An Unsettled Mind

Reading Time: 7 minutes

One of the things I enjoy in life is when two things I’m interested in converge. I am finding that with teaching, as I read up on how to do it better. One topic—mindset—grabbed my attention because it’s such a common thing to consider in management too. I had always thought of them as scarcity and growth but the correct terms appear to be fixed and growth. Now I’m thinking about the interplay, when you have students or staff who are working with an instructor or manager with a fixed mindset.

I’ve been reading Dr. Carol Dweck’s book, based on her research. One thing that finally dawned on me was how we might have a growth mindset in one area of our lives and not in another. That was really helpful to me because, in general, I think—and have been told—that I have a growth mindset.

Here is how Dweck introduces the fixed mindset:

And the growth mindset:

The outcomes of each of these mindsets is really interesting. I won’t do a book review but one of the findings is that people with a fixed mindset may stop trying after running into an obstacle, because they think of their ability as fixed. And while I am interested in the growth mindset myself, it is the challenge of helping people to move off of a fixed mindset that is most intriguing.

You Are(n’t) Your Grades

I was on the job hunt for about a year before I landed here in Chicago. I tried a number of different directions, testing out where I thought I’d be a good fit and to figure out which places might be a good fit for me. For one of those applications, I had to provide my university transcripts. It was a shock in more ways than one.

I am not sure I was ever a strong student although I have mostly enjoyed school. There were definitely times that my lack of success was an irritation at home. I managed fairly well, even though I was never the top of the class. There were classes that I really connected with and some I really didn’t.

It is fair to say that I have not thought about my GPA for many, many years. So I was a little horrified at revisiting my university grades. While I got higher marks with each subsequent degree (BA to JD to M.L.S.), I was not setting the world on fire. I could see a connection between courses I enjoyed, though, and my grades, which would tend to be higher in those subjects. I also recognized in myself that the lower scores drew my attention: my framing was driven by the failures, not the successes. By the time I got my M.L.S., my grades were what they should be given the interest and effort I put into them. More than any education I’ve had, the M.L.S. was one to be endured and completed as quickly as possible.

The process of sharing those grades with a potential employer was a bit unsettling. I was embarrassed. I am a firm believer that other people’s grades don’t really matter. At best, they’re a measure of that person at a particular age and in a particular situation, which may or may not be relevant or comparable to anyone else anyway. I definitely don’t believe that a degree or certification is definitive. But my grades! That was different.

I read Stephanie Land’s memoir Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education for the MAALL Book to Action initiative. There was a lot to think about, including lots of unmet legal needs. The whole unfolding of her M.F.A. story reminded me a lot of the M.L.S., which is that it may open doors but it isn’t necessarily an indicator of someone’s future success or ability.

The reality was that the employer didn’t care about my grades either. They were just validating the existence of my degrees. But this experience really knocked me for six. In a way that I would not apply to anyone else—our kids, a new hire, anyone—my own grades really made me feel not intelligent. And not intelligent in a way that I could not change, because I had pieces of paper from 20-30 years ago that confirmed it. From that perspective, my grades reflected someone who had a fixed ability and had, frankly, not done very well with it. Every smart thing I’d struggled with since then was obviously a struggle due to the fact that I am not a smart person. My successes were in spite of not being smart.

This has always struck me as a common law school mindset. In my first years in an academic law library, a faculty member explained that a law school will only hire faculty from schools that are higher ranked. Or, as one of my faculty at law school told me, if I ever made it into a faculty, I’d be a very rare UALR law school grad. A recent AALS survey bears out that this remains the case. In other words, your 22-year-old grades will determine your law school and, therefore, your access to teaching in certain law schools.

I didn’t get the job and for reasons I am confident had nothing to do with my grades. But it still put me in a real funk. In a way that was distinct from how I felt about my actual work, not getting an offer on that job made me start to feel like future options were shut to me. What if I had to give someone those grades and they did care? I had no reason to think this was true but I had lost my way a bit.

Fortunately, I have a bunch of truth tellers in my family. Also, they do not have fixed mindsets from what I can tell. What became clear in talking to them was that I’d really lost perspective. I’d put a ton of weight on something that was a measurement but was also irrelevant. In hindsight, I can totally understand that: a grade or a GPA is a number and we don’t get a lot of those in our professional lives. Perhaps a salary stands in for some people as another way to value others or themselves.

