Dr. Heidi Grant

Read an excerpt from FOCUS (available April 18th)

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Most people in every workplace, classroom, or community on the planet belong to one of two camps. In Camp #1, there’s Jon – the kind of person that some people might call “difficult,” though probably he (and we) would prefer the term “skeptic.”  It is a challenge to get to the end of a sentence in Jon’s presence without having him interrupt you to tell you how the beginning of it was all wrong.  He is immaculate in his appearance, chooses his words with precision, and never procrastinates.  He is, by nature, a pessimist (the defensive kind that we describe later) – try to tell him things are going to work out just fine and watch as he gets visibly uncomfortable with your reckless and naïve attitude. 
At this point, Jon is probably starting to sound pretty annoying to work with, and there is no denying that he can be on occasion.  But once you have gotten to know him, it’s easy to see why he works the way he does – he is determinednot to make mistakes.  In fact, just the idea of making a mistake upsets him.  (Did we mention that much of the time he is at least a little anxious?  He is.)  As a result, his work is usually flawless.
In Campt # 2, there’s Jon’s colleague Ray – the Anti-Jon.  We’re not sure that Ray has ever actually worried about anything.  He is just as smart, and just as motivated, but he goes about his work (and his life) with a relentless optimism that is impossible not to envy.  He doesn’t sweat the small stuff – he’s all about the Next Big Idea.  But sometimes, that sweat-free existence leads to trouble.  He has been forced to label most of his possessions “If Found, Call Ray 555-8797” because he is always forgetting where he left them.
Ray’s work is creative and innovative – he’s not afraid to go down untraveled paths and take intellectual risks, even though some of them end up being time-wasting dead ends.   But appearance-wise….well, Jon once remarked during a meeting that Ray’s shirt was so wrinkled it looked like he had been keeping it in his pants pocket all morning.  Maintenance is not Ray’s thing.
On the surface, Jon and Ray are two talented, hard-working individuals who have the same goal:  to do their jobs exceptionally well.  When you want to influence someone else – whether you are a psychologist, manager, marketer, teacher, or parent – you usually start by trying to figure out what that person wants, and then use that knowledge to understand and predict their behavior.  But if Jon and Ray want the same thing, then why is everythingabout the way they pursue it so different?
Two Kinds of Good (and Bad):  Promotion and Prevention
People like Ray, as the old song goes, “accentuate the positive.”  They see their goals as opportunities for gain or advancement.  In other words, they are focused on all the great things that will happen for them when they succeed – the benefits and rewards.  They “play to win.” When people pursue this kind of “good,” we call it having a promotion focus. Studies from our lab (and many other labs now) show that promotion-focused people respond best to optimism and praise, are more likely to take chances and seize opportunities, and excel at creativity and innovation.  Unfortunately, all that chance-taking and positive-thinking makes them more prone to error, less likely to completely think things through, and usually unprepared with a Plan B in case things fail. For a promotion-focused person, what’s really “bad” is a non-gain:  a chance not taken, a reward unearned, a failure to advance.  They would rather say Yes! and have it blow up in their faces than feel like they let Opportunity’s knock go unanswered.
Others, like Jon, tend to see their goals as opportunities to meet their responsibilities and to stay safe. They consider what might go badly if they don’t work hard enough to achieve.  They don’t play to win – they play to not lose. They want, more than anything else, to feel secure.  When people pursue this kind of “good,” they have what we call a prevention focus. In our studies, we find the prevention-focused to be more driven by criticism and the looming possibility of failure (if, for example, they don’t work hard enough) than by applause and a sunny outlook. Prevention-focused people are often more conservative and don’t take chances, but their work is also more thorough, accurate, and carefully-planned.   Of course, too much caution and hypervigilance for error pretty much kills off any potential for growth, creativity, and innovation.  But for the prevention-focused, the ultimate “bad” is a loss you failed to stop:  a mistake made, a punishment received, a danger you failed to avoid.  They would much prefer to say No! to an opportunity, rather than end up in hot water.  Whoever first said “the devil you know is better than the one you don’t” would have earned Jon’s enthusiastic approval.            
