You Don't Get an A for Effort
episode
The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
39 min
4 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. The Curiosity Shop is on summer hiatus, but stay tuned as we'll be back with brand new episodes July 30th. In the meantime, we're revisiting some of our favorite conversations. Today's episode was originally recorded during Brene's Dare to Lead series on Strong Ground. In this episode, we tackle a question every leader eventually faces. What do you do when someone's giving their all, but the results just aren't there? We talk about the difference between effort and excellence, and how great leaders coach people toward meaningful growth. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Curiosity Shop, a show from the Fox Media Podcast Network.
Hi, everyone. I'm Brené Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. And I am back for episode six of this special series with my friend Adam. Hi, Adam.
Hey, Brené. How's it going? So far, so good, but we'll see where this goes, won't we?
Yeah, I, you know, you're one of the, so there are several, there are teachers in the book and the teachers in the book, which includes you, are folks who I thought their work was, their impact on the book and my research and my thinking was so big, it was more than just kind of a paragraph. It was, I wanted to share a lesson directly from you. So Think Again is one of my all-time favorite books. And so I share an excerpt from Think Again in the book, Were you surprised to see yourself come up in yet another chapter?
I was. It's such an honor to be featured at all. And I, you know, I, of course, skipped through the part that I wrote, not wanting to reread my own writing. Oh, yeah, that's horrible. I don't do that either. The worst. I had so many edits when I got into the first paragraph alone. I was like, yeah, I can't do this. That's enough rethinking for now. And then... And then I thought I was home free. And I'm just, you know, sailing along a couple hundred pages. And all of a sudden, I came across my name.
You're in the chapter called The Big Reward. And so I talk about your op-ed. Let's get everyone caught up. So you wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled, No, You Don't Get an A for Effort. Tell me about the origin of this op-ed. Tell me the premise.
Okay, this started when I was teaching a week-long course for brand new MBA students. And at the end of the class, a couple years ago, I got several grade complaints that were worded completely differently from any prior grade grubbing I'd come across. And different students wrote different versions of I'm not happy with my grade because it doesn't reflect the effort that I put into this course. And I was so surprised to read that because we don't grade effort, we grade excellence. Leaving aside the fact that in a week-long course, there wasn't a lot of room for Herculean amounts of effort. And I was really curious about why they expected to be rewarded for hard work alone as opposed to mastery. And what finally crystallized for me was that some of these students had been, they'd taken the wrong lesson from Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset.
Say more. This is really, this is so interesting to me.
Well, there's a whole generation of, you know this well, of parents and teachers who were told, don't praise ability, praise effort. Because if you tell a kid you're really smart, When they fail, they're going to think, well, I didn't have the cognitive horsepower. I don't have the talent to succeed at that. Whereas when you praise kids for effort, when they fall short of a goal, they learn, oh, I need to try harder. And that's much better for their resilience. It's better for their persistence, ultimately serves their growth. But if you take that too far and you only praise effort, what you're essentially doing is you're rewarding students for only their inputs and ignoring their outputs. You're telling them you should keep beating your head against a brick wall as opposed to saying, huh, that strategy is not effective for me.
Let me find a different one. And I guess where I landed as I was working through this puzzle was I think we should be praising effort that leads to progress.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–10:04
2
What inspired Adam Grant's op-ed 'No, You Don't Get an A for Effort'?
10:04–14:36
3
How does praising effort vs. excellence affect student and employee motivation?
14:36–26:49
4
When should leaders reward effort with time and coaching instead of grades?
26:49–39:13
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
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Can We Build an “Us” Without a “Them”? with John Green
Leading Under Pressure with Rebecca Lowe