Average appeal

Do C grade students make the best CEOs, asks Robert Wood.

I first saw the quote “C students make the best CEOs” on the t-shirt of a Kellogg MBA student during the recruiting period while I was a visiting professor. Unfortunately, I never got to speak to the student, but I thought it was an interesting hypothesis and would have liked to hear the explanations he offered to the hard-nosed recruiters – if he got an interview. However, the slogan did get me thinking about what a C grade student might have learnt from his or her experience and how could that prepare them for a CEO role?

Effective CEOs have to be able to cope with, and recover from, setbacks and remain adaptive in the face of often overwhelming pressures and competing demands. Those who don’t are increasingly being shown the door. C students have to learn how to cope with setbacks and failure to meet expectations and, if they are to get through their MBA program, recovery strategies for their next assignment or exam. All this is good training for the stressful demands of the CEO role, which is anything but a set of structured assignments with defined grading criteria.

It is not the A or C performance level of a student that determines or even defines their capability for management roles it is what they learn from the experience. Failure and setbacks can be great sources of learning but it depends upon the mindset that individuals adopt when confronting challenging tasks that involve setbacks and failure along the path to ultimate success. Carol Dweck of Stanford has identified two mindsets that have been shown to influence how people react to challenges, how they cope with failure and setbacks, and their ability to continue solving problems and learn from their experience when under pressure. These are labelled the fixed mindset and the growth mindset, and they are founded on people’s beliefs about ability and other personal characteristics. Let’s deal with each in turn.

Fixed mindsets are those held by people who believe that abilities are fixed or innate. They will often refer to natural ability or as being gifted when referring to exceptional performers. When they or others don’t perform well on a task, individuals with a fixed mindset will often attribute it to a lack aptitude. In summary, their language for explaining performance refers to ability, talent, aptitude and other entity like characteristics that are relatively fixed and not easy to change.

Developmental mindsets are based on beliefs that performance is the product of effort, understanding, strategies and other factors that can be learnt or developed through experience. As a result, individuals with development mindsets attribute performance, good or bad, to these types of factors and, when explaining performance, use terms such as strategies, role clarity, goal specificity, learning opportunities, developmental needs and striving.

Experimental and field research by Dweck and others, including studies that my colleagues and I have conducted on the role of mindsets in problem solving, team effectiveness and coaching, have established that individuals, including MBA students and managers, do differ systematically and consistently in their mindsets.

We found that fixed mindset individuals attribute performance setbacks and failures to ability or lack of capability, and become self-doubting, which undermines their cognitive functioning, leading to further poor performance. Often, their primary response on tasks that must be done is to work harder and they spend too little time on diagnosis and strategy creation. Growth mindset individuals may have initial self-doubts, but move more quickly beyond negative evaluations to diagnostic analyses and consideration of alternative strategies.

Fixed mind set individuals are also more risk averse. They prefer to work on familiar tasks and to employ strategies that they know work. They also tend to be highly vigilant to errors, which they seek to avoid, for the reasons mentioned in the first point. This makes them ideal for roles that require error avoidance and highly structured risk avoidance approaches. Growth mindset individuals see errors as opportunities to learn and refine strategies. This does not mean they try to perform poorly, just that they respond more constructively when things go wrong. They are also more likely to experiment and seek improvement, even when they are performing well.

Fixed mindset individuals are quicker to judge themselves and others and they rely more on categorical judgments than their growth mindset counterparts. When assessing people they refer more often to ability, personality traits and character. By way of contrast, growth mindset individuals are more likely to suspend judgment and to use less categorical explanations or descriptors. If a staff member performs poorly, they are more likely to talk about strategy or task understanding or contextual factors like other work commitments as reasons for the poor performance. They are slower to reach an opinion on people.

Finally, people with a growth mindset are more coachable and more willing to learn new tasks than those with fixed mindsets. They respond more positively to the inevitable setbacks and displays of ineptitude that occur when learning a new task. They try new strategies, discard those that don’t work, and do not get locked into cycles of frustration when progress is slow. Fixed mindset individuals do, and, given a choice, are more likely to avoid or give up on learning new and challenging tasks, if they do not make rapid progress.

So, what about the C student? Well, developing a growth mindset is a product of life’s experiences and the guidance we receive from people and institutions about how to interpret that experience. This means that our parents, our peers, our teachers, our coaches and others who provide us with advice and influence what we learn from experience shape our mindset. The type of experiences we have along the way also shape the mindsets we develop.

If we experience some of life’s ups and downs, like our C student, and our friends, family and partners help us to focus on strategies and what we could do in the future, then we are more likely to develop a growth mindset. If, instead, we receive messages that we lack competence whenever we are outside our comfort zone and not performing effectively, have no aptitude for a subject, or are not as talented other people, then we are more likely to develop a fixed mindset

Robert Wood is professor of management and director of the Accelerated Learning Laboratory at the Melbourne Business School.