Researchers (ourselves included) have been hard at work for twenty years, exploring the causes and consequences of promotion and prevention focus in every aspect of our lives.   We know that while everyone is concerned with both promotion and prevention, most people have a dominant motivational focus – the one they use to approach most of life’s challenges and demands.  It’s also true that focus can be situation-specific:  some people are promotion-focused at work, but more focused on prevention when it comes to their kids.  Everyoneis promotion-focused when they line up for a lottery ticket, and prevention-focused when they line up for a flu shot.
 Hundreds of studies later after that initial insight, it’s become clear that the kind of “good” you are pursuing affects everything about you – what you pay attention to, what you value, the strategies you choose to use (and which ones actually work for you), and how you feel when you succeed or fail.  It affects your strengths and your weaknesses, both personally and professionally.  It affects how you manage your employees and how you parent your children (and why your spouse’s decisions and preferences can seem so odd). Without exaggeration, your focus affects just about everything.
In Part 1 of FOCUS, we’ll explain the nature of the promotion and prevention focuses  and how they work, and you will come to understand yourself and the people around you in a whole new way.  Some things will make sense that never did before.   You’ll finally see why it’s so hard to be good with both the big ideas andwith the details.  Why the “spontaneous” one in any couple usually isn’t the one who balances the checkbook.  Why you either underestimate how long everything will take, or you overestimate how difficult it will be – and why someone different from you can seem so strange.  You’ll understand the choices you’ve made, the experiences you are drawn to, and why you tend to prefer one brand of product to another.  And you’ll be able to use that knowledge to enhance your well-being and be more effective in your life.
Increase Your Influence
It will be especially valuable for you to understand promotion and prevention if you are in the business of influencing others – if a big part of what you do every day involves informing, persuading, and motivating. (Note that this definition of “influence” applies to teachers, coaches, and parents as much as it does to marketers, managers, and advocates.  Come to think of it, most of us – in one way or another – are engaged in the ‘business’ of influence.  Unless you live alone on a desert island, in which case you can try using this book to break open your coconuts.)
Products, activities, and ideas can appeal to either promotion or prevention motivation, depending on the kind of “good” or “bad” they focus on. Some are obvious: seat belts, home security systems, and mammograms are essentially about avoiding loss (prevention focus), while vacation homes, lottery tickets, and facelifts are about potential gains (promotion focus). Other products can satisfy either promotion or prevention motivation, depending on how you talk about them. When toothpaste is about a “whiter smile” and “fresh breath,” it’s a promotion-focused product. But when it’s about “avoiding cavities and gingivitis,” it’s all about prevention.  As the studies we share with you in Part 2 of FOCUS will show, you can learn to speak the motivational language of the person you are trying to influence.
A Practical Guide
This book is a practical guide to understanding and working with your promotion or prevention focus. Use this knowledge in your own life, and you’ll be more effective in reaching your goals.   Use it as a tool to influence others, and it’s as if you can create trust, value, and better performance out of thin air.  It’s like magic.  Only it’s real.

