Implementing the Growth Mindset as a Cultural OS (Part I)

These days, performance culture is the default operating system for most businesses. It’s built on clear goals (think OKRs), measurable outcomes, and accountability. When done well, it drives focus, alignment, and results, making it a reliable framework for achieving specific outcomes.

I've worked in places with a healthy performance culture, and I've seen it work as advertised. Even in those cases, there were downsides, nearly all of which result from ignoring the limitations of measurement and metrics. The biggest problem is always that the nuance is lost when goals take the form of metric targets. That's not surprising or even interesting … everybody knows that a metric or two can't comprehensively define success for any complex endeavor. When combined with a culture of target setting though, you will often find that people pursue specific outcomes with great intent, regardless of overall impact. Moreover, it's not uncommon to find that goals have been set against the wrong metrics, and managing to targets can make teams slow to adapt.

Another challenge is that performance culture can really stifle risk-taking. If you believe you will be punished for not hitting your goals, you will likely try to negotiate those goals down to numbers you know you can achieve, and you'll likely stick to tactics you already know will work.

In less healthy situations, challenges arise like folks working in silos, unhealthy competition, and serious delays when people aren't on track to hit goals and start second guessing everything.

This is where performance culture particularly struggles—when the work requires solving novel problems or achieving goals no one knows how to reach. In these moments, rigid targets and fear of failure can stifle progress. Organizations need a different approach to unlock creativity and adaptability: the growth mindset.

The growth mindset is rooted in learning, persistence, and adaptability. It sees failure not as a threat but as a natural and necessary step toward progress. It encourages curiosity, openness to feedback, and a belief in the capacity to improve—not through innate talent, but through deliberate effort and problem-solving. In contrast to performance culture, which relies on predictable outcomes, the growth mindset thrives in uncertainty and ambiguity. It prioritizes learning over perfection, fostering a culture where teams feel safe to experiment, take risks, and collaborate to tackle tough problems.

Back in 2017, Etsy had a big change in leadership. The company brought on a new CEO and a new CTO, and one of the mandates that came with them was fully migrating everything from data centers running on our own hardware to the cloud. At this point, we didn't even know which cloud provider we were going to use, and we wanted to be done with this project in 12 to 18 months, which even now strikes me as fairly crazy.

We were really fortunate that our new CTO didn't push us to manage to targets. We didn't have a clue how to pull this off. Collectively we didn't know a whole lot about the cloud, and pretty much all of our systems were designed around leveraging the data center.

We quickly learned we had to assess every single system and decide whether to "lift and shift" it to the cloud or rebuild it in a more cloud-native manner, and the answers were rarely clear. Had we layered on a bunch of intermediate milestones and a hard deadline while trying to adapt to new leadership, I feel like the project would have just stalled.

The growth mindset is what got us there. There were enough people who believed that success was inevitable (even if we couldn't exactly describe what it was) that we were able to push through the uncertainty and learn what we needed, in some cases doing some truly innovative work. We didn't hit whatever deadline we imagined at the beginning, but the external feedback we got was that our cloud migration was improbably fast.

When you aspire to hit goals you don’t yet know how to reach, you have to create the space to learn how to reach them. In my experience, organizations never know how to hit their longer term goals, and often limit themselves by choosing shorter term goals that feel safer and more predictable instead. By collectively adopting the growth mindset, we can push beyond the limits of predictability and safely take on the challenges that truly drive innovation and growth. In doing so, we trade short-term safety for the possibility of transformational success—something no performance culture can achieve alone.

Of course this argument is overly broad. There is always a lot of work to do that is well understood, and managing to targets is a completely reasonable approach. It's also true that demonstrating performance within specific timeframes is important, and accountability for performance always falls on someone. I think it works best when day to day decisions are made within the context of the growth mindset the vast majority of the time.

In Part II, I'll share how I’ve worked to cultivate a growth mindset in my current role—sometimes without even realizing it—and the lessons I’ve learned about applying this approach in a challenging situation.