D BEST INSPIRED COACHING

Fixed and Growth Mindset Explained by Fear

A mistake is simply an event, yet for many it feels like being judged. This edition explores a fixed mindset as protection.

FEAR AT WORKCULTURE & ORGANIZATIONS

Deb Best

11/2/20264 min read

Carol Dweck’s research on fixed and growth mindsets is well known in education and in business. A growth mindset sees ability as something that can develop. Mistakes become information: What can I learn? What can I do differently? A fixed mindset sees ability as more fixed. Mistakes can then feel like evidence of inherent limitations, and lead to giving up or dejection.

This is very helpful in developing people, but there is an underlying question here that deserves a lot more attention:

Why does a mistake feel threatening in the first place?

A mistake is simply an event. Something did not work, an answer was wrong, or an expected result was not achieved. It just is... human. Completely normal and to be expected. Happens all the time, to everyone.

Yet fear of making mistakes is real. Being accountable can feel like blame, judgement, and criticism, and therein lies our answer.

People do not experience the same mistake in the same way. For one person, it means, “I have something to learn.” For this person, the response is, “Oh, thanks for letting me know, I’ll fix that.” For another, a mistake means, “I am not good enough,” “I am going to lose credibility,” “I won’t belong,” “I’ll lose my job,” or “I am not safe here.”

Learned in Relationship

The meaning we attach to failure is not in the failure itself. It is shaped by experience, specifically by what happened to us when we made a mistake and were made to feel bad, or not enough.

Dweck’s own later work points in this direction. A 2016 study she co-authored with Kyla Haimovitz found that children’s mindsets were predicted less by what their parents believed about intelligence than by how their parents reacted to failure.

For parents, the stakes feel high. A child must grow up to be successful, and mistakes can look like a risk to that future. A parent’s reaction to failure is often fear for the child, passed on as pressure. The fear is learned, and it is shared.

When acceptance, approval, belonging, or worth become connected to performance, failure stops being a learning event. It becomes a threat. If success has meant being valued, and mistakes have meant criticism, rejection, shame, or loss of status, it makes sense that people become alert to any sign they may have failed.

Sound familiar? Rejected for past mistakes, afraid of failing again, reluctant to try.

Mindset as Protection

When we experience threat, our nervous system moves toward protection: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flock. A fixed mindset can be part of that protective response.

If failure feels like evidence that I am not enough, avoiding the situation, defending my competence, hiding the mistake, or quietly disengaging may feel safer than risking another failure. What looks like resistance to learning may be an attempt to protect against a perceived threat.

Consider two responses to the same setback:

“That didn’t work. What can I learn?”
“That didn’t work. What does this say about me?”

The first keeps the problem separate from the person. The second makes it personal.

Dweck’s research helps us see the difference between these two responses. A broader view of fear adds another piece: before failure can become a learning opportunity, people need enough security that failure does not threaten who they believe they are.

From Report Cards to Performance Reviews

Many people carry a fear of failure into their professional lives, and it is usually seen as an individual issue. It is not.

At work, the report card becomes the performance review. The manager steps into the parent’s role. The judgement remains, and so do the consequences. People do not arrive at work with a blank slate. Many have been criticized, shamed, rejected, or made to feel inadequate for their mistakes. Fear of failure may already be present, unstated, before they walk through the door.

Is a grade a status check to see how well learning is being conveyed or projects are progressing, or is it a judgment that determines enough-ness, success, and safety from rejection?

Most, if not all, performance systems work as judgment. Individual scorecards focus on the person’s ability or outcomes, often without the organizational context. And the ratings themselves are less objective than we assume. One large study found that more than half of the variation in performance ratings reflected the person doing the rating, not the person being rated (Scullen et al., 2000).

At work, avoiding, defending, hiding, and disengaging are exactly the behaviours we don’t want. We expect performance feedback to encourage better performance in the future, yet the feedback itself can undermine that success. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the fear of being judged produces the very behaviours that get judged.

What Failure Means Here

Mindset does not operate in a vacuum. The environment shapes what it means to make a mistake.

If failure means learning, people can experiment, ask questions, admit uncertainty, and improve. A fear of failure can calm, and growth is unleashed. If failure continues to mean exposure, inadequacy, or exclusion, people have good reason to protect themselves.

Leaders hold the power to assess, judge, and exit people. That authority carries an embedded threat, whether or not anyone intends it. Business education increasingly teaches psychological safety and growth mindset, but we have not generally looked further into the roots of these beliefs and behaviours. Psychological safety helps, but understanding why it helps is key to making a difference and sustaining it.

So the question for organizations is not only, “Do our people have a growth mindset?” as if that mindset were solely innate, but “Do our leaders enable growth?” It is also, “What does failure mean here?” and, “What role does threat play in our practices, including how we treat one another in performance reviews?”

Perhaps the goal is not simply to create more growth mindsets. It is to create conditions in which growth feels safe enough to occur.

Sources

Cloke, K. (n.d.). “Flock” and “fix”: Proposed additions to “fight, flight, freeze and fawn.” Mediate.com.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). What predicts children’s fixed and growth intelligence mind-sets? Not their parents’ views of intelligence but their parents’ views of failure. Psychological Science, 27(6), 859–869. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616639727

Scullen, S. E., Mount, M. K., & Goff, M. (2000). Understanding the latent structure of job performance ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(6), 956–970. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.85.6.956

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote.

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In the spirit of respect and truth, I honour and acknowledge that I live and work within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

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