Growth Mindset: Kathleen Hogan on How Microsoft’s Culture Continues to Drive Innovation and High Performance
As Microsoft celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding [April 4, 1975] this month, another significant milestone is at hand—a decade of growth mindset.
To explore this, we sat down with Kathleen Hogan, who served as Microsoft’s Chief People Officer for the past 10 years and recently stepped into a new role under Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella as EVP, Office of Strategy and Transformation.
Over the past ten years, Microsoft's cultural transformation has been anchored in growth mindset, a core philosophy that emphasizes learning, adaptability, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Growth mindset has enabled the company to pivot its business strategy—first around the Cloud and more recently with AI.
Against this backdrop, Microsoft’s senior leadership assessed what it would take to sustain and advance the company’s “all-in” AI strategy. The resounding conclusion: double down on growth mindset.
The ten-year anniversary of Microsoft’s adoption of a growth mindset also represents a consequential partnership of the same span between Nadella and Hogan, who worked closely to introduce the growth mindset concept to Microsoft’s workforce and lead the way forward, with culture as their North Star (the transformation of Microsoft’s culture is detailed in the best-selling book, Culture Revolution: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company, by i4cp’s Kevin Oakes).
“When I first became CHRO, Satya was clear that he wanted our culture to be a strategic differentiator. He believed that how we do things in service to a mission that matters would unlock the potential of our people. He knew that our worldview would evolve, our customer solutions would evolve. And it has—from the desktop PC to the cloud to AI—but that sense of culture grounded in growth mindset should endure,” said Hogan.
Introducing Growth Mindset
The 2015 rollout began with recognition of the need to clearly define growth mindset and educate Microsoft’s workforce about organizational culture.
“If you say, ‘we aspire to have a culture of learning, or innovation, or performance,’ everyone intuitively knows what that means. But saying to a workforce—most of whom had not yet heard of growth mindset—'we’re building a culture of growth mindset’—that requires a deeper conversation. We knew we had to start with teaching leaders what growth mindset meant and what it would look like in a corporate environment,” said Hogan.
At the time, Nadella was reading “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” by Carol Dweck, based on her research on the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets. The book examines how these beliefs influence success and personal development, and the idea that potential is not predetermined—everyone is a work in progress, and curiosity and openness to learning are force multipliers in terms of driving high performance.
While Dweck’s growth mindset research focused on helping children improve academic performance, Nadella's and Hogan’s shared theory was that growth mindset, from the perspective of grounding organizational culture in it, would support driving high performance at Microsoft.
Hogan said, “We started by intentionally inviting input from across the company—across functions, roles, tenure, and demographics—to ensure that everybody thought that this growth mindset would speak to them.”
They began by providing resources such as short videos introducing managers to growth mindset, then asked them to talk with their teams about it. They also rolled out environmental reminders, such as posters throughout the company’s offices and workspaces. Eventually, growth mindset was embedded across all of their people processes.
“Ten years on, we still believe that culture in service to a mission matters, and is key to our ability to attract and retain exceptional talent,” said Hogan.
Elements that Accelerate the Adoption of Growth Mindset
Modeling and storytelling about instances of growth mindset by Microsoft’s leadership from Nadella on down, illustrating what it means and what it looks like, was fundamental. Nadella set the example early on by openly acknowledging his own missteps, which was very powerful, Hogan said, and especially helpful in driving a groundswell of understanding and enthusiasm across the organization.
“His superpowers are humanity, humility, and empathy, coupled with his technical expertise and vision. All of that is what has made him a unique leader who has truly helped Microsoft transform.”
Hogan says that growth mindset requires empowerment that enables and supports challenging fixed mindsets. This is critical because it helps identify opportunities to do things in ways people might not have done in the past, which has unlocked innovation in profound ways.
“We talk about it in terms of candor still being kind—intellectual honesty in terms of challenging each other, and the obligation to dissent. Growth mindset does not equal false harmony, but it does mean that everyone is required to model it.”
Another key element of growth mindset is thinking differently, being willing to experiment, and being willing to fail—as long as it gets one closer to the end goal, which can still be defined as success.
“We naturally want to celebrate people who take risks and succeed. But if somebody takes risks and gets closer to the goal because they’ve learned, we want to celebrate that more than celebrating always playing it safe,” Hogan said.
Thinking differently also means challenging conventional wisdom, and asking, ‘Do we have to do everything ourselves?’ Such thinking has resulted in strategic partnerships with companies such as OpenAI and bringing in outside AI experts, Mustafa Suleyman and Jay Parikh to join Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team and lead important AI initiatives for the company.
Investment in managers is another critical component—ensuring that they have the training, tools, and resources they need to develop and coach their teams.
Measuring early on also helped assess progress. This included measuring basic awareness, adoption, and advocacy of growth mindset (e.g., did employees understand what it meant, were they seeing it consistently modeled by their leaders. etc.)?
Regrounding Growth Mindset in 2025
Last year, Hogan asked the leaders at Microsoft’s annual leadership summit, “Do we need a culture change? Will what got us here keep us here?”
The clear consensus? “We still need a growth mindset.” Hogan said.
“It’s not hit ‘refresh’—in the era of AI, it’s hit the accelerator. We’ve got to have that growth mindset exponentially as we think about how we learn, how we pivot, how we disrupt, how we’re willing to say, ‘that was the old model, but with this new technology, we can reimagine how we do things in a completely different way.’”
Hogan says that Microsoft's growth mindset culture is foundational, so the discussion now is about what needs to be added or amplified to the culture in the era of AI.
How does Microsoft sustain its growth mindset with a global workforce of 220,000 people in 90 countries in such a way that achieves a shared understanding across regions, cultures, and backgrounds?
It starts with a focus on people managers. “We're investing in our managers to elevate their coaching abilities, where growth mindset drives high performance in the AI era. We're also helping managers coach their teams to set high standards, innovate, disrupt, and positively pivot," Hogan said.
Growth mindset will serve as a critical foundation for Hogan’s new role, focused on defining Microsoft’s overarching corporate strategy and structure and leading its continuous transformation as a company in the AI era.
Amy Coleman, Hogan's successor as Microsoft’s new Chief People Officer, will play a pivotal role in driving Microsoft’s growth mindset and culture forward, building from her experience leading HR for Microsoft’s corporate functions across the company for the past six years and the variety of HR leadership roles she has had during her 25 years at Microsoft.
“What we know is that growth mindset is part of propelling us forward in the era of AI—and into the next 50 years", said Hogan.
