Praise Effort and Grit, Not Talent
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
- Stephen King, Author
Carol Dweck led a fascinating study back in 1998 in which she and her colleagues worked with four hundred 5th graders and gave them a series of tests, mostly puzzles, and then praised them in two different ways with these six little words.
With half of the group they said, “You must be smart at this.”
With the other half of the group they said, “You must have tried really hard.”
The first word set awarded intelligence, and innate talent, similar to how many parents and coaches (myself included) get trapped into talking about, and to, our kids. We say how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. The second word set praised effort, determination, preparation, grit. What the researchers were interested in, was how the kids would view their abilities, as fixed and unchanging or as malleable and able to grow and change with work.
In the next round of puzzles, the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. You guessed right, the kids praised for effort choose to attempt the harder problems. The kids praised for talent selected the easier problems because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes they have special talent and they are expected to perform well, then the thought of failing expectations becomes a liability. So to protect yourself as a “gifted and talented” individual we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance.
In the next part of the study both sets of kids were given harder problems to solve and both sets of kids performed more poorly. But here’s the interesting thing. When the researchers asked the kids how they did on the problems, the kids praised for talent lied 40% of the time, presumably to maintain their social status as “talented.” However, when the other kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, only 10% of them exaggerated their performance. They felt no loss of self-esteem from doing poorly on difficult problems.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the next phase of the study, both sets of kids were given problems comparable to the original set of problems. In terms of difficulty, this next set was just as challenging as the first. The group praised for talent had just had an ego setback in the earlier round, and did 20% worse than they did the first time around. They were told they were smart, then they performed poorly, and now attacking the same level of difficulty with decreased confidence they do 20% worse.
But the second group did 30% better this time around. There’s the difference – 6 words. But keep in mind there are a lot of ways to say, “You must have tried really hard.”
Carol and her colleagues use these kinds of effort or “process” praise: which is praise for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, etc.
– You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
– I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, and kept working. That’s great!
– I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things
Next time you see excellent, praise the effort, the grit, the patience and hard work it must have taken to get there. You’ll not only be rewarding excellence, but also building growth and confidence.
Read MoreThe Velocity of Learning
You don’t often think of learning as having a speed, a velocity, but it does. The classic notion of practice involves putting in the hours, doing the time, right? But there is a striking difference in the quality of practice that leads to accelerated learning. And it isn’t about watching the clock, it’s more about purposeful practice. Purposeful practice is found right on the edges of your ability, at the intersection of challenge and ability when you are successful perhaps 50-75% of the time. Not so much easy success that gains overconfidence and loss of challenge, and not so much difficulty that it creates a sense of stress and anxiety.
But the only why to find that sweet spot is to try, to get in action. Particularly when trying to acquire new skills or new behaviors the aim shouldn’t necessarily be to stop a trait or practice, but instead think about starting new behaviors and habits. Dan Coyle told a marvelous story about visiting the Shyness Clinic in Palo Alto, CA where they focus on building new habits toward developing what they call “social fitness.” The folks that come to the shyness clinic often have arrived at a point where their social anxieties and shyness have become a real hindrance and barrier to connection. The clinicians and psychologists there believe that much like developing physical fitness, or leadership or creative capacities, so too can people develop social fitness.
A simple exercise might involve asking participants to approach two people per day in a public place and simply ask them the time of day. And then graduate to asking a store manager where the restroom is, for example. For a final exam a participant was asked to go to a supermarket and intentionally drop a whole watermelon on the floor and work with the market employees to deal with the mess and apologize for the accident. Such a scene would be an appalling thought to someone suffering from acute shyness. But over time, with incremental social practice and repetitive purposeful practice and interactions, the participants could build the social and emotional capacities to envision such an incident, and effectively deal with it in a public social setting.
And remember the practice needs to be in context, under real conditions, with a little stress, a little challenge such that you are on the edges of your ability. For example, instead of asking the soccer team players to shoot twenty penalty kicks at the end of practice, instead stop the scrimmage in the middle of practice and have a player shoot just two, under pressure, in the middle of the game.
Read MoreGratitude = Meaning = Performance = Happiness
The results were clear: Higher levels of optimism, increased life satisfaction, and decreased negative feelings were all associated with students’ expressions of gratitude. By the follow-up three weeks later, students who had been instructed to count their blessings showed more gratitude toward people who had helped them, which led to more gratitude in general.
– Jeffrey Froh, Professor, Hofstra University
I have three kids, currently with a combined age of twenty-one. The other day I was musing on how to teach gratitude to them and posed this question to my five year old at the kitchen table: “Annie, would you name three things you are grateful for?”
“What’s grateful?”
“Thankful. What are three things you are thankful for?”
She thought for a moment and said, “Santa Claus!” Cute. She also said painting with her grandmother and playing with our dog. A good start. Gratitude, just like creativity, can be learned. The importance and power of engaging ourselves in our work, connecting with the people and world around us, and deviating from convention to create new value, defines our potential in this creative age.
Jeffrey Froh, Hofstra University, did this cool study in which he and his colleagues, tracked 221 students and divided them into three groups, asking each group to think about 1. things they were grateful for and liked about school, 2. things they found to be a hassle and not fun, and 3. a control group they asked nothing of.