Want to know if you are promotion or prevention-focused?  Take our free online assessment.


How Are YOU Motivated? A New Free Online Diagnostic

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Are you more promotion-focused or prevention-focused overall?  How about at work – what’s your dominant focus there?  And are you good at reaching your promotion and prevention goals?

Find out using my new (free) online assessment, located at www.YourFocusDiagnostic.com.  It’s quick and easy, and will set you on the right path to knowing how you tick, and what you can do to become even more effective in reaching your personal and professional goals.

Do You Play To Win, Or To Not Lose?

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by Heidi Grant Halvorson & E. Tory Higgins
Harvard Business Review, April 2013 

In what kinds of situations are you most effective? What factors strengthen—or undermine—your motivation? People answer these questions in very different ways, and that’s the challenge at the heart of good management—whether you’re managing your own performance or someone else’s. One-size-fits-all principles don’t work. The strategies that help you excel may not help your colleagues or your direct reports; what works for your boss or your mentor doesn’t always work for you. Personality matters.
In business the most common tool for identifying one’s personality type is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. But the problem with this and many other assessment tools is that they don’t actually predict performance. (In fairness to Myers-Briggs, it doesn’t claim to.) These tests will tell you about attributes—such as your degree of introversion or extroversion, or your reliance on thinking versus feeling—that indicate what you like to do, but they tell you very little about whether you are good at it, or how to improve if you’re not.
Fortunately, there is a way of grouping people into types on the basis of a personality attribute that does predict performance: promotion focus or prevention focus. Although these types are well known among academic psychologists and marketing and management researchers, word of them has not yet filtered down to the people who we believe could benefit most: managers keen to be more effective in their jobs and to help others reach their full potential as well.

Yes, You Can You Learn to Sell

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Appeared originally on HBR.org

What makes a person good at – and comfortable with — persuading others? 
Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend, a brilliant and hard-working VP. I had just finished Dan Pink’s excellent new book, To Sell Is Human, and was eager for my friend’s take on it. In a nutshell, Pink argues that moving people (i.e., selling, but also persuading or influencing) has become an essential component of nearly everyone’s job in the modern workplace.  Everyoneis in sales. Like a lot of people, I found Pink’s argument to be radical, surprising, and undeniably true.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone likes this argument. I thought my friend would find it interesting, but instead he seemed profoundly uncomfortable.  “That’s crap,” he said, more to himself than to me.  “I’m not a salesman.  My job is strategy, not manipulating suckers.”
On the surface, it seemed like the salesmen-are-slimy stereotype was at work here (something Pink’s book tackles head on and does an admirable job dispelling). There might also have been a touch of aversion to the idea of selling- many of us wonder if it’s right, ethically–speaking, to persuade someone to buy or believe something.  We’re uneasy with the power that effective persuasion gives us.  But, as Pink points out, it’s impossible for human beings to avoid influencing, and being influenced by, other people’s words and deeds.  People are going to be moved – the trick is to make sure that the ideas and products with genuine merit do the moving.
In my friend’s visible discomfort, however, I sensed something more.  Something like what happens when you give an unsuspecting person a set of algebra problems and they literally back away from you stuttering, “Um… I’m not a math person.”  (Believe it or not, in my job I actually do things like that.)
I spend a lot of time writing and speaking about the pervasive – and false – belief that our success depends upon the possession of innate, immutable abilities.  I drown my readers and listeners in data, showing beyond a reasonable doubt that reaching goals and mastering skills is about strategy, effort, and persistence, and that these things are learned.  The abilities I have usually focused on are intelligence, creativity, self-control, and, of course, mathematical skill. 
But until I read Pink’s latest book and witnessed my friend’s reaction to the idea that the ability to move people is essential to success, it really hadn’t occurred to me that a lot of people might think that’s innate too.  Oh no.
To find out more, I turned to Google.  I searched the internet for the expression “natural born salesman.”  Over half a million hits.  To be fair, many of these were attempts to dispel the myth of the naturally-gifted mover, but the need to dispel the myth speaks volumes about its ubiquity.
Selling, moving, persuading, influencing… many of us may resist the idea that this is part of our job description (or avoid taking positions for which it would be) because we believe we lack that ability, just as we avoided calculus in college like the plague because we weren’t “math people.”  My friend doesn’t want to believe that sales is a part of his job because he doesn’t believe he is good at sales, and more importantly, because he doesn’t believe he can be.
(A quick aside:  There is research suggesting that successful salespeople have particular personality traits, including conscientiousness, humility, and as Pink points out “ambiversion” – being neither an extreme introvert nor extrovert.  But it’s important to not assume that personality traits = innate ability.  Personalities can and do change as a result of our efforts and experiences.  You aren’t “stuck” as you are.)
If you want to become good at influencing others, then you simply need to learn how.  It’s not magic, and it’s certainly notinnate.  It may sometimes feel innate, but that’s because people are often able to pick up on effective strategies implicitly – without conscious awareness – through experience and observation.  Not realizing you are learning makes your abilities feel innate, even when they aren’t.
Do you want to be a people mover?  Pick up one (or more) of the many excellent, data-driven books on the subject.  To Sell Is Human is a good place to start.  Robert Cialdini’s Influence and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational are also filled with strategies of effective persuasion.    (My forthcoming book with Tory Higgins, Focus, offers a few useful pointers as well.)
Then, armed with the knowledge of what works, practice.  Everything gets easier, more automatic, more “natural” with practice.  You don’t need to be afraid of this brave new people-moving world – you have what it takes, you just need to learn to use it.


The Feedback You Need to Be Giving

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If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be “critical” or “negative” when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode.  It’s incredibly frustrating.  This kind of advice is surely well-meant, and it certainly sounds good.  After all, you probably don’t relish the thought of having to tell someone else what they are doing wrong – at minimum, it’s a little embarrassing for everyone involved. 
But avoiding negative feedback is both wrong-headed and dangerous.  Wrong-headed because, when delivered the right way, at the right time, criticism is in fact highly motivating.  Dangerous because without awareness of the mistakes he or she is making, no one can possibly improve.  Staying “positive” when doling out feedback will only get you so far.
Hang on, you say.  Can’t negative feedback be discouraging?  Demotivating?
That’s perfectly true.
And don’t people need encouragement to feel confident?  Doesn’t that help them stay motivated? 
In many cases, yes.
Confusing, isn’t it?  Thankfully, brilliant new research by Stacey Finkelstein (Columbia University) and Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago) sheds light on the seeminlgy paradoxical nature of feedback, by making it clear why, when, and for whom negative feedback is appropriate.
It’s important to begin by understanding the function that positive and negative feedback serve. Positive feedback (e.g., Here’s what you did really well….) increases commitment to the work you do, by enhancing both your experience and your confidence.   Negative feedback (e.g., Here’s where you went wrong….), on the other hand, is informative – it tells you where you need to spend your effort, and offers insight into how you might improve.
Given these two different functions, positive and negative feedback should be more effective (and more motivating) for different people at different times.  For instance, when you don’t really know what you are doing, positive feedback helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing – something novices tend to need.  But when you are an expert, and you already more or less know what you are doing, it’s negative feedback that can help you do what it takes to get to the top of your game.
As Finkelstein and Fishbach show, novices and experts are indeed looking for, and motivated by, different kinds of information.  In one of their studies, American students taking either beginner or advanced-level French classes were asked whether they would prefer an instructor who emphasized what they were doing right (focusing on their strengths) or what they were doing wrong (focusing on their mistakes and how to correct them).  Beginners overwhelmingly preferred a cheerleading, strength-focused instructor.  Advanced students, on the other hand, preferred a more critical instructor who would help them develop their weaker skills.
In a second study, the researchers looked at a very different behavior: engaging in environmentally friendly actions.  Their “experts” were members of environmental organizations (e.g., Greenpeace), while their “novices” were non-members.  Each participant in the study made a list of the actions they regulatory took that helped the environment – things like recycling, avoiding bottled water, and taking shorter showers.  They were offered feedback from an environmental consultant on the effectiveness of their actions, and were given a choice:  Would you prefer to know more about the actions you take that areeffective, or about the actions you take that are not?  Experts were much more likely to choose the negative feedback – about ineffective actions – than novices.  
Taken together, these studies show that people who are experienced in a given domain – people who already have developed some knowledge and skills – don’t actually live in fear of negative feedback.  If anything, they seek it out.  Intuitively they realize that negative feedback offers the key to getting ahead, while positive feedback merely tells them what they already know.
But what about motivation?  What kind of feedback makes you want to take action? When participants in the environmental study were randomlygiven either positive or negative feedback about their actions, and were then asked how much of their $25 study compensation they would like to donate to Greenpeace, the type of feedback they received had a dramatic effect on their motivation to give.  When negative feedback was given, experts gave more on average to Greenpeace ($8.53) than novices ($1.24).  But when positive feedback was given, novices ($8.31) gave far more than experts ($2.92).
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you never tell the rookie about his mistakes, or that you never praise the seasoned professional for her outstanding work.  And of course negative feedback should always be accompanied by good advice, and given with tact. 
But I amsuggesting that piling on praise is a more effective motivator for the rookie than the pro.  And I’m saying, point blank, that you shouldn’t worry so much when it comes to pointing out mistakes to someone experienced.  Negative feedback won’t crush their confidence, but it just might give them the information they need to take their performance to the next level.

