Dr. Heidi Grant

How To Get Better At Spotting Opportunities

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To be a successful entrepreneur – or really, a successful anything – you need to be able to recognize an opportunity when you see one. Specifically, you need to be able to identify a problem or gap, and come up with an innovative solution. (Of course you also need to be able to execute that solution, but without spotting the opportunity in the first place, you aren’t going anywhere.)
So how, exactly, does one become good at spotting opportunities?
It’s probably innate — you’re either good at that sort of thing or you’re not, you say.
Wrong. Try again.
Well, then it’s probably a matter of practice — of getting experience.
Probably not. (Hang on and I’ll explain why.)
The suspense is no doubt killing you, so I’ll go ahead and tell you the secret to recognizing opportunities: promotion focus.
As I’ve written about with Tory Higgins in our new book, Focus, when you see your entrepreneurial venture (or your career, or your goals in general) as being about the potential for advancement, achievement and rewards, you have a promotion focus. You are promotion-focused when you think about what you might gain if you are successful — how you might end up better off.
Alternatively, if you approach your venture focused on not losing everything you’ve worked so hard for, on avoiding danger and keeping things running smoothly, you have a prevention focus. Prevention focus is good for many things — careful planning, accuracy, reliability, and thoroughness, just to name a few. But it doesn’t lead to creativity, open-mindedness, and the confidence to take chances the way promotion focus does. And as new research by Andranik Tumasjan and Reiner Braun from Germany’s TUM School of Management shows, that’s the combination you need to be an opportunity-spotter.
Tumasjan and Braun asked 254 U.K. entrepreneurs from a variety of industries to take an assessment to determine their dominant focus, and to then demonstrate their opportunity-recognition skills. They were provided with comments from real focus groups that dealt with five kinds of problems associated with footwear (durability, comfort, performance, style, and price.) After looking them over, the entrepreneurs were told to make a list of the underlying problems revealed by the comments, and to provide solutions for those problems.
The results painted a very clear picture: Promotion-focused entrepreneurs were better able to detect opportunities — i.e., they generated more solutions to identified problems. In addition, those solutions were judged by independent raters to be more innovative than prevention-focused solutions.
That’s not all. Being promotion-focused even compensated for low levels of creative and entrepreneurial confidence, which are usually considered to be essential ingredients for success. Equipped with the right focus, even low-confidence entrepreneurs were among the top performers.
If you don’t have enough of it at the moment, there are many research-based techniques you can use to strengthen your promotion focus. Here are a few that work well:
  • Write down several goals you have for your venture (or for your career). For each goal, make a list of ways in which you will gain something if you are successful. Read through these goals and potential gains on a daily basis, or before undertaking any important task.
  • Picture yourself five or ten years down the road as you would ideally like to be. What are your aspirations? Your dreams? What do you hope to accomplish? Thinking about your ideal future self will put you in a promotion focus.
  • Reflect on your past. Think about a recent big win or accomplishment — a time when you felt really pumped up about what you were able to achieve. A time when you felt on top of the world. Thinking about our past gains puts us in a promotion focus.
The more often you use any or all of these techniques, the more automatic the shift to promotion focus will become.

Is Your Team Promotion or Prevention-Focused? Here’s Why It Matters to Leaders

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This post originally appeared on Tanveer Naseer’s awesome and award-winning leadership blog.  Check it out.

Is your employee a risk-taker, or does he avoid risks like the plague? Does she get uncomfortable with too much optimism or praise, or is she known for her sunny outlook? Do some assignments always seem particularly hard for her, while she excels at others naturally?

The answers to these questions give you a window into your employee’s motivational focus – something every leader needs to understand in order to give feedback and create incentives that are persuasive and motivating.

There are two ways to look at the goals we pursue at work (and in life). Let’s start with a goal many of us share: “doing my job well.” For some of us, doing our jobs well is about the potential for advancement, achievement and rewards. It’s about what we might gain if we are successful, how we might end up better off. If you are (or your employee is) someone who sees goals this way, you have what’s called a promotion focus.

For the rest of us, doing our jobs well is about security – about not losingeverything we’ve worked so hard for. When you are prevention focused, you want to avoid danger, fulfill your responsibilities, and be someone people can count on. You want to keep things running smoothly.

What’s important to know is that promotion and prevention-focused people work very differently to reach the same goal. They use different strategies, have different strengths, and are prone to different kinds of mistakes. One group will be motivated by applause, the other by criticism. One group may give up too soon – the other may not know when to quit.
The key to helping your team reach their goals your goals is to identify their focus, and learn to work with it instead of against it.

