Is Your Fixed Mindset Sabotaging Your Procurement Career?

When Kylie* was given the feedback that she again had failed to be promoted to CPO, she was gutted. For five years, she’d been working hard for that role. She knew now what someone told her a while back: that all of her hard work had been in vain. That she just wasn’t intelligent enough, and that she never would be. That her failures had come to define her. She was so defeated that she couldn’t, didn’t want to, and wouldn’t listen to feedback. Her career was over, or so she thought…

Do you know anyone like Kylie? We all do. And by ‘Kylie’s’ we don’t mean people that aren’t, for whatever reason, enjoying as much career success as they’d like to be at this present moment. What we mean is people whose mindset is betraying them. People whose fixed mindset is literally sabotaging their career. 

Have you ever stopped to think just how much your mindset influences your success? If you haven’t, it’s high time you did (fortunately, this is the exact topic we’ll be dissecting at our upcoming event The Faculty Leadership Festival of Fun: Keeping a Positive Mindset). Mindset is so influential in your career that Entrepreneur magazine says it is the single most important factor influencing a person’s success. But how do you know whether you have a fixed mindset, versus a growth mindset, the exact type you’ll need to flourish and succeed? Here are the characteristics of each. 

Do I have a fixed mindset? 

Like Kylie above, if you have a fixed mindset you will sooner or later become stuck in your career, and you may never become unstuck. 

People with a fixed mindset are strongly of the belief that they are ‘born a certain way.’ For example, Kylie believes that she was born with a certain amount of talent and intelligence, and that there was no way she could change that. Based on this, she believed she could only go so far. 

Yet people with a fixed mindset have other even more limiting beliefs. Because of the innate amount of talent and intelligence they think they have, they believe that any additional effort to improve these things is wasted. Beyond that, those with a fixed mindset also tend to shy away from challenges and things outside their comfort zone, as they tend to believe they will fail at these, too. 

Stemming from this belief in a ‘fixed amount’ of talent, those with a limiting mindset are also not very good at accepting failures and feedback. They tend to believe they failed because they are a failure, and they see feedback as pointless, as they don’t believe it’s possible for them to personally change and transform. As a result, those with a fixed mindset try to hide their flaws, instead of taking responsibility for them and trying to learn from their mistakes. 

As you can see, with this type of mindset, it’s incredibly easy to get stuck in your career. Now though, let’s take a look at what might happen if you had the opposite mindset: a growth mindset. 

Do I have a growth mindset? 

Let’s return to Kylie for a second, and see how she can quite literally turn her career around with a growth mindset. After her latest failed promotion, she took the time to talk to her manager about what it was she needed to improve to be successful. The advice sounded difficult to execute, but instead of seeing it as insurmountable, she took it as a challenge and relished the opportunity to learn and grow. After all, what was a career about if not about growth?!? 

A year later, she was given the opportunity to interview again. This time, she had executed on all of her manager’s advice, and also shown that she was a resilient, transformative leader. 

She got the job. 

When Entrepreneur magazine says that a growth mindset is everything, they really mean it. Those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and talent can be developed, and that the way to do that is through effort. They also see failures as an opportunity to learn and grow, and they apply those learnings to everything they do. 

Those with a growth mindset embrace challenges, welcome feedback and are inspired by the success of others, not intimidated by it. 

A growth mindset can be extremely liberating at work. But in challenging work environments and at challenging times in your career, it can also be difficult to execute. Join us on 23 February at 2pm to learn more, with the help of people, learning and leadership expert Michelle Rushton, as well as your fellow Faculty Roundtable members. 
This session is for The Faculty Roundtable members only. Not a member? For more information, please contact [email protected].