
B.A. (Hons), M.Psych (Applied), PhD. (Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management)
Dr. Peter Heslin is a Professor of Management, Academic Fellow at Warrane College, and Scientia Education Fellow at UNSW Sydney. He is a Registered Psychologist who was elected Chair of the Academy of Management Careers Division.
Peter pioneered research on growth mindsets in organisations and wrote the most cited ever sole-authored peer-reviewed article on career success. His paper with Lauren Keating and Sue Ashford on How Situational Cues and Mindset Dynamics Shape Personality Effects on Career Outcomes was Finalist for the Careers Division’s Award for Best Paper Published in 2019. Peter’s ongoing research on mindsets in careers, leadership development, and sustainability appears in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets (e.g., Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Personnel Psychology, and Harvard Business Review).
Peter developed and has published widely on the concept of being in learning mode. He leads the Micro Theory pre-doctoral course and teaches the Leadership course that launches AGSM students on their MBA(Executive) journey. A former consultant at KPMG Career Navigation, Peter won faculty and university-level awards for sustained teaching excellence. He is an innovative educator, consultant, researcher, and speaker who enjoys conducting research and delivering keynote addresses and workshops across Australia and around the world.
Peter is a proud dad who enjoys challenging and enabling (future) leaders to be in learning mode about how to realise their immense potential to bring out the best within themselves and those in their team, organisation, family, and communities.
2019 Lead a successful Business of Diversity Visiting Scholar grant application to support Distinguished University Professor Tammy Allen (U of South Florida) visiting UNSW three times between 2019-2021 to collaborate with myself and other School of Management colleagues (Suz Chan-Serafin, Hugh Bainbridge and Josh Keller) on three diversity-related research projects: Funding: AU$108,883.
2019 Heslin, P. A. UNSW best practices at priming students to be in learning mode. Scientia Education Fellow Funding: AU$5,000.
2018 Heslin, P. A., Keating, L. A., & Ashford, S. A. UNSW Business School Linkage Research Seed Funding (LRSF) scheme: The role of being in learning mode in meeting adaptive organisational challenges. Funding: AU$25,000.
2016 Heslin, P. A. International seed research grant to facilitate collaboration with partners at MBRU and Stanford University: Potential predictors of medical students’ adaptability and academic success from Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU) in Dubai. Grant number - RG162835. Funding: AU$16,507.00.
2012 Heslin, P. A., & Minbashian, A. Better at anything? The role of entity implicit person theories (IPTs) in personnel selection. UNSW Business School Research Grant. Funding: AU$15,000.
2011 Heslin, P. A., & Minbashian, A. Pilot project on limitations to the utility of an incremental implicit person theory. UNSW Business School, School of O&M Faculty Research Grants. Funding: AU$9,521.
Research Awards
2020 Finalist for the Academy of Management Career Division’s Award for Best Careers Paper Published in 2019 for: Heslin, P. A., Keating, L. A., & Minbashian, A. (2019). How situational cues and mindset dynamics shape personality effects on career outcomes, Journal of Management, 45, 2101–2131
2016 Finalist for the 2016 Academy of Management Career Division’s Best Overall Symposium Award for When and why objective career success deserves a demotion.
2014 Finalist for the 2014 Academy of Management Career Division’s Best Overall Paper Award for Managerial moral disengagement and career demise.
2012 Winner of the Academy of Management’s Best Overall Paper in Management Education Award for the paper that “offers the most significant contribution to management education” for Rockstar vs. ringmaster: Balancing complementary teaching roles to develop management skills.
2006 Best poster featured at the SIOP all-conference reception for Who’s procedurally just? The role of managers’ implicit personal theory. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Dallas, TX.
Teaching Awards
2018 UNSW Award for Teaching Excellence Medal, which “recognise(s) individuals … who have shown sustained excellence in teaching, enhancing student learning and/or the student experience over a period of at least five years.” (AUD$10,000)
2018 UNSW Business School’s Bill Birkett Award for Sustained Excellence for “sustained effort over a period and clear demonstration of practices that make a difference to student learning.” (AUD$3,000)
2014 AGSM MBA Programs Teaching Excellence in a Core Course Award, which the Business School Dean Professor Chris Styles noted is “probably the hardest teaching award to win because MBA conscripts can be the hardest to inspire.” (AUD$2,000)
2006 C. Jackson Grayson Endowed Faculty Innovation Award for Excellence and Creativity in Teaching, from the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. (USD$1,000)
Leadership development, learning mode, learning agility, mindsets, self-regulation, sustainable career success, resilience, successful aging.
Executive Education
Since the 1990s, I have led celebrated leadership programs and workshops focused on topics including cultivating growth mindsets, resilience, impactful communication, nurturing change, and leadership development for organisations including:
Recent Presentations and Workshops to Support Colleagues within UNSW
Co-facilitated a workshop with Mark Uncles on 17 February 2020 on Setting Yourself Up for a Successful Required Peer Review of Teaching.
Delivered a webinar for professional staff within the faculty on Building High-Quality Connections During the Pandemic on 22 April 2020.
Presented on principles for Moving from Coping to Thriving as part of the AGSM’s ‘Leadership in Times of Crisis’ webinar series on 1 May, 2020.
Presented to a Business Faculty workshop on Developing Your Case for Promotion to Full Professor on 6 June 2020.
Delivered a UNSW-wide presentation on Preparing Your Education Case for Promotion to Full Professor on 18 June 2020
Facilitated a Bounce Back Resilience Training session for the Academic Women’s Career Advancement Program (AWCAP) AWCAP on 1 Sept 2020 and for the Early Career Academics (ECA) program on 23 October 2020.
Presented on Developing Supportive Learning Communities at the UNSW Inclusive Education Showcase on 28 October 2020.
Chaired a session on Rethinking Assessment during the UNSW 2020 Learning and Teaching Forum -Learning without limits: Leading the change on 19 November 2020.
Current Service Roles within UNSW
Recent Media Engagement
Professional Memberships and Honorary Roles
My Teaching
My teaching primes students to lead themselves and others in ways that enable them to be more effective in their studies, their careers, in their life at home, and in their communities. A core element of how I do so is routinely priming my students to be in learning mode, that is, deliberately engaging in a series of experiential learning tasks with more of a growth than a fixed mindset (Heslin & Keating, 2017; Heslin et al., in press, 2019). How I teach is guided by my assumptions that: