Is Your Mindset Limiting Your Leadership? | An Interview with Ryan Gottfredson
Leading Saints Podcast
Leading Saints
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
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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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let's be honest, few humans enjoy meetings and many feel trapped in meetings. |
| 0:11.0 | As leaders, we don't want to burden those we lead, but meetings can seem to do that more often than not. |
| 0:17.0 | We wanted to address the pain of meetings through the Meetings with Saints Library. |
| 0:21.6 | Here we have 15 plus presentations dedicated to improving the meetings we run. |
| 0:27.2 | We have experts in the field addressing topics like getting people involved in meetings, |
| 0:32.2 | staying on task, dealing with conflict in meetings, and a ton more. |
| 0:36.5 | We'd love you to explore the full Meetings with Saints library over 14 days at no cost to you. |
| 0:42.3 | You can do this by visiting Leadingsaints.org slash 14. |
| 0:45.9 | That's Leadingsaints.org slash 1-4. |
| 0:49.2 | We'll also give you access to all of our virtual libraries that educate about other leadership topics. |
| 0:54.6 | It's really good stuff. |
| 0:55.9 | So visit leadingsaints.org slash 14 or click the link in the show notes. |
| 1:01.0 | The following episode is a throwback episode, one that was published previously and was |
| 1:05.5 | extremely popular. |
| 1:06.9 | To see the details of when this was originally published, see the show notes. |
| 1:10.8 | Enjoy this throwback episode. |
| 1:25.3 | Welcome back to another episode of the Leading Saints podcast. |
| 1:29.4 | My name is Kurt Frankum and I will be your host. |
| 1:31.9 | Now, if you're new to Leading Saints, we are a 501C3 nonprofit organization with a mission to help Latter-day Saints be better prepared to lead. |
| 1:40.6 | And do that through various ways. |
| 1:42.5 | And one of those is this podcast. |
| 1:43.9 | So I hope that you |
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