Pretty simply, they asked group one to spend just a few minutes each day identifying up to five things they were grateful for, and measured their school performance and engagement from both their perspective and the perspective of their teachers. Essentially, they found these students to be happier (by their own account), and more engaged in their work (by the teachers account), and…wait for it, they got better grades. Not only that, the effect lasted beyond the duration of the study itself. Finally consider the effect of extrinsic rewards in this study:
“Evidence from research with adolescents indicates that gratitude is incompatible with the pursuit of materialistic or extrinsic goals and that it positively predicts academic achievement, mental health and well-being—outcomes that are negatively predicted by materialism.”Read More
Finding the Adjacent Possible
Whatever field you work in, your expertise is expected, it’s a given. So too your diligence. It is your initiative and creative ability to bring unique and signature solutions to solve unexpected problems that is your brand, and increasingly your company’s brand and identity. The question is how to find it? Or a better question – how can we create collaborative learning environments where we can have new ideas on a regular basis? Not in a mechanized on-demand sort of way, but rather create an ecosystem which encourages exploration of the adjacent possible. More on that cool concept here from Steven Johnson.
Bill Taylor’s new book, Practically Radical, talks about three key elements to drive successful innovation:
- To become the ‘most of something’. Check out the most successful organizations and people. They are all the most of something. There is no place in today’s high-pressured, rapidly-changing, killer-competitive world for anything less
- To embrace a sense of vuja dé. Vuja dé is looking at a familiar situation as if you are seeing it for the very first time. This instantly opens up limitless imagination, and fresh insights and ideas
- To look for fresh, new ideas in new places. Never compare yourself with what or who is considered best in your field. Learn from people and organizations that are way outside your field
If Bill is right (and I think he is) this has implications for how we develop learning environments for people in our organizations. The future of learning is must be to provide conceptual and powerful learning opportunities; opportunities which offer insight, ideas, and parables intended for inference and application by the learner. The outcomes of this kind of learning are quite unexpected, and by its very nature, bring in fresh insights and solutions. This is what makes the whole learning experience unique and beautiful.
To create the shift to conceptual learning, is to essentially balance the spoon-fed, outcome-anticipated, specific-competence results-oriented learning environments with more conceptual learning environments. This will treat learners as ready and able to distill ideas into their own signature integrated solutions, which are applicable for their line of work both internal and external. Success ensures that the experience is meaningful. This will then bring about the total shift to conceptual learning.
Tom Kelley, CEO of IDEO, a premier product and services innovation company, has been a long advocate of this approach. In his book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, he describes a particular persona called the “Cross-Pollinator”. Cross-Pollinators are those people who are inquisitive beyond their particular domain expertise and explore ideas from industries outside their immediate purview. They understand and learn the technology, device or methods employed elsewhere and figure out how to incorporate these ideas into their own work.
Go. Find the adjacent possible.
Read MoreThe Innovation Midwife
AMA Corporate Learning recently surveyed over 1100 senior managers and executives on the topic of leadership succession planning and discovered only 14% described their organization as properly prepared to confront key leadership loss, and over 80% said they were either “somewhat prepared” or “not at all prepared.” In the case of Steve Jobs, confidence appears reasonably high that Tim Cook is prepared to lead Apple through Jobs’ health break. Yet, 14% nationally reflects a pretty sad confidence level in our leadership pipeline.
I’m reminded of the development culture at U.S. Cellular which dictates the both/and equation when it comes to business results. In their culture a defining metric of goal success is both achieving the business objective AND developing people in the process. The goal is considered incomplete if you ink a deal but the people growth component isn’t there. There is a clear expectation that business drivers include the people development part. Because people aren’t assets, they’re well…people. As Jonas Ridderstrale likes to say, “If you are doing your job as a leader you shouldn’t be needed.” What he means is that if you stock the organization with both high-will ecosystems and high-skill individuals and collaborators, you won’t be needed. The point at which the leader makes their most valuable contribution is to be the midwife of innovation. The leader acting as innovation midwife cannot possibly provide the answer or prescribe the insight, since that approach lacks the originality of the democratic process, and isn’t born from the mind of the contributor. In this capacity, the innovation midwife plays inquisitor – asking the kinds of honest probing questions that yield the birth of ideas.
And there’s another role for the midwife – finding the home and support for the idea. At the same time the innovation midwife is coaxing powerful new ideas into the world, she has to also be finding those sponsors and champions within the organization who are willing to nurture, feed and shelter these ideas so they can become big enough to surprise the world. To quote Ridderstrale again, the TBUS (Time Between Unexpected Surprises) is shrinking every day.
Read MoreBuilding Urgency for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
We had a fantastic interaction and presentation with Andy McAfee, author of Enterprise 2.0, this past week. He delivered a live, interactive webcast to our global audience of over 500 organizations. He opened by debunking a fairly straightforward idea that we hear constantly, “It’s not about the technology.” This is a common idea paraded about in organizations to demonstrate that while, yes, technology is of course changing, it is more about the business models, ideas, and market landscape that surrounds the changing technology.
Myself, I’ve been sucker to that same argument when talking about the importance of recognizing technology as a tacit enabler, but not the point itself. McAfee wants to point out that…now…more than ever before, the technology itself is changing at such a logarithmic rate, that indeed it has powerful impacts on the services and product innovation we provide.
Take at look at the graph – when we weigh infrastructure asset prices of industrial, transportation and infrastructure costs against the cost of available technology, clearly online technological costs are plummeting, and that has profound implications about how we can, and should, do business. And importantly, how we interact as communities in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 environment. The price crash of collaborative technologies based on peripheral equipment like computers (iPads!, NetBooks!) has opened up immense opportunities for people to congregate virtually, share expertise, practices, and insights – and if they choose, to also collaborate in competitive ways in the market.
With the advent of online collaborative environments we are seeing heightened competition from everyone, everywhere, for everything. If you thought your market niche was product based, or particularly regional in scope, think again. With cool collaborative innovation sinks like InnoCentive, people can build iterative new products and services leveraging expertise around the world in a flash. So as you and your business consider integrating Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, consider that the alternative could be obsolescence.
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