What happens when organisations take growth mindset seriously.

Transport Victoria, a large government department, handles over 100,000 customer interactions each month. Their old system was touch-pad routing: press 1 for this, press 3 for that. Customers pressed the wrong number, got sent to agents who couldn't help, and called back. The department replaced it with an AI Service Agent powered by a large language model. Customers describe what they need in their own words. The AI asks clarifying questions when needed, sends SMS links to relevant services when full automation is possible, and routes calls accurately when it isn't.

Within the first months: 15 per cent fewer calls reaching agents, 10 per cent reduction in handling time because the AI captures information upfront, 5 per cent of requests fully automated, and NPS up from 41 per cent to over 50 per cent. Cost savings reached 11 per cent, with a projected pathway to 20 per cent as automation scales.

The technology design is half the story. Contact centre staff were the ones who made it work. When the AI misrouted a call or confused a customer, they flagged it, openly, so the prompts could be rewritten. That only happens when people trust that raising a problem will not come back on them. Leaders held their nerve through early misclassifications and customer complaints, treated them as expected rather than alarming the team, and kept the focus on what the data was telling them. HR redesigned performance conversations from error-free to learning-rich. Small experiments with prompts and call flows ran between formal releases, informed by what front-line staff were hearing every day.

John Rives, GMI’s co-founder, led the deployment.

Microsoft ran a pilot program to test whether growth mindset development could work as a self-directed learning experience supported by cohort sessions, short films, and the Mindset Profiler™.

Before the program, 58 per cent of participants said they could identify their fixed mindset triggers. Afterwards, 90 per cent. The ability to manage those triggers moved from 37 per cent to 85 per cent. 90 per cent of participants said the experience helped them build skills that would improve their performance at work. NPS reached 50, which the company’s internal evaluation framework rates as excellent.

Cohort learning stood out. Sixty-three per cent of participants ranked group sessions as the most impactful part of the experience, well ahead of films, reflection templates, and self-study. Participants valued having space to make sense of the concepts with other people, share what they were noticing about their own patterns, and connect across the organisation. The program manager’s assessment: the content created awareness and appetite, and the format has a clear pathway to scale.

Public Transport Victoria (PTV), responsible for roads and public transport, had a culture problem. Teams were disengaged, reluctant to take ownership, and working in silos. A culture survey put the number at 84 per cent of team interactions classified as passive-aggressive.

We designed a growth mindset program for approximately 800 employees, with the second phase focused on clarity, accountability, and feedback as practised behaviours. All 50 senior leaders participated in immersive workshops. Passive-aggressive interactions dropped from 84 per cent to 15 per cent. Constructive interactions increased by 120 per cent. Every culture metric improved: desirable traits moved between 75 and 130 per cent, undesirable ones decreased by 16 to 50 per cent. The employee engagement score beat the Australian national norm for the first time.

Growth Mindset Institute can command a room regardless of what happens. When the solution comes together, the only fitting word is ‘beautiful.’Dr Jason Gindidis · Organisational Psychologist

NAB’s finance team had the lowest engagement scores in the bank. The executive leadership group was failing to deliver key projects to the Board. Susan Mackie and Carol Dweck ran a growth mindset intervention together, introducing fixed mindset triggers and working with the team to change how they handled problems, setbacks, and each other.

Within six months, the team had delivered all four overdue projects. In the next engagement survey, they were rated the most engaged team in the bank. Dweck featured the work in the updated edition of Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential (Robinson, 2017).

Allianz asked Growth Mindset Institute to work with intact teams across the EMEA region. Each team member completed the Mindset Profiler™. The data showed something unusual: 65 per cent of employees had a strong Success of Others trigger. The normal distribution across our dataset is 16 to 18 per cent.

People with a strong Success of Others trigger are less likely to collaborate, share information, or pursue common goals. They compete. The teams in this company showed exactly that pattern: low trust, low engagement, and productivity that did not match the potential of the people in the team.

The source turned out to be the performance management system: their ranking determined career advancement, pay increases, and recognition. The environment was training people to protect their position at the expense of the team. The Profiler data made the cause visible in a way that opinion and engagement surveys had missed.

The company reviewed its performance management system, and the team’s engagement, collaboration, and problem-solving improved. People on the team reported better engagement and trust.

“The Growth Mindset Institute brought deep subject matter expertise and a strong evidence-led approach to behavioural change. They took the time to understand our organisational context, enabling us to tailor both the content and delivery approach to our needs. Most importantly, they demonstrated growth mindset in action through their openness to feedback and commitment to continually improving and evolving the program.”

Allianz

BT Financial (Westpac) ran our full suite of mindset programs across five states, reaching 2,900 people over 5,960 training hours. Participants rated how critical the knowledge and skills were to their success on a six-point scale: Mindset & Me scored 5.9; Mindset Spark (Motivation) and Mindset Thrive (Resilience) scored 5.8; Mindset Elevate (Goals) scored 6.0; and Mindset Team Tempo scored 6.0. Mindset & Me achieved an NPS of 72.

QBE, a leading Australian consumer insurance company, had a claims experience problem. At the moment customers needed the most support, the interaction was failing. NPS for the claims experience sat at minus 6.

The core issue was how staff had been trained. Case managers knew how to process a claim. They did not know how to work with the person on the other end. We designed four two-hour workshops for approximately 450 employees, focused on moving from a task orientation to a goal orientation: from closing the claim to understanding what the customer actually needed and managing the fixed mindset responses that showed up in difficult conversations.

The claims processing metrics did not change. How customers felt about the experience did. NPS went from minus 6 to plus 26 within three months. Staff engagement rose, and turnover dropped.

A large Australian financial institution wanted to know whether mindset predicted team performance as a measurable outcome. We surveyed 600 leaders to assess whether they held a growth mindset towards their team’s potential and demonstrated the organisation’s leadership behaviours.

We compared four groups: leaders with a growth mindset who demonstrated the behaviours; leaders with a growth mindset who did not; leaders with a fixed mindset who demonstrated the behaviours; and leaders with a fixed mindset who did not. Growth mindset leaders outperformed fixed mindset leaders on every metric. The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing groups in engagement was greater than 50 per cent.

Mindset alone moved the dial. Mindset, combined with the right leadership behaviours, moved it further.