The Amazing Power of I Don’t (rather than I Can’t)

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To reach many, if not most of the goals we’d like to achieve – losing weight, getting ahead at work, improving a relationship –it’s not just a matter of taking action.  There are things we need to stop doing if we want to be successful.  We need to stop overeating, stop procrastinating, stop getting worked up over things that really don’t matter.
It’s hard to motivate yourself to adopt new habits, but it’s even harder to rid yourself of old ones.  More often than not, it’s the latter that keep us from becoming the person we really want to be. 
We need help – we need strategies that actually work.  I don’t care how much self-control you have – willpower alone is not going to do the trick.
Thankfully, there are strategies that work.  Here is a particularly useful one that was recently discovered by researchers at Boston College and the University of Houston.
Imagine you are on a diet, and you are enjoying a meal at a nice restaurant.  After clearing the plates, your server says, “You know, we have an incredible chocolate cake on our dessert menu.  We’re famous for it.  Would you care to try it?”
Would you think to yourself:
“I can’t eat chocolate cake.”
Or
“I don’t eat chocolate cake.”
If you think there is no real difference, you couldn’t be more wrong.  Don’t and can’t may seem somewhat interchangeable, but they are very different psychologically.  And if there is one thing that social psychologists have learned over the years, it’s that even seemingly subtle differences in language can have very powerful affects on our thoughts, feelings and behavior.
I don’t is experienced as a choice, so it feels empowering. It’s an affirmation of your determination and willpower.  I can’tisn’t a choice – it’s a restriction, it’s being imposed upon you.  So thinking “I can’t” undermines your sense of power and personal agency.
The difference between thinking “I don’t” and “I can’t” can be quite dramatic.  In one study, students with a healthy eating goal were instructed that when faced with a temptation, they should say to themselves either I don’t do X or I can’t do X.  (e.g., I don’t eat candy versus I can’t eat candy.)  On their way out of the lab, they were told that they could choose a token of appreciation for their participation in the study: a chocolate bar or a granola bar.  Who chose the healthier option?  Sixty-four percent of those who said I don’t, compared to only thirty-nine percent of those who said I can’t.
In another study, twenty adult women who were working toward a health and fitness goal were encouraged to use either I don’t or I can’tlanguage when they were tempted to lapse (e.g., skip the gym, grab a donut, etc.)  On each of the next ten days, these women checked in via email to report on whether or not the strategy was working for them – if not, they were told they could stop using the strategy.  By the study’s end, 8 out of the 10 women using the I don’t strategy were still using it successfully, while only 1 of the 10 who used I can’t lasted that long.
The beautiful thing about using this strategy is that it could not be easier – every time you catch yourself thinking I can’t have this, or I can’t do that, simply say No, I don’t do this, instead. 
Because the truth is, it isyour choice. The power to decide what you do and don’t do really is yours.  When you are always thinking I can’t, it’s easy to lose sight of that fact. 
It’s time to take your power back, and now you know where to start.
Don’t forget to check out the FOCUS giveaway!