on who we're with, what situation we're in, we might be more in a growth mindset or more in a fixed mindset. Our mindset can also vary by person. So we might see ourselves as a learner, but then label other people in fixed ways. And so it is very contextual for sure. And what a person's fixed mindsets are tend to be different than from the next person's fixed mindsets are. So one of the things that I do in my workshops and in my keynotes is I ask people to identify what fixed mindsets might be getting in the way of their goals. And people are interested to see that Some of the things other people write are things they see that can be developed. So similarly, the things that they write are things that other people can see as things that can be developed.

Yeah, that is fascinating and important to think about because I have run into a lot of leaders who say, I have a growth mindset. And first of all, as you said, it's not binary. Second of all, you can't have a growth mindset on everything. There might be certain specific areas that you have more of a growth mindset on. Now, as leaders of teams and organizations are thinking about setting up the kind of systems in their team and organization that encourages more of a growth mindset approach in order for people to spend an appropriate amount of time in the learning zone rather than just pure performance zone, what are some of the best practices you typically recommend, Eduardo?

Yeah, systems are so important. One thing that ties to what we were just talking about and leaders is because we tend to think that other people think like us as leaders, sometimes we send messages that are meant in a growth mindset way that we assume other people are going to take in a growth mindset way, but they might take in a fixed mindset way. Like for example, we might say, remember, this is challenging, so we need to work hard. And we might think that encouraging people to work hard might foster a growth mindset, but actually, if we're not saying anything about the nature of people's abilities and their ability to change, people who are in a fixed mindset might say, okay, we just need to work hard because we are incapable, or just because this task is hard, but it doesn't help them shift the way they view the nature of human qualities or abilities. And it's not just related to mindset. We need to make the implicit explicit. So our implicit assumptions that if through hard work we get better, We need to voice that explicitly to people so that they interpret those messages in the way that we intend. But more directly related to systems, which you asked about, we need to identify what learning zone systems and habits are we going to use in our company on a regular basis and make that part of the default way we work in order to improve over time. So for example, in LinkedIn, their top 100 leaders meet once a week to have a weekly meeting. And one of their executives, Tomer Cohen, he's the chief product officer there. When he became an executive, he instituted a part of that meeting to be for people to share what they learned the prior week. And when they first instituted that meeting, people started just sharing their mistakes. I made this mistake last week. And Tomer would say, that's interesting. I'm glad you're sharing that. But so what, what are we going to learn from that mistake? What is the lesson that you and others could take, or how to do things differently in the future? So through that coaching, people realized what he was looking for, and people then share, hey, here's what I learned, here's what I think we could do differently in the future. And people really value that part of the meeting so much that people who are not in the top 100 leaders started asking to attend that meeting because people started saying, this is a really useful time and I'm learning a lot from it. So think about How much people tend to dislike meetings and not being meetings. Now you people are asking to be in the meeting, right? So that's one example. But a very simple way to change the conversation in our meetings is to change the agenda, just like Tomer did. I talked about Clear Choice Dental and the systems they use through video is another example. There's another company that I love is called Scratch Labs, and one thing that they do is Every quarter at their all-hands meeting, they talk about a couple of significant successes or significant failures, and they analyze them as a company to figure out what they can learn from them and if there's any systems that they need to change going forward as a result of this experience. And so that's another example of a system, but whether it is in what we talk about in meetings or in experimenting or in learning from the outside or doing customer focus groups, getting feedback from customers or from suppliers. There's a company, Coats, it's a manufacturing company that created these spaces, they call them innovation hubs, where they bring their customers and their suppliers together and they have rapid prototyping equipment and they prototype new product ideas together with their customers and suppliers. So that's another example of a learning zone, but there's many examples.

It's outstanding. And you do have lots of examples where leaders can learn from this. Now, one of the challenges that I see also is there are times when the leaders have a growth mindset, the systems encourage a growth mindset, but there is resistance in the team and organization to adopting a growth mindset. As you mentioned, sometimes our own upbringing, our own belief systems, get in the way of us accepting the fact that if you work on something, you have the opportunity to develop it. So where we draw the line differs. Any thoughts on how leaders can approach overcoming some of the resistance sometimes their team members might have to growth mindset?

