Mary C. Murphy

In the past decade, scientists have shown definitively that people’s mindsets—their beliefs about themselves and their place in the world—can shape innovation, belonging, and risk-taking. If we can create an environment where everyone across the organization can develop and benefit from their growth mindset, pursuing improvement and persevering through challenges, we can unlock radical success and empower everyone to bring their unique contributions to the workplace.

Based on her decades-long research program, Dr. Mary C. Murphy guides you through a Mindset Reset—showing how mindset cultures affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior and the downstream implications for ourselves and our organizations. She shows you the difference between “Cultures of Genius,” which focus on innate intelligence and often stifle innovation, diversity and inclusion, and performance, and “Cultures of Growth,” which prioritize learning, development, risk-taking, and creativity. She demonstrates how leaders, individual contributors, and the environments that they co-create can shape the performance, trust, and commitment of employees and the bottom-line success of the organization more broadly.

Mary draws on research and stories from her work with companies and schools to help us understand what the growth and fixed mindset is, and how to avoid the “false growth mindset.” Audiences will learn to identify their individual mindset triggers, and how the mindset beliefs and practices of organizations and teams influence collaboration, innovation, integrity, diversity and inclusion, and more. This interactive presentation includes opportunities to reflect and apply these ideas to your own lives so that you can create and communicate Cultures of Growth at home, at work, and anywhere else.

Mindset isn’t just in your mind, says Dr. Mary C. Murphy. If we believe that a fixed or growth mindset lives only in a student’s head, we miss opportunities to support and shape their learning environments to help them move from the unhelpful fixed mindset to the motivation-boosting growth mindset. And when we recognize our ability to foster Growth Mindset Cultures across our schools and organizations, we can increase belonging, motivation, persistence, and performance for all students.

Drawing on her decades of groundbreaking research, Mary helps audiences identify and improve the role of academic leaders, faculty, advisors, and staff in shaping the learning environment. She demonstrates how you can use these strategies to not only enhance learning, but also foster belonging and inclusion, and create lasting change across your whole organization. She offers simple and concrete practices to help you create Cultures of Growth that shift students toward their growth mindset more of the time to foster student success.

Many organizations have put a lot of work into hiring and building diverse teams—but how do you make sure these teams can reach their full potential? Dr. Mary C. Murphy says that a growth mindset culture is the often overlooked key element to actually benefiting from the insights and talents of your diverse teams. She explains that in a Culture of Growth, where employees can develop and benefit from their growth mindset, people from different backgrounds are empowered to contribute their best ideas and broaden your organization’s capacity, creativity, and performance.

In this talk, Mary explains how cultivating a growth mindset culture—and believing that good ideas can come from anywhere—enables you to unlock the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whether you’re a leader in the workplace or a teacher looking to help all your students thrive (or anyone in between), her research and practical takeaways will help you take the necessary steps towards a Culture of Growth. She shares four tangible ways you can reduce “identity threat,” bolster belonging, inclusion, and trust, and create contexts that support everyone’s success.

“It’s about creating an environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and inspired to do their best work together—and has equal access to the tools and resources that will help them get there,” she says.