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Jenn Johnson, VP of People, Culture and DEI at ezCater, is a coaching credentialed people leader who has spent close to two decades helping companies create environments where employees can grow honestly. The conversation focused on what it takes to operationalize a growth mindset across a workforce, not as a slogan but as a set of habits embedded in how people are hired, developed, and rewarded.
Carol Dweck's research at Stanford put the phrase growth mindset into the management vocabulary. The harder question is how you embed it in an organization with hundreds or thousands of decisions a day. The answer is not training alone. It is a redesign of the small interactions that teach people whether their abilities are fixed or developable.
HR leaders should think about growth mindset as the cumulative result of how managers give feedback, how the company rewards effort, and how new hires are introduced to the culture in their first 90 days. The story those moments tell is the one employees remember.
Why a growth mindset is an HR design problem
Mindset gets shaped by environment. Telling people to embrace challenges does little if the performance system punishes failure or if managers reward only polished outcomes. HBR research on what having a growth mindset actually means argues that most organizational claims to growth mindset stop at the language layer and never reach the practices.
HR teams have the rare position to redesign those practices. Hiring rubrics that prize curiosity and trajectory, performance reviews that score learning behaviors, and recognition programs that celebrate stretch work all push the mindset deeper into the organization. AllVoices supports this work through an HR solution that ties listening to action and a performance improvement product that handles the harder side of growth conversations with care.
The risk is treating growth mindset as a values poster. The reward is treating it as a system. Companies that pick the second path see fewer plateaus, more internal mobility, and managers who feel comfortable having honest development conversations.
Building the practice
How does a growth mindset show up in hiring?
It shows up in what you ask candidates and how you score the answers. Replace pure competency questions with questions about a time the candidate did not know how to do something and figured it out. Score the trajectory rather than the polish. Trajectory predicts how someone will grow inside your company.
Onboarding extends the message. A new hire's first manager check-in should ask what they want to learn rather than only what they need to know. The shift from absorption to inquiry sets the tone for tenure.
What does it mean for performance reviews?
Performance reviews that only score outcomes teach employees to take safe bets. Add a learning dimension that scores how someone responded to setbacks, how they incorporated feedback, and what new capability they built. Performance management shifts from a rear view exercise to a forward looking one.
The review conversation itself should model the mindset. Managers ask what the employee learned, what they would do differently, and what they want to try next. The employee leaves with a plan rather than a verdict.
What actually works
Train managers in feedback that builds capacity
Most feedback failures happen because the manager confuses feedback with judgment. The fix is a structure that names the situation, the behavior, the impact, and the next step. Gallup data on fast feedback shows that frequent, specific feedback drives stronger performance than infrequent comprehensive reviews.
The manager layer carries the practice. Without trained managers, growth mindset becomes a CEO talking point that dies between the all hands and the 1:1. With trained managers, it becomes the texture of daily work.
Recognize effort and learning, not just results
Recognition that only celebrates wins teaches employees to hide losses. A program that recognizes the engineer who took a difficult rewrite, the manager who admitted a hiring miss and corrected it, or the salesperson who lost a deal but documented what they learned, reshapes what the company praises. Rewards and recognition have to align with the mindset for the mindset to take.
The signal does not need to be expensive. A short story shared in a team meeting, with consent, often carries more weight than a bonus. The point is what gets named publicly.
Make stretch assignments explicit
Growth requires reach. Build a small inventory of stretch assignments and offer them deliberately to employees who would not normally raise their hand. Coaching from a manager during the assignment converts the experience into capability rather than survival.
According to Deloitte research on internal mobility, employees who get internal stretch experiences stay longer and perform stronger than those who do not. Stretch is a retention tool as much as a development tool.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Growth mindset cultures still have hard moments. Performance issues, peer conflict, and miscommunication are part of the territory. AllVoices supports the harder side through an employee relations function that gives HR a structured workspace and an HR case management product that documents every step.
Performance conversations and growth go together
A performance improvement conversation is one of the highest stakes growth moments in someone's career. Handled well, it gives the employee a credible path to recover. Handled poorly, it teaches a different lesson. The blog on AI for on-demand HR support covers how technology can give managers better preparation for those conversations.
Frequently Asked Questions About Growth Mindset at Work
How is this different from a fixed mindset?
A fixed mindset treats abilities as innate. A growth mindset treats them as developable through effort and feedback. The difference is consequential because it changes how people interpret setbacks.
Can a company have a growth mindset if its founders do not?
Partially. The founders set the ceiling on how deep the mindset can go. HR can still build pockets of strong practice. The pockets either spread or get squeezed depending on executive sponsorship.
How do we measure it?
Watch internal mobility rates, manager effectiveness scores on coaching, and employee responses to a question about whether they have grown in the past six months. Three signals beat any single index.
What about employees who resist?
Some resistance is healthy. The framing should be invitation, not coercion. Offer the practice. Show what it produces. Let employees opt in over time. Coercion teaches the wrong lesson.
Does this work in highly technical roles?
Yes. Engineers and scientists often respond well to growth mindset framing because their work depends on iteration. The barrier is usually the management layer, not the discipline.
What's the first step for HR leaders who want to put this into practice?
Start with one team and one measurable outcome. Pick a function where the issue shows up sharply and a leader who is willing to model the new practice. Map the current state honestly: what is happening, who feels it, and what would good look like in ninety days. Share that picture with the team, ask them what is missing from your read, and adjust before launching anything formal. The goal of step one is alignment, not activity.
Once the picture is shared, pick two or three changes you can make inside one quarter. Resist the urge to launch a full program. Run the changes, measure the response with simple pulse questions, and report back. The combination of a focused team, a clear measure, and a public commitment to learn is what turns a good idea into a practice that spreads. HR leaders who try to launch everywhere at once usually end up launching nowhere.
Iterate from there. The teams that succeed treat the first cycle as a prototype, not a rollout. They keep what worked, drop what did not, and write down what they learned. By the time the practice expands to the next group, it has been pressure-tested by people who have a stake in seeing it work. That is the unglamorous work of putting any people-strategy idea into practice, and it is also the work that compounds.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Jenn Johnson is right that growth mindset has to be built into the moments where employees feel judged, recognized, or stretched. The companies that get this right design the system rather than rely on the words.
The mandate for HR leaders is to align hiring, feedback, recognition, and assignments around the same lesson: ability is developable, effort is honored, and learning is the work. Done consistently, the mindset becomes the culture rather than the campaign.
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