Me and Others – Creating a Culture of Growth

‍Welcome to the July edition of Positive Leadership & You, the second in our summer series exploring how leaders can shape their mission, live the culture, and lead more effectively with AI.

This month, we shift focus to the "Me and Others" dimension—because leadership isn’t a solo journey. It's about how you help others grow while growing yourself.

At the heart of this month’s theme is a simple but powerful question: What kind of culture are you nurturing around you?

When leaders create environments where learning, experimentation, and improvement are valued, they unlock collective growth—not just individual performance.

Growth is a Collective Mindset

Culture isn’t created by policies. It’s shaped by behaviors—especially those modeled by leaders.

As a leader, your mindset sets the tone. When you approach challenges with curiosity, view failures as learning opportunities, and reward progress rather than perfection, your team will mirror that mindset.

This is what Dr. Mary Murphy, Stanford professor and author of Cultures of Growth, calls a “growth culture”—an environment where everyone is invited to keep evolving.

In our conversation, she shared that In a true culture of growth, no one has to develop alone. They’re going to have supports, strategies, and feedback along the way.

When leaders model this kind of support system, they don’t just unlock potential — they build environments where people thrive.

🎧 Listen to the episode with Mary Murphy:

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Leadership has never been a solo sport—now it’s truly a team game because every one of us can partner with AI. Used wisely, a generative copilot becomes an always-on coach, sounding board and culture-scaler.

As Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft shared with me in a former episode:

“My 15-year-old daughter … isn’t a ‘tech person,’ yet she’s using ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to prototype healthcare solutions. You no longer have to be a programmer to get a computer to do powerful things in service of your mission.”

Listen to the episode:

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Start every conversation this month with one question: What kind of culture and mission are you nurturing—and how will AI help you scale it?

Reinvention Takes Time—and Culture

Long-term growth requires long-term thinking. Yet in our fast-paced world, it’s easy to focus on quick wins over lasting development.

Dorie Clark, best-selling author and leadership expert, reminded us that true growth is a long game. In our episode, she offered strategies to create space for learning and reinvention—both for yourself and your team.

In our conversation, we explored the idea that growth isn't just something you pursue once—it’s a continuous mindset. Dorie shared how her own journey of reinvention, from philosophy student to bestselling author and executive coach, has always been driven by a deep sense of intrinsic motivation:

“I had a very strong internal drive. It wasn't that I necessarily felt like I needed to be better than anyone. It wasn't that I was competitive per se, but it was that I had a lot of things that I wanted to do.”

This sense of purpose, curiosity, and long-term thinking is something leaders can cultivate—not only in themselves, but in the people around them. When team members are given the space and encouragement to grow beyond their current roles, they bring energy, innovation, and resilience to the organization.

The Growth Mindset at Scale: Satya Nadella’s Transformation of Microsoft

Few leaders have demonstrated the power of culture like Satya Nadella .When he became CEO of Microsoft soft in 2014, he made a bold move: placing the growth mindset at the heart of Microsoft’s cultural transformation.

Rather than focusing on being right, teams were encouraged to stay curious, listen deeply, and keep learning. Nadella’s leadership didn’t just shift internal culture—it drove innovation, collaboration, and sustained performance.

As he put it:

“If one is a know-it-all and the other is learn-it-all, the learn-it-all will always do better. And I said, oh, that applies to a CEO, but it also applies to the entire company.”

Scaling it in the field. In 2016 I took the baton on the customer-facing side, leading Microsoft’s Global Sales, Marketing & Operations alongside Satya, and we moved 30,000+ sellers from an inspection culture (“Did you hit quota?”) to a coaching and learning culture (“How did you create value for the customer—and what did you learn?”), using AI and telemetry to track the change process, one seller at a time.

This mindset shift—from proving to improving—created ripple effects across the organization, and inspired many other companies to do the same.

🎧 Listen to the episode with Satya Nadella:

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How to Fail Well: Learning as a Leadership Practice

Creating a culture of growth means embracing failure as a teacher.

In my conversation with Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor and author of Right Kind of Wrong, she shared the importance of framing failure not as weakness, but as essential data in the learning process.

She reminded us that when leaders normalize smart failure, they reduce fear—and unlock creativity. In other words, failure is not the opposite of success. It’s part of it.

🎧 Listen to the episode with Amy Edmondson:

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What I’m Practicing: Leading with a Culture of Growth

In my own leadership journey—whether at Microsoft or through Live for Good—I’ve learned that creating a growth culture starts with three simple but not always easy habits:

1. Asking more questions than I give answers.
2. Encouraging people to take small risks and learn out loud.
3. And now, embed AI as a “growth partner” to nurture the culture

One of my mentors once told me: "If people aren't failing occasionally, they’re not growing."

Growth doesn’t happen in a comfort zone. It happens in a trust zone.

That’s why culture matters. Not just what we achieve, but how we make others feel while striving toward it.

A Reflection for the Month Ahead

As you lead your teams, ask yourself:

• What kind of risks do people feel safe taking around me?

• Do I model learning—by sharing what I don’t know or what I’ve just learned?

• Am I celebrating effort and improvement, or just outcomes?

• Am i leveraging AI to truly empower my team members to be more?

Culture is built in the everyday. And when you lead with a mindset of growth, you give others the courage to stretch, fail, and ultimately succeed.

Let’s keep learning—and growing—together.

Warmly,

Jean-Philippe Courtois