Is Your Mindset Limiting Your Leadership? | An Interview with Ryan Gottfredson

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Apr 30, 2025

Ryan Gottfredson, a leadership development author and professor, dives into the impact of mindsets on effective leadership. He discusses how leaders' good intentions can create unintended negative environments. Ryan highlights the differences between closed and open mindsets and how adopting a growth-oriented approach fosters better decision-making. With insights from sports and personal experiences, he emphasizes the importance of empathy and challenging the status quo to enhance leadership and engagement in organizations.

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INSIGHT

Positive vs Negative Leadership Desires

Leaders often have self-focused desires like looking good and avoiding problems, which lead to negative mindsets.
Shifting these to learning, truth-seeking, goal reaching, and lifting others activates positive leadership mindsets.

ANECDOTE

Lee Iacocca’s Mindset Impact

Lee Iacocca focused on making Chrysler look good rather than building substance, which initially appeared successful but later failed.
His mindset limited sustainable organizational growth and adaptation.

INSIGHT

Open vs Closed Mindsets

Closed mindsets mean being unwilling to accept new ideas, often because we believe what we know is definitely right.
Open mindsets allow absorbing new ideas with a “soft front” while holding firm principles.

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This is a rebroadcast. The episode originally ran in April 2020.

Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge leadership development author, researcher, and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders primarily through a focus on mindsets. Ryan is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of Success Mindsets: The Key to Unlocking Greater Success in Your Life, Work, & Leadership and The Elevated Leader: Leveling Up Your Leadership Through Vertical Development. He is also a leadership professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton.

Links

RyanGottfredson.com
Success Mindsets: Your Keys to Unlocking Greater Success in Life, Work, and Leadership
The Elevated Leader: Level Up Your Leadership Through Vertical Development
Transcript available with the video in the Zion Lab community

Highlights

Ryan explores the critical role of mindsets in effective leadership. Leaders often enter their roles with good intentions but may inadvertently create negative environments due to their mindsets. Ryan shares insights on how mindsets shape perceptions and behaviors, using examples from sports and personal experiences. He discusses the difference between closed and open mindsets, highlighting how a closed mindset can hinder effective leadership. He examines the prevention versus promotion mindset, illustrating how focusing on avoiding problems can stifle growth. The conversation encourages leaders to embrace open-mindedness and take calculated risks to foster engagement and positive change within their organizations, ultimately stressing the importance of having a clear vision to guide leadership efforts.

05:45 Value of mindset in assuming leadership responsibilities; NFL example of good intentions gone awry. Leader impact on “subordinate” self-esteem.

11:15 Becoming awakened to our personal mindsets, e.g. homeless individuals

15:00 Do we perceive our leaders as doing their best? Bias towards our personal perceptions vs openness to other possibilities. Unintentional damage to team/group/congregation members.

18:39 Mindset in conducting successful meetings. Chrysler/Lee Iacocca case study. Desire to look good, be right, avoid problems and get ahead are self-focused, negative self-protection modes. We should want to learn and grow, find truth, reach goals, and lift others.

24:05 We limit ourselves by believing our opinions count more than others.

26:00 Decision making becomes stunted if we are closed. Do we desire to be the person with all the answers who minimizes the perspectives of others? Do people feel psychological safety in the group?

31:20 Do we allow formal handbooks to stifle our creativity?

32:50 Prevention mindset vs risk taking. Fleeing to safe comfort zone may not lead to original destination.

36:40 Sacrament meeting mindset

40:30 Comfort-focused vs intention focused. Are the people in the group growing? Do we deem our bucket so full we cannot pour anything else into it by way of considering avenues for growth?

44:00 How do we know if people in the organization are engaged and growing? What drives engagement? Do stakeholders feel their opinions matter? Gallup study reveals 30% of workforce feels truly engaged.

50:15 Only 5% of mindset survey respondents find themselves in the top quartile. There is no correlation among the four mindsets. Failure avoidance leads to wanting to look good as opposed to learning/growing. 50% of population has fixed mindset. Spiritually, are sanctification and tapping into the Spirit more difficult with a closed mindset about self? Having faith to “lean into” difficult situations.

1:00:37 Consider crucial conversations with leaders whose closed mindset is negatively impacting the organization. “I Hear You” by Michael Sorensen will improve your emotional intelligence.

1:03:53 Are we closed-minded in thinking our leader has a closed mindset? Being proactive.

1:05:05 Once we know our mindset tendencies, how will we take charge of our future? Neuro connection link. Shift towards more positive mindset is easier than many realize. “The Power of Stillness.” Focusing on behaviors without modifying our mindset leads to frustrations. Learning from mistakes.

1:13:55 Becoming a better disciple of Christ by learning, growing, finding truth, and lifting others. Live in opportunity mindset, not fear. The Atonement is liberating.

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