The Illusion of Individual Agency

The plastic of the chair is digging into the back of your thighs. It’s the kind of cheap, unforgiving stackable chair that signals a mandatory, low-budget meeting. Up front, a facilitator named Dave, who looks impossibly energetic under the flickering fluorescent lights, clicks to the next slide. A cartoon brain, split in two. On one side, a grey, rigid-looking cerebrum labeled “FIXED.” On the other, a vibrant, rainbow-colored one labeled “GROWTH.” You are one of 22 people in this room, and the collective sigh is almost, but not quite, audible.

Dave is talking about neuroplasticity. He’s using phrases like “embracing challenges” and “seeing failure as a learning opportunity.” Your mind drifts to last month. To the email chain, 12 messages long, that ended with your manager explaining that the $272 budget for your certification course couldn’t be approved. “We need you to be resourceful,” she’d written. “See this as a challenge to learn in new, creative ways.” You’re now seeing it as a challenge to remain employed without screaming.

“We need you to be resourceful,” she’d written. “See this as a challenge to learn in new, creative ways.”

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The Weaponization of a Good Idea

This is the weaponization of a perfectly reasonable idea. The corporate adoption of “growth mindset” has become one of the most insidious, pervasive forms of psychological manipulation in the modern workplace. It presents as a tool of empowerment, but it functions as a mechanism for blame-shifting.

Building Alibis, Not Culture

It’s a systemic sedative, designed to tranquilize a workforce that is beginning to diagnose its own condition: the environment is the problem, not the individual. The pathology isn’t in our attitudes; it’s in the organizational structures that refuse to invest in us, promote us, or create genuine pathways for advancement.

When a company hasn’t promoted anyone in your department for 32 months, but spends thousands on mindset workshops, it isn’t building a new culture. It’s building an alibi. It’s crafting the perfect defense for when you finally burn out:

“Well, they just didn’t have the right mindset.”

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It privatizes systemic failure. It takes a collective, organizational responsibility-the duty to develop and retain talent-and atomizes it into thousands of individual, moral struggles.

Muhammad’s Clarity

Meet Muhammad M. He’s a supply chain analyst, sharp and incredibly meticulous. He’s been with his company for 42 months. For the last 12 of those, he’s been doing the work of a senior analyst after the last one quit for a 42% pay increase. Muhammad has repeatedly asked about a promotion, about a title change, about some formal acknowledgment of his expanded role. Each time, he’s been told to:

“Demonstrate leadership” and “embrace the ambiguity of his current position as a growth opportunity.”

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He identified a new logistics software that could save the company an estimated $92,000 annually. He built a 22-page presentation on it. The final slide was a request for the company to pay for his $272 certification. It was denied. The reason given was budget constraints. Two weeks later, the mandatory “Growth Mindset For Q2” workshop was announced. The facilitator, Dave, probably costs the company ten times what Muhammad’s course would have. Muhammad sits in the back of the room, looking at the cartoon brain, and understands the message perfectly. The company’s growth is paramount. His is incidental.

My Own Misdirection

I’ll admit, I used to be part of the problem. Years ago, I managed a small team, and I remember a junior designer coming to me, completely fried. She was working with buggy, outdated software that crashed at least twice a day, costing her hours of work. She was frustrated, on the verge of tears. I listened, nodded, and then I trotted out the line.

“I hear you, it’s tough. But try to see this as a challenge. The best designers can make magic with any tools. It’s about having a resilient mindset.”

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It was a complete cop-out. I see that now. What I was really saying was, “Your problem makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t have the political capital or energy to fight the battle with IT for a software upgrade, so I am going to reframe this systemic failure as a personal test of your character.” I was asking her to be more adaptable to a broken environment because it was easier than fixing the environment. I didn’t see the toxicity in my own approach. I thought I was coaching. I was actually just offloading my own powerlessness onto someone with even less power. I was perpetuating the cycle.

The Masterclass in Misdirection

It’s a masterclass in misdirection.

We get so caught up in the label that we forget to analyze the substance. We allow language to shape our reality in ways that don’t serve us. It’s a fundamental problem of categorization. We do it all the time with simpler things, getting into pointless debates about definitions. People still argue whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, for instance. A surprising number of people will even google basic questions like sind kartoffeln gemüse because our understanding of a thing determines how we interact with it. Is it a side dish or part of the main? Does it count toward our five-a-day?

The classification matters. And when a corporation successfully reclassifies “we will not invest in you” as a “learning opportunity,” they change the entire dynamic. They’ve moved the problem from the company’s ledger of responsibilities to the employee’s ledger of personal attributes. It’s no longer a resource issue; it’s a mindset issue. And that’s a much cheaper problem to pretend to solve.

The Real Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck’s original research, the foundation of all this, was brilliant. It was focused on children and how their beliefs about intelligence impacted their academic success. It was observational, nuanced, and powerful. It was never intended to be a corporate panacea, a justification for starving employees of resources and opportunities. It has been diluted, commodified, and twisted into a tool of behavioral control. The posters and workshops are the hollowed-out husks of a once-vital idea.

The real growth mindset isn’t about convincing yourself to love a challenge that exists only because your company refuses to support you. A real growth mindset is having the clarity to recognize when a system is designed for your stagnation. It’s the ability to differentiate between a productive struggle that leads to skill acquisition and a futile one that only leads to burnout. A productive struggle is trying to master a new, complex piece of software. A futile struggle is trying to do it on a 12-year-old computer that constantly crashes.

I used to believe that talent and a good attitude could overcome any obstacle. That was before I saw dozens of talented people with great attitudes get systematically ground down by organizations that praised their resilience while denying them the tools, time, and promotions they deserved. A plant can have the best “growth mindset” in the world, but if you put it in a dark closet and never water it, it will die. It is not the plant’s fault.

“A plant can have the best “growth mindset” in the world, but if you put it in a dark closet and never water it, it will die. It is not the plant’s fault.”

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The Path Forward

Muhammad M. is back at his desk. The cheap workshop mug, with the two cartoon brains on it, sits on the corner of his monitor. He takes a sip of stale coffee. He pulls up the email again.

“While we appreciate your initiative, we are not able to approve this expenditure of $272 at this time.”

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He then looks at a job posting on another screen, a competitor, looking for a senior supply chain manager. They list the exact software he wants to be certified in as a primary requirement. He looks back at the mug. He understands. The challenge isn’t to be resourceful within this company. The challenge is to find a new one. He clicks “Apply.”