Cultures of Growth book review

When I first saw this book at a bookstore in Traverse City, I knew it’d bug me if I never read it. As a pastor, I desperately want to be someone who can lead a congregation, and individuals, into spaces of growth. I think that the Christian life is about constant movement. If Christ has called me to follow him, then I need to move as he moves. A life standing still is often one actually moving backwards.

In this literary effort, Mary Murphy gives us a well-tested guide on how to transform the mindset of your self, your team, and your community into one of growth rather than staying fixed in the status quo.

What is mindset? Murphy describes it as “our beliefs about the malleability of intelligence” (xvi). It is your mindset, individually or communally, that determines how you respond to the world that is happening around you. Challenge, setbacks, opportunities, and goal-setting are just some of the things that are impacted by you an your teams’ mindset.

If we can believe that our mindset can shift, then we should do everything that we can to become people who are growth oriented and not stuck in ways of being and doing that do not bring out the best in us.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

1. The biggest influence on whether you are operating from your fixed or growth mindset at any given moment isn’t necessarily between your ears — its outside of you (xvi).

Murphy compares the shaping of our mindset to a fish swimming in a pond — our mindset is dramatically impacted by the quality of water we are swimming in.

Your home culture, work culture, church culture, town culture, school culture, and on and on, all impact how you think about what you do.

We need to cultivate surroundings, and choose to be a part of surroundings, that encourage trial and failure, places that emphasize encouragement and development.

It also is a powerful reminder that the reason you feel stuck, bored at work, or afraid of failing, may have nothing to do with you personally at all. Rather, the place you are in may be unhealthy and you just need a fresh start with a new community.

2. Mindset culture is so powerful that it can block an individual’s growth mindset (7).

When you have a new or young leader, it is so important not to just send that individual off on their own adventure and hope for the best, but instead equip them with the support they need to succeed.

Many young pastors don’t make it long in ministry. Most business start ups don’t last long enough to become profitable.

Setting and changing culture is hard to do, and near impossible as an individual. We need to make sure to be doing our best to help young leaders find success early and often so as to not burn them out.

3. Cultures of Growth are likely to deem more characteristics essential to success besides sheer ability, talent, or intellectual brainpower, like motivation, creativity, problem-solving, and the willingness to develop one-self (18).

Culture-setters cannot just be about the product, but more about the people.

In business, the people on your team will work better and innovate more if they enjoy and believe in the community they work in.

In things like church, we are not trying to create a class of elite Pharisees but trying to create spaces that inspire people to take seriously their discipleship to Christ.

4. In the course of our work, we discovered that managers’ mindsets about their employees shaped managers’ behaviors (26).

This may seem somewhat obvious, but the way you think about the people living around you ultimately impacts the way you behave towards them. If, when you go home from work, constantly complain about your coworkers, chances are that, over time, you will be unable to keep up the facade that you like them when you are around them.

I think this is true in just about any relationship. My mind immediately drifts to household relationships. If you talk about the kids getting on your nerves to other parents, chances are the kids are only going to get on your nerves more.

5. Inside organizations, the internal competition that such practices encourage often has unintended consequences, including crushing collaboration (32).

I love competition. I thrive on it. But when you create a culture of competition amongst team members, the research that Murphy has done clearly points out that competition chokes out collaboration among teams.

We often believe that competition brings out the best in one another. This is far from the truth.

Murphy encourages leaders to replace competition with encouragement. Where competition births the fear and anxiety of losing, foster an environment where innovation is desired and failure is a natural byproduct of doing new things well.

6. When we worship outstanding performers, we infantize everyone else, conveying the message that everyone can — even should — be passive in the face of towering ability (38).

This aptly describes the present pastor-to-church relationship I find haunting America. We’ve place the pulpit so high on a pedestal that the pastor has gained outsized influence in the modern church. The pastor certainly has qualities that are important to the body and is one who leads the congregant into Christlikeness.

But the strength of the pastor has often led to the stunted growth of the congregation. Just listen to podcasts like The Fall of Mars Hill to hear how abuse of pastoral power leads to stunted spiritual growth.

7. When provoked into a fixed mindset, these students performed worse, worried about how they’d be evaluated… preoccupation with social comparison and trying to showcase one’s ability consumes working memory (59).

The growth mindset is concerned more with learning than success, allowing for failure and the ability to try anything creative. The fixed mindset is the pressure to perform, to perfect, to show at all times your capabilities.

Murphy has done extensive work to show that getting the high grade doesn’t actually promote growth, at least not to the same level of growth that could be achieved if failure were a more accepted outcome and creativity more encouraged in the process.

8. Edmonson found that it wasn’t that the highest-functioning teams were making more mistakes, it was that they spoke more openly about them with one another… (68)

The highest-functioning and most successful teams were found to have a culture of confession. We need to redevelop this culture in our churches!

9. No one person can be fully ‘interdisciplinary’; that requires pulling from a diverse array of people steeped in different sets of knowledge and experiences (87).

Part of creating a culture of growth is promoting collaboration. Each part of the whole needs to recognize that they will function to their highest potential if they continue to develop skills around what they are good at, while being open to working with others who are best at the things we lack.

10. The four mindset triggers (152-155).

Evaluative situations: When we enter a situation where we are performing for a grade, it is natural to move into a fixed mindset. We must develop practices that allow us to keep a learners’ attitude even in graded performances.

High-effort situations: When we put in so much effort to succeed on a project, we want it to succeed. Having peace with failure is essential to keeping a growth mindset even in stress-filled situations.

Critical feedback: Taking criticism is not always easy. It can seem like negative feedback is pointed not just at our performance in a task but our entire identity. Developing the skill of seeing all criticism as an opportunity to improve is important to keeping a growth mindset.

Success of others: We need to allow the success of others to inspire us towards greatness, not threaten our own status.

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