Yeah, this requires time because it involves all of us working on ourselves to change our mental models. For example, some of us might see feedback as something negative that is a sign that you are inadequate versus others see feedback as something that's positive that we can learn from, that anybody can learn from. And I made that shift. I used to see feedback as something that was negative and I would react defensively, and I have shifted my mental models over time, but it takes time. And so I think step one is to introduce these ideas and have a conversation About whether this is the type of culture that people want. Usually if it's a big company, that happens at the senior executive level and think about what kind of culture do we want? What does this look like? What behaviors does it entail? And if we want this culture, sometimes often companies get feedback from all their employees about what they would like in the company, what their strengths are, what the areas of opportunity are, and then get clear and get people's feedback. If you're in a team, you're a leader of a team. You can bring these ideas to your team, share, for example, a TED Talk from me or from Carol Dweck or from Angela Duckworth, whatever. Say, hey, here's some ideas that I think could be interesting for us to think about. What do people think about this idea of the learning zone and the performance zone? And do we want to make more of a learning zone in our team? Is that something people are interested in? How are we doing with regards to that? And What do we work on first? What are some challenges? Are there any concerns? So you get alignment and you get people to opt in. It's not something that's forced into them because people love this. Like they really lean into it. And so if you give them the choice, they will make that choice cognitively. And so you align, okay, this is something we all want. These are the behaviors we wanna work on first. And so you have the intention there. Still, people are gonna make mistakes. They might revert to fear, especially when they're stressed out. But you have alignment on the intentions, and then you can support one another in that and keep each other accountable to growth and improvement so that if behavior is not changing, it might be okay. What is challenging? What is going on? And through surfacing those challenges, you can think together about how can we change our systems or our habits to try something different so that we can get greater progress. And what we see consistently is that when leaders do that when they model the way. Because sometimes a challenge that leaders have is that we have this idea that once we get promoted and we become a leader, we need to be knowers. Like I was in venture capital, I need to have all the answers and I need to coach other people on how to improve, but I don't need to improve, or I don't need to make that visible, because if I make it visible, then other people will think that I'm incompetent or I'm not confident. So we need to, as leaders, work on our own beliefs and realize that we can't just work on the learning zone in private, in our commute, or in our home, or in our office behind closed doors. Because if other people see us as a know-it-all and we say that learning is important, our actions will speak louder than our words and they'll emulate being know-it-alls too. So we're not going to build a learning culture. And so we need to be conscious of wanting to come across as a work in progress, as a learner, just like an Olympic gold medalist. They might be the best in the world, but they're getting up early the next day to try to become even better. And so we wanna make that visible and explicit to other people and then create the systems and habits of say, okay, if we're gonna work on this particular thing, like for example, feedback, are we going to do that by soliciting feedback frequently? And so then let's keep each other accountable to soliciting feedback. That means I as a leader need to be soliciting feedback from the people I lead or from the rest of the team. Everybody else needs to be doing that too. And if that's not happening, we have to have conversations about why that's not happening. Am I creating fear? How can I better support you? And what we see consistently is that if you do that, people really lean into it and they grow and the culture transforms. And at the same time, there may be a few people, usually the minority, who might not change. And you try different strategies and for whatever reason, they are not successful in affecting the change and they might need to part ways because this work is also about the fit of people who are ready and choose the culture that they want to be part of and they want to build together, and that they are ready and they find a way to become successful at it.