What’s Their Focus?
There are online assessments you and your employees can take to identify your motivational focus, but you can also get a pretty good sense of it by comparing any employee’s behavior to each of the following descriptions:
Promotion People are…
  • Creative and innovative
  • Comfortable taking chances
  • Optimistic
  • Speedy workers
  • Good at seizing opportunities
  • (Downside: They are also more likely to make mistakes, less likely to have a back-up plan if things go wrong, bad with details, and more likely to take a risk that lands them in hot water.)
Prevention People are…
  • Great planners
  • Deliberate, thorough
  • Cautious, skeptical
  • Accurate workers
  • Analytical, good at evaluating
  • (Downside: They are also more likely to miss out on great opportunities, get too bogged down with details, and have a tendency to be overly-anxious.)
Working With Focus
Studies show that the way to be most effective in leading your team is to understand how they work best, and use the strategies that match each individual’s particular motivation. Here is a sample of what I mean:

Feedback
When your employee is promotion-focused, their motivation feels like eagerness – an enthusiastic desire to really go for it. So encourage them to be optimists, and provide frequent praise (though only when it’s deserved, of course). Confidence heightens their energy and intensity. Doubting themselves takes the wind right out of their sails.

When your employee is prevention-focused, their motivation feels like vigilance – they are always on the lookout for danger. Vigilance actually increases in response to negative feedback or skepticism. There’s nothing like the looming possibility of failure to get their prevention juices flowing. Over-confidence or effusive praise, however, may lead them to let down their guard, and undermine their motivation – so beware of both. Offer honest, realistic feedback and focus on ways to improve performance.

Decision-Making
Allow your employees to make decisions in the way that feels right for them. Promotion-focused people make the best decisions when they weigh the relativepros of Option A and B, when they think about why something is worth doing, and when they trust their instincts.

The prevention-minded, on the other hand, prefer to weigh the cons of Option A & B, and go with lesser of two evils. They make the best decisions when they think about how something could be done, and when they can point to rational reasons, rather than feelings, to justify their choices.

Problem-Solving Approach
Expect your promotion employees to be more exploratory and abstract in their thinking. They generate lots of options and possibilities when coming up with ways to reach goals – they are creative, and always consider alternatives.
Prevention-focused thinking is concrete and specific – they will pick a plan and want to stick to it. Prevention people drill down to the details, and focus on the nitty gritty of what’s still needs to be done. And they are more comfortable with tried-and-true methods rather than “innovative” but untested ones.

Incentives
Promotion-focused employees are more motivated by incentives that are framed as gains or reward. If you meet this sales target, you will get a bonus. If generate a certain amount of new business, then you get a Caribbean vacation.
Prevention-focused employees care more about hanging on to what they already have, so frame incentives as opportunities to lose. Everyone gets a bonus this year,except those who fail to meet their sales target. Everyone on the team gets a Caribbean vacation, except those who generate too little new business.

Which Focus is the Best Focus?
People always want to know – is it better to be promotion or prevention focused? The truth is, both kinds of motivation can bring you success, and each has its pitfalls. Each brings something of value (e.g., bold solutions, attention to detail) to your organization. In fact, no organization can truly thrive without a balance of promotion and prevention motivation – to keep you moving forward, while maintaining the progress you’ve already made.

As a leader, be sure to appreciate and recognize the value of your promotion and prevention-minded team members, and help each of them to work in ways that bring out their very best.



