Are You Promotion or Prevention-Focused?

In which kinds of situations are you most effective?

What factors strengthen—or undermine—your motivation?

People answer these questions very differently, and that’s the challenge at the heart of good leadership—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.

We all strive for a harmonious workplace that offers us the opportunity to bring out the best in ourselves and others, and to do meaningful work that we believe is important. However, many of us find something much different…. awkward or strained interactions with leaders and colleagues that sap our motivation rather than helping us to excel.

Leaders keen to be more effective in their jobs and to help others reach their full potential can benefit from research on motivational focus, which affects how we approach life’s challenges and demands. In Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World to Power Success and Influence, authors Heidi Grant Halvorson (a social psychologist) and E. Tory Higgins (a professor of psychology and management) discovered a way of segmenting people on the basis of a personality attribute that also predicts performance.

Motivational Focus

Promotion-focused employees see their goals as creating a path to gain or advancement and concentrate on the rewards that will accrue when they achieve them. They are eager and they play to win.

You’ll recognize promotion-focused people as those who are comfortable taking chances, who like to work quickly, who dream big and think creatively. Unfortunately, all that chance taking, speedy working, and positive thinking makes these individuals more prone to error, less likely to think things through and usually unprepared with a plan B if things go wrong. That’s a price they are willing to pay, because for them, the worst thing is a chance not taken, a reward unearned, a failure to advance.

Prevention-focused employees, in contrast, see their goals as responsibilities, and they concentrate on staying safe. They worry about what might go wrong if they don’t work hard enough or aren’t careful enough.

They are vigilant and play to not lose, to hang on to what they have, to maintain the status quo. They are often more risk-averse, but their work is also more thorough, accurate, and carefully considered. To succeed, they work slowly and meticulously. They aren’t usually the most creative thinkers, but they may have excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.

While the promotion-minded generate lots of ideas, good and bad, it often takes someone prevention-minded to tell the difference between the two.

The promotion-focused are engaged by inspirational role models, the prevention-focused by cautionary tales.

Simply identifying your own type should help you embrace your strengths as well as recognize and compensate for your weaknesses. Although everyone is concerned at various times with both promotion and prevention, most of us have a dominant motivational focus. It affects what we pay attention to, what we value, and how we feel when we succeed or fail. And it’s why the decisions and preferences of our differently focused colleagues can seem so odd at times.

Both types of employees are crucial for every organization’s success. Businesses need to excel at innovation and at maintaining what works, at speed and at accuracy. The key is to understand and embrace our personality types and those of our colleagues, and to bring out the best in each of us.

Once we understand whether colleagues are promotion-focused or prevention-focused, we can speak and work with them in very specific ways that will enhance their motivation.  Properly addressing employees’ motivational fit enhances and sustains both the eagerness of the promotion-minded and the vigilance of the prevention-minded, making work seem more valuable and boosts both performance and enjoyment.  

Choosing Role Models

The promotion-focused are more engaged when they hear about an inspirational role model, such as a particularly high-performing salesperson or a uniquely effective team leader. The prevention-focused, in contrast, are impressed by a strong cautionary tale about someone whose path they shouldn’t follow, because thinking about avoiding mistakes feels right to them.

As an individual, you naturally pay attention to the kind of story that resonates most with you, but as a colleague or leader, you should think about whether the stories you share with others are motivational for them.

It’s also important to seek out mentors and, when possible, leaders whose focus matches your own. If you’re a leader, subtly adapt your style to suit each employee’s focus. Promotion-minded employees thrive under transformational leaders who support creative solutions, have a long-term vision, and look for ways to shake things up.

The prevention-focused are at their best under transactional leaders who emphasize rules and standards, protect the status quo, discourage errors, and focus on effectively reaching more-immediate goals.

Framing Goals

Even minor tweaks in the language you use to describe a goal can make a difference.

For example, coaches in a highly regarded semiprofessional soccer league were told to prep their players for high-pressure penalty kicks with one of two statements: “You are going to shoot five penalties. Your goal is to score at least three times.” Or “You are going to shoot five penalties. Your obligation is to not miss more than twice.” Players did significantly better when the instructions were framed to match their dominant motivational focus.

Likewise, when offering motivation, the promotion-focused on your team will respond better to “If you finish this project by Friday, treat yourself to a long lunch.” Whereas, “If you don’t finish this project by Friday, you’ll have to spend Monday cleaning the supply room” will hit the right motivational cue for the prevention-focused.

Providing Feedback

Once goals are set in a way that creates motivational fit, you must sustain the fit by giving the right kind of feedback.  Promotion-focused people tend to increase their efforts when a leader offers them praise for excellent work, whereas prevention-focused people are more responsive to criticism and the looming possibility of failure.

You should always give honest feedback, but you can adjust your emphasis to maximize motivation. Don’t be overly effusive when praising the prevention-focused, and don’t gloss over mistakes they’ve made or areas that need improvement. Meanwhile, don’t be overly critical when delivering bad news to the promotion-focused – they need reassurance that you have confidence in their ability and recognize their good work.

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Named as one of the Ten Best and Brightest Women, and one of the 25 Most Influential People in the incentive industry, and selected for the Employee Engagement Power 100 list; Michelle was inducted into the Incentive Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame and received their President’s and Karen Renk Fellowship Awards. She’s a highly accomplished international speaker, author, and strategist on performance improvement. A respected authority on leadership, company culture, workplace trends and employee engagement, she’s a trusted advisor to many of the world’s most successful organizations and the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States. Michelle was the Founder and Chair of the Editorial Board of Return on Performance Magazine, and has been featured on Fox Television, the BBC, in Fortune, Business Week, Inc. and other global publications, and contributed to the books Bull Market by Seth Godin, Contented Cows Still Give Better Milk, and Social Media Isn’t Social.  Connect with her via LinkedIn or Twitter.