In the end, I listed the jobs that I’d applied to and that had not turned into a hire. In my negative funk, there was a lot of rejection. But once we started to talk about what had happened, my mood lightened and we had a good laugh at what a complete mess hiring for law librarians seems to look like:

• Job A: Academic: search failed.
• Job B: Academic: search failed.
• Job C: Academic: not enough academic experience.
• Job D: Government: not hired because out of state.
• Job B, part 2: Academic, search renewed, asked to participate, declined
• Job D, part 2: Government, search renewed, interview, no offer.
• Job E: Academic: interview, search failed.
• Job F: Academic: interview, on campus, offer, declined.
• Job G: Academic: interview, on campus, no offer.
• Job C, part 2: Academic: search renewed, asked to participate, already at new job.

That’s 7 job applications with only one offer, on the one hand. On the other, I was interviewed by almost every employer whose search didn’t fail and was a finalist a couple of times. I went from feeling my glass was half empty to realizing it was half full. Soon, after, I went through my final application and accepted the offer that brought me to Chicago.

In the moment, I wasn’t really thinking about mindset. This was particularly true because, when it came to my perception of myself as a library director, I think I have very much embraced a growth mindset. But clearly, when it came to asking people to value me as a new colleague, I very much feared the rejection that would confirm what my course grades indicated: not smart.

This realization was really helpful for me. I had not really thought that a person could either see-saw that much on mindset, or perhaps even hold two mindsets at the same time applied to different contexts. It was also no surprise that one way to manage imposter syndrome is to develop a growth mindset.

Mindset Management

If I had to try to explain the dissonance, it would be that, in the workplace, you are often dealing with people attempting a set of skills. Someone with a fixed mindset may be reluctant to try new things or to grow their skills. Someone with a growth mindset may be open to taking on a new skill or expanding their current learning, because they understand that their expertise isn’t fixed. In a sense, in my mind anyway, what they are doing is all inter-related within their role. I haven’t noticed someone who was a mixture of mindsets when it came to their work.

One thing a manager will always be looking for, though, is when someone has a setback. A project doesn’t get off the ground an initiative fails, a customer complains. Even someone with a growth mindset may feel like a setback says something about them, something that they may not be able to remedy. “I’m not good at …”

The ideal is when you can hire someone who already has that growth mindset. When you land in a new role, you may find a mixture of mindsets on your team. Then it will take some work to try to shift people so that the whole team is on the growth end of the spectrum.

And, when there’s a setback—and there will be, that’s normal—you need to step in and provide encouragement and reinforce that it’s something that can be repaired. Another iteration, a bit more planning, and also a bit more experience dealing with unknown quantities like customer reactions.

I think that I have conflated scarcity with a fixed mindset because, in the workplace, it has come with a sense of “we don’t have the resources to do X”. And that may be true, but I have often found that there have been choices to use available resources to do things other than X. If that’s the case, it’s merely about finding resources to allow X to occur. It is rarely the case that there has been an explicit decision to not do X, but that may not have been clearly communicated.

I find that reinforcing the availability of resources and choices in using resources can help people to shift from “we can’t because we don’t have” to “we can, we just have to make choices”. It is also a great way to develop your ability to say no. One way a scarcity mindset seems to develop is when a library is doing everything, exhausting staff but also a lot of resources. I know that, in one law library, merely saying no and scaling back projects to allow staff to catch their breath and for us to make some decisions about how we were using resources made a huge difference. If you have no time or energy, you may also fall into a scarcity mindset just because you can’t possibly do anything more than you currently are.

It is going to be very different with students. For one thing, it may not be obvious what type of mindset you are dealing with. I was surprised that students might develop a fixed mindset within weeks of arriving as a 1L (see this multi-part initiative at the University of Pitt ).

It’s going to be an interesting dilemma to deal with. I attended an online teaching course that discussed the correlation between 1L grades and their likely success on the bar. There are, of course, the grade impacts that can lead to being on a law review or other honors-related activity. Law school seems very much to create an environment where there is no time to cure an error, even though, over a legal career, these grades won’t determine long-term success. Errors may be amplified by things like grade curves, pushing down further people who may already feel as though they’re struggling or not good enough or who don’t see an opportunity to improve.

I have so much to learn still but it’s helpful to know that these reefs exist in the water. For example, I might have taken a student’s withdrawal from work as lack of interest. I wouldn’t have considered that it was from a mindset that discouraged them from trying after they’d had a failure.