How to Get Your Customers to Pay More for Your Product

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A Columbia undergraduate travels deep into the bowels of Schermerhorn Hall, home of the Motivation Science Center’s underground laboratories. (We would actually prefer to have windows, but what can you do?) He comes here to fill out a few questionnaires in exchange for $5. When he is finished, he’s told that in addition to his $5, he can choose a parting gift — an attractive, logo-embossed Columbia mug, or a disposable Bic pen. He is asked to make that choice in one of these two ways:
1. Think about what you would gain by choosing the mug, and what you would gain by choosing the pen.
Or:
2. Think about what you would lose by not choosing the mug, and what you would lose by notchoosing the pen.
He chooses the mug. (They pretty much all choose the mug, because the pen is deliberately lame.) And then the experimenter asks, “What do you think is the price of the mug?” Here’s where it get’s interesting.
In that packet of questionnaires our Columbia undergrad filled out was one that measured hismotivational focus — whether he tends to view his goals as ideals and opportunities to advance (what researchers call “promotion focus”), or as opportunities to stay safe and keep things running smoothly (“prevention focus“). While everyone has a mix of both to some extent, most of us tend to have a dominant focus. (To find out yours, try this free online assessment).
And as it turns out, if the way you ask him to make his choice fits with his motivational focus — thinking about gains for a promotion-focused person, or thinking about avoiding losses for a prevention-focused person — he thinks the mug is worth more. About 50% more, to be precise.
mugworth.gif
You might be saying to yourself, “But what if he actually had to spend his own money to buy it? Would he really be willing to pay more? Would motivational fit have such a big effect… or any effect at all?” The researchers wondered that, too.
So they brought in more undergrads, and ran the experiment again: gave each of them $5 just for showing up, and then asked them whether they would prefer the mug or the pen by thinking either about what they would gain or lose with each. Once again, everybody preferred the mug.
Then the researcher did something different. They showed the subjects an envelope containing a fair price for the mug. The researcher explained that the subject could now buy the mug if he wished to, but only if he offered an amount that was equal to or higher than the price in the envelope. (The idea is similar to a silent auction — you make your best bid and see what happens.) If he offered an amount less than the price, he would not get the mug. If he offered an amount equal to or higher than the price in the envelope, then he would get the mug for the price that they offered. The table below shows how much of their own $5 they were willing to pay to get the mug in each condition.
paymug.gif
So the answer is yes: Even when people are spending their own money, they perceive an object to be worth much more — this time, roughly 70% more — when they make their decision in a way that creates motivational fit. It’s an experience that creates real, honest-to-goodness cash value.
Findings like these have emerged with many other kinds of products, too, as Tory Higgins and I found while researching our book (Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World For Success and Influence). For instance, when consumers were allowed to evaluate bike helmets in a way that created motivational fit, they were willing to pay about 20% more for one. In another study, consumers offered to pay more than 40% more for the same reading booklight if the way they made their choice created motivational fit.
Here’s the best part: Study after study shows that consumers who choose products while experiencing motivational fit are later significantly more satisfied with their selections. So you aren’t just tricking people into paying more — by taking into account your audience’s promotion or prevention focus, you are giving them the opportunity to experience of a genuinely better product. It just all depends on how you ask.

The Creative Benefits of Split Personalities

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This post appeared originally on 99u.com

In his wildly popular 2006 TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson defined creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Aside from being wonderfully succinct, this definition implies that any creative enterprise requires two key phases:

Phase 1: Coming up with an original idea

Phase 2: Taking a hard look at that original idea and assessing its values

So to be a successful creative, you need to not only be a good generator, but also a good evaluator. The problem is that in practice, it’s remarkably hard to be both. And the reason for that has everything to do with your motivational focus – how you think about the goal you are pursuing when working on a creative project. One kind of focus heightens your creativity, while a different focus gives you the analytical tools you need to assess your work. The good news is that you can actually shift yourself from one focus to the other in order to bring your best game during each phase of the creative process.

When you see your goal as an opportunity to advance – to gain something, or to end up better off – you have what psychologists call a promotion focus. This focus has been shown to be highly conducive to creative insight. For instance in one study, when asked, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?,” promotion-focused participants were more quickly able to go beyond the obvious (e.g., pave a sidewalk, use as a paperweight) to the clever and original (e.g., use it to commit burglary by breaking through windows, or to turn off your TV – assuming you don’t ever want to turn it on again.) This is the focus you want when you heading into a job interview, or brainstorming options for a new ad campaign.

Promotion focus causes you to have a more exploratory information-processing style, and greater comfort with risk, which facilitate creativity. The promotion-focused worry less about every idea being perfect or even feasible, so they are open to more possibilities. Unfortunately, the downside of promotion focus is that while it may be great for creative idea generation, research suggests that it’s not well-suited to creative idea evaluation. So there is another kind of focus you should adopt to get that particular job done.

When you see your goals as opportunities not to gain, but to avoid danger and keep things running smoothly, you have what’s called a prevention focus. This focus makes you more analytical, more cautious, and more sensitive to potential flaws or weaknesses in an idea. Prevention focus is unlikely to lead you to creative insight – in fact, it is likely to block creative insight from happening in the first place. You definitely don’t want to be prevention-focused when you are trying to generate ideas. But switching to a prevention focus after you’ve come up with some options will help you to more easily tell a workable idea from one that will never get off the ground.

In my new book Focus, I describe many techniques for shifting from one focus to the other – but here’s one that works brilliantly:

Phase 1: Creative idea generation

Get your Promotion Hat on by taking a few moments to think about what you will gain from successfully completing your project. What good things will happen? What are the rewards? How will you be better off? It can help to actually write a short paragraph to really get into focus and, as Charlie Sheen might say, access the right set of mind tools. The next thing you know, you’ll be feverishly scribbling all your awesome new ideas onto cocktail napkins.

Phase 2: Creative idea evaluation

Now it’s time to take a breath and put your Prevention Hat on. To do this, think about what you will lose if you don’t successfully complete your project – what will the negative consequences be? How will you be worse off if you fail? (I know – this doesn’t sound fun. I never said prevention focus was fun. But it is really effective.)

Looking again at your cocktail napkins with your prevention focus, you’ll be able to see much more clearly which ideas probably won’t work, which ones can’t possibly work, and which ones appear to be mustard stains. The ones that still seem promising, even while wearing a Prevention Hat, are probably gold.


Are You An Unsung Hero?

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            At the very end of 1998, NASA launched a much-anticipated robotic space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter.  Its mission was to collect data about the atmosphere, and act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander.  Nearly ten months later, it arrived at the red planet, only to disappear just as it was supposed to establish an orbit. 
It had come, unintentionally, 100 kilometers closer to the planet’s surface than originally planned, which was 25 kilometers beneath the level at which it could properly function.  Instead of orbiting Mars, it plowed right through the atmosphere (possibly disintegrating) and was lost to us forever, taking $125 million in American taxpayer dollars with it.
The problem, it was later discovered, was one of unit conversion.  The team of engineers at NASA worked in metric units (the standard they had adopted in 1990.)  The engineers at Lockheed Martin who helped build the Orbiter and its navigation systems, on the other hand, worked in English units of measurement (pounds, inches, etc.) 
When asked how an error of this magnitude could have occurred (particularly one that seemed so simple to have gotten right in the first place), Tom Gavin, chief administrator of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “Something went wrong in our system processes, in checks and balances, that we should have caught this and fixed it.”
When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention.  But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves?  When things go the way they are supposed to.  And because of this, roughly half of us – people we call prevention-focused – rarely get the credit we are due.
As I’ve written about in previous posts, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don’t succeed.  They want to stay safe – to hold on to what they’ve already got.  As a result, they are diligent, accurate, analytical, and go out of their way to avoid mistakes that might derail their success.  They excel when it comes to keeping things running smoothly.
Promotion-focused people, on the other hand, see their goals in terms of what they might gain if they succeed – how they might advance or obtain rewards.  Their strengths, relative to the prevention-focused, are creativity, innovation, speed, and seizing opportunities – exactly the kinds of qualities that the business community (and our culture as a whole) tends to admire and praise.
But what the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter so compellingly illustrates is that there isn’t (or at least wasn’t) nearly enough prevention-thinking going on in the NASA labs.  It’s not really surprising – these people, after all, are rocket scientists.  They devote their lives to exploring space– if there is something more promotion-focused than that, I don’t know what it is.  These folks pretty much own the phrase “going where no one has gone before.”  
The heroes of the business world always seem to be the risk-taking promotion-focused innovators.  But you see, it’s really not that there are no prevention-focused heroes – it’s that they are so often unsung.  You rarely get the credit you deserve for averting disaster when it never happens.   No one says “Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob.  You just saved us $125 million dollars and a boatload of humiliation.  You rock!”  Instead, the prevention-focused toil away, quietly and carefully, making sure that things work the way they are supposed to.  They see to it that the airplane you are flying in won’t fall apart at its seams mid-flight, that the medication you are taking wasn’t contaminated in the factory, and that your large skim mocha latte really is decaf so you won’t still be up at 4 a.m. watching The Weather Channel.
When what you are good at is keeping things running smoothly, and things do run smoothly, your contribution is – sadly – less likely to be noticed. So you probably won’t get the praise you have in fact earned.  (Unless you are the immediate successor to someone who let things go to hell in a handcart – then people will appreciate you, at least for a little while.)   And this is a big part of why Tory Higgins and I wrote FOCUS – to make people understand that there are two ways of looking at our goals, that result in two sets of distinct strengths – both of which are critical to the success of any team or organization.