Oh, I love so much of what you just described, Eduardo, both in terms of the leadership example that the leader sets with their own growth mindset. And you talked about making it visible and explicit. A lot of times leaders might be going through that learning but aren't making it explicit and visible for others to see, and therefore that way showing the example of what a growth mindset would look like. One of the challenges that you mentioned is a lot of times we feel when we move up in organizations, people's expectation of us is to have the answers, So we tend to present ourselves as the know-it-alls and therefore encourage other people through our example to be know-it-alls. So I love the way you describe that most especially, and I would love to get your thoughts on this as I'm of strong belief that technological advancement, especially now as a result of artificial intelligence, will require individuals and teams to reinvent themselves at a much faster rate than ever before. Would love to get your thoughts with respect to how a growth mindset overlays into these technological changes that we have coming ahead of us.

Absolutely. And I've learned so much about artificial intelligence from your podcast, and I continue to do so. Thank you for all your work on So on the importance of making things explicit, if we make it explicit that everybody can improve and we explain why and we make analogies to the Olympic gold medalist, for example, then we're making our implicit assumptions explicit. And then other people understand that when we're working on ourselves, it's because everybody needs to be working on themselves, not because there's something wrong going on. Or if we Say, for example, that we solicit feedback, and so we're making our learning visible, but not explicit in the sense that we're not explaining why we're soliciting feedback. Other people might think, okay, this person's soliciting feedback, that means that they don't know what they're doing and they're not confident. So if you explain why soliciting feedback's really important, something we can all benefit from, making our implicit explicit, then everybody gets on the same page. Regarding the change in the world and the technology, A growth mindset helps us leap into the unknown because we know that we can learn from that and that we might make some mistakes. We might try things that don't work, but we will learn from that. We will change and we will find a way to get to our goal. It also allows us similarly to drive some of that change. So not just to adapt to the change that's happening, but also to create some of that change and to think about Okay, this new technology is happening. How do I adapt to it? But also, how can I tinker with it and do something that maybe nobody else has done before that can be an opportunity and that can actually make us stronger?

That is a strength that we are all going to need as we go through these transitions. And as I mentioned, you share lots of examples of organizations and individuals in your book. I do want to highlight one though, because she has been a dear friend, mentor, For 25-plus years, you had a chance to interview Linda Rabbitt, who, without any construction experience, started a construction company, which is one of the largest women-owned construction firms in the country at this point. Would love to get your thoughts with respect to Linda Rabbitt having a growth mindset and the impact on her and her organization through that.

Yeah, it's been such a pleasure to get to know Linda, and thank you, Mahan, for making that introduction and connecting me with her. I talk about Linda Rabbit. One of the chapters I do that is in a chapter called The Growth Propeller, and The Growth Propeller describes the 5 elements that allow us to succeed. And I think Linda is a wonderful example of that. So one element of that is identity. She sees herself as a learner. She was a teacher and then she became a stay-at-home mom. And then her husband became emotionally and physically abusive. So she left him. But that meant she was a single mom. She needed to get a job. So she became an executive assistant at KPMG. And she had ambition to transform herself and also to prove herself to her ex-husband and to her dad that she could be successful because she was feeling like a failure. Like her marriage had collapsed. She was not where she wanted to be. And so she wanted to be an executive at KPMG, but without an accounting degree, she was told you can't. And so she met a woman who wanted to start a construction company and she said, yeah, let's do it. Let's start a construction company together. And her boss, who is great and she really loves, but he told her, look, what do you know about construction? And she's like, I don't know anything about construction, but I can learn. And so that reflects An identity as a learner who says, I don't know, I don't have the answers, but I do know that I can figure it out. I can jump in and figure it out and build a network. And she built a network of women in real estate and construction that they support each other for 25 years. She's now obviously a mentor and an advisor to lots of other women and others. So an identity as a learner is something that's really important for us to become acquainted with and develop as part of our identity, as opposed to we're fixed in a particular way. Here are the labels that I place on myself. No, I learn and I evolve and I change myself over time. Otherwise, she wouldn't have become an executive, which was not always part of her identity, or even after becoming an executive, she's now more of an advisor and a mentor. So her identity has shifted over time, but what has remained constant is being a learner. She also has a strong sense of purpose in doing work that's important in building a workplace that is a workplace that people love to go to and that they're going to learn a lot from. She has a set of beliefs that allow them to be an effective learner and performer, a set of habits that allow her to do the same. And she has built a community, even though construction is largely a male-dominated industry and she didn't necessarily feel she belonged at the beginning. She made sure to build relationships in a network and a community of both men and women who now support each other and have been able to help one another succeed both in learning zone and the performance zone. And those are the ingredients. to be successful in both of the zones.

She's an outstanding example of what you talk about, Eduardo. And one of the things that gives me extreme joy in having this conversation with you is that so are you. I've had many interactions with you over the years, and your own approach, your own growth mindset and willingness to seek feedback continually has inspired me to have more of a growth mindset and understand that we are all on a journey together, a journey to learn, grow ourselves, and also impact others. One of the things that I loved in reading your book is that it both enables the organization and the team to thrive, and more importantly, in my view, It unleashes the potential of the individuals in that organization. So it allows people to become their best through this growth mindset, not just the organization to perform at a higher level.

Thank you, Mahana. And I feel the same about you, and one of the reasons I listen to your podcast. But yeah, I feel like I have changed so much throughout my life in so many different ways, and that's been very empowering to me. I've become a person that's a lot happier and more effective and doing things, making life more worthwhile. And I didn't know that I could do that at the beginning. So I love to be in partnership with others so that more of us can feel that way and can feel like we can continue to evolve ourselves and what we do and what we do with our lives. And being in partnership with you in this journey of life is a joy because it definitely magnifies that.

It absolutely is. Now, Eduardo, in addition to your book, are there other books, resources, or practices you typically find yourself recommending to leaders of teams and organizations as they look to either develop more of a growth mindset themselves or put in the systems and approaches in their teams and organizations to encourage more growth There are many books, and I know you read a ton of books too.

The foundational book on mindset is Mindset by my mentor Carol Dweck. That's a book that often comes up if people haven't read that book and they want to learn about fixed mindset and growth mindset. That's the seminal book, and that's about the power of the belief that we can improve. My book is about how to improve, and those 2 things go hand in hand together. They reinforce each other. Other books I would say I love the book Grit by Angela Duckworth. One of the things that Often people who haven't read the book get the impression of that is that grit is about grinding it out like I started my childhood with. And what I love about Grit by Angela is that it really talks about kind of purpose and doing things that are worthwhile and how we can get there. But other than that, I would say the learning strategies that are effective are domain specific. So if we want to get better at sales, there's a ton of books about sales, then sales strategies. Or if there are accountability or performance systems, like there's books about that, or if there's books about becoming a web developer or books or other resources. And so I would say first doing some introspection on what we're interested in and what we want to grow in, and then looking for resources on what do experts or great performers in those things recommend are strategies for me to improve in this one area and going there.

Outstanding recommendations. And as you mentioned, Carol Dweck's book is an outstanding perspective on the why of growth mindset, and yours becomes a very practical way for leaders to implement a growth mindset for themselves, their teams, and organizations with lots of examples. of others that have done it and examples that we can learn from. As we experiment, we learn and we grow. So where can the audience find out more about you, Eduardo, and your book?

My website is briceño.com, and there's a page about the book there. There's actually at the bottom a way to flip through the first few pages of the book, the table of contents and the first few pages. And there's my newsletter. I have a monthly newsletter there that people can sign up Or if they want to. I'm most active in LinkedIn, and you're probably the person that I'm most active with. It's such a joy to be in conversation with you on LinkedIn, and those are the 2 places to find me.

Eduardo, what an incredible joy to get a chance to celebrate the launching of this book, not only because it is an incredible book that I know will impact many professionals teams, and organizations. Additionally, it comes from a source that I have the honor of having seen as a person who serves as an example of what he talks about. So would highly recommend for the audience to look up both you and your book, The Performance Paradox. Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. Thank you so much for joining me in this conversation, my friend, Eduardo Briceño. Absolute pleasure.

Thank you, Mahant Avakali. It was a real pleasure to be here with you.