Developing a Growth Mindset

why did it take me so long?

In my inaugural newsletter, I said that the best leaders have self-awareness, empathy, and a growth mindset. Today, I want to dive into growth mindset today by telling you the uncomfortable story of how long it took me to develop a growth mindset in myself. If I’m being honest, I’ll tell you that I struggled to write this because the source of my professional drive hasn’t always been healthy. I’ve had a chip on my shoulder for a good chunk of my life that started when I was young.

I love my family, but I am the Gen-X product of the wave of divorce that swept the 80s. My parents married far too young, got divorced when I was 10, and then struggled with finances and second relationships during my teenage years. I would describe those years as frequently unstable in ways that today’s mental health awareness would call traumatic.

I was a very smart, geeky kid who loved computers and electronics. My goals for college were to 1) move out of the house, 2) go somewhere that I could afford since I was paying for college myself, and 3) land a career that would provide much-needed life stability. I love engineering and can’t imagine having picked a different career, but part of my motivation in picking engineering was to get a (relatively) high-paying, stable job.

My college degrees are in electrical engineering, which is a rigorous field dominated by advanced mathematics. I was academically underprepared going into college, and I started off unsure if I could afford it or survive it. I developed a “do whatever it takes” kind of drive, but that particular type of grit is rooted in survival and performance rather than growth. And I’m not going to sugarcoat this next part. I felt a ton of jealousy of the friends around me whose parents were paying for their entire college and for whom college seemed more like a learning journey full of adventure rather than my slog for success and stability. Chip…meet shoulder.

This mindset continued into my early professional life. I won’t share all of the stories now because then I won’t have any material for future newsletters! But, let me summarize what I now call Phase 1 of my career: I brought the same drive and grit from college into the workforce and combined it with a) zero patience for managers who didn’t fit my model of good leadership, b) zero patience for the bullshit aspects of corporate life, and c) zero patience with the seemingly slow speed of my career growth.

Impatience can be a good trait, but I was missing an important learning during this phase of my career. Even in situations with crappy managers or bullshit company behaviors, there are always things to learn and always good feedback to receive. My opinion was absolutist: crappy manager == nothing to learn from them. That’s dumb and pretty career-limiting.

Learning #1: a growth mindset requires that we look for learning and feedback in every situation we are in.

Phase 1 of my career was a mixture of 3 startups and 2 small-ish companies (less than 2000 people). I was successful enough in phase 1 to get to phase 2—executive leadership at hyper-growth startups. The punchline here is obvious: stepping up to executive leadership is where the growth mindset slapped me in the face.

I’ll talk more about hyper-growth in future newsletters, but it’s characterized by an extreme pace of customer growth, hiring, and execution speed. Companies in hyper-growth experience a CAGR of 40% or more, and virtually every aspect of the company feels like it changes every 6 months. How I managed to land the top Engineering leadership job in my first hyper-growth company remains a mystery to me given what I know now. Much like college, I was woefully underprepared for the job.

Again, there are many future stories here, but I’ll share one to highlight how the growth mindset shocked my system. When I started at my first hyper-growth company, I went in totally overconfident in my abilities. On paper, things looked good. I had managed a multi-layered engineering org before. I had scaled hiring significantly in previous companies. I had managed the development of multiple new products. Yet despite all of that previous experience, I hadn’t yet learned to move at the pace required for a hyper-growth company. There just wasn’t enough brute force grit I could apply to the problem. Brute force wasn’t what I needed, though. It was creative thinking and helpful feedback.

Learning #2: a growth mindset requires a delicate balance between self-confidence in one’s skills and self-awareness of one’s weaknesses.

There are a lot of mistakes I made in that role: not learning enough from a founder’s experience building a previous generation of the product; not properly adapting my previous operational playbooks to the current company; not taking a stronger stance around my needs for specific staff and roles; not realizing that I was stepping on toes as the newly hired head of engineering. There were multiple points along my journey at this company when I could have recognized my own weaknesses and could have asked for better feedback.

My team and I built many great things during my time there, but in the end, I lost that job. Looking back, this was the best thing that could have happened to me professionally, but it was also the first time in my career that I felt like I had really failed. More importantly, it was the first time in my life that my drive, grit, and impatience were not enough to get the job done. This began my pivot towards a growth mindset.

I’ll share more stories from this so-called Phase 2 in future newsletters. For now, I’ll say that in the next few roles and companies, Learning #1 was a key anchor. The people that I struggled with—the uber-political c-level who was masterful at getting what he wanted out of a founder, the gaslighting c-level who had every VP regularly questioning their sanity, the non-empathetic HR leader—all of these people had things I could learn from and feedback to offer me.

Learning #3 a growth mindset requires continuous learning; it’s a journey, not a destination.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that to keep growing as humans we have to keep learning. The difference with a growth mindset is how you approach learning. Earlier in my career, I weighed feedback according to who it was coming from. If it was someone I didn’t particularly like or respect, I tended to discount their feedback if not outright ignore it. That’s a mistake. Feedback is a separate thing from the messenger who delivers it. Feedback is its own package. Yes, you still have to judge feedback validity and accuracy because there could be a dishonest agenda behind it. But you can’t ignore it. Ironically, some of the best learnings will come from the least expected people.

One final story. I had a neurotic, narcissistic CEO tell me once, “Doug, you just want people to like you.” He intended it as a criticism of my leadership skills…his feeling that I lacked the ability to make hard decisions that might affect people poorly. You know what? He was right. He was right that my empathy sometimes gets in the way of making hard decisions. He was also right that I tend to value people and teams first and business outcomes second, and that priority order isn’t always correct. And while it’s not so much about a need for being liked, I do have a core need for people to perceive me as honest and ethical, even when I have to make hard decisions. So looking at this in retrospect, it was all good feedback.