Heidi Grant Halvorson, a social psychologist and author talks about two types of focus and how they influence virtually every aspect of our lives
When it comes to how we approach work—and life—you believe people belong to one of two camps. What are they?
In both work and life, there are two basic types of motivation. Some people look at their goals with what we call a ‘promotion focus’, meaning that when they think about doing well on a particular project, they’re thinking about what they can gain from being successful—how they will end up better off, make progress and advance. The second type of motivation is a ‘prevention focus’. When these people think about doing well on something, they’re thinking about what they can avoid losing if they’re successful. They might think about how success on a particular project will make their job more secure, for instance. With a prevention focus, it’s really about hanging on to what you’ve got and avoiding loss.
Which type of focus makes for a better employee?
It’s not that one way of being motivated is better than the other; they’re just different, and they result in different strengths and weaknesses. In general, promotion-focused people are optimistic. They respond very well to being praised and encouraged, and they work best when they feel confident that they’re able to succeed.
Prevention-focused employees are actually very uncomfortable with too much optimism: it makes them feel like they aren’t sufficiently ‘on guard’, and that they won’t be vigilant in the way they need to be to reach their goals. We think of them as ‘defensive pessimists’. It’s not that they think they’re going to fail, but they always think they might fail if they don’t take all the required steps. These people are uncomfortable with too much praise and encouragement. You never want to say to them, ‘Don’t worry; everything’s going to turn out great!’ They hate that; it feels very wrong to them, and it’s actually demotivating. In their minds, they need to stay focused on what could go wrong in order to give their best performance.
You have said that it’s not a black-and-white distinction: everyone, to some extent, is both promotion and prevention focused. Please explain.
You can actually have a different dominant motivation in different areas of your life: you might be very prevention-focused at work, but promotion-focused in your personal life. But we find that people do tend to have a dominant motivation—a particular lens through which they look at the world, and that means that they have different strengths and weaknesses.
Different strategies work well for each type. For example, when you have a promotion focus, you tend to be more comfortable with risk, more creative and more innovative. These people are very good at detecting and seizing opportunities, because they tend to say ‘Yes’ to things. The worst case scenario for the promotion-focused is when an opportunity passes them by—when there is a chance they didn’t take that could have paid off in a big way.
Prevention-focused people, on the other hand, have very different strengths. They tend to be more conservative; they’re more interested in being accurate and thorough; they’re very careful planners, very reliable, and they’re excellent at ‘maintenance’ tasks.
If you have a sales team, the promotion-focused people will be the ones who are best at tracking down new leads; but the prevention-focused people will be those who spend lots of time on maintaining relationships with existing customers and making sure those people are taken care of.
You have said that if we want to start exercising more, quit smoking or lose weight, we have to employ both the promotion and prevention focus at once. How is this achieved?
As indicated, everyone is focused each way at some point in their life; even if you’re more promotion-focused, you know what it’s like to be prevention-focused. Any time you’re standing in line for a flu shot, that’s your prevention focus in action—it’s about hanging on to what you already have (i.e. your good health.) Similarly, prevention-focused people know what it’s like to be promotion-focused. If you ever go out just to have an adventure, that’s a promotion-focused thing to do. So everybody does both.
As a result, we can switch back and forth, and we do. You can learn to control this and actively put on your ‘promotion hat’ or your ‘prevention hat’, depending on the task you’re working on. And some activities require both, like running a business: you have to be creative and think about how to advance, but you also have to make sure that you’re maintaining what works by practicing due diligence and that you have a Plan B ready, if something goes wrong. So, everybody needs both of these things.
You have also found that when we listen to people speak, we ‘tune in’ to certain parts of what they are saying, and ‘tune out’ of others; why is this?
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]