The Promotion Lens: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Even if you yourself rarely look through the promotion lens, you will immediately recognize the people who do. Promotion-focused people are the risk takers, the rule breakers, the adventurers. It’s the guy you went to college with whose crazy idea for a start-up made him a multimillionaire. (It’s also the guy you went to college with whose start-up went bust, because his idea really was crazy, and now he lives in his parents’ basement.)

Just like that most famous rule of improvisational acting, to every opportunity that knocks, promotion-focused people answer, “Yes! And . . .” Here a gain, there a gain, everywhere nothing but potential gains, rewards, and advancements. (Also, lots and lots of ways to fail spectacularly. But the promotion lens tends to obscure that part of the picture.)

You see, when people wear the promotion lens, they are naturally more open-minded, less cautious, more willing to consider many possibilities, and quicker to generate them. Promotion-focused people feel free to be more exploratory and abstract in their thinking. The solutions they come up with are more creative and more innovative. People using the promotion lens are also particularly good at picking up on connecting themes, synthesizing information, and identifying opportunities when they present themselves.

When promotion-focused people are really motivated, it looks and feels like eagerness—they can’t wait to go for it. They work quickly, rushing to see their ideas come to fruition and wanting to be ready when the next opportunity comes along. They are usually optimists, in large part because they need to be. Promotion motivation is at its highest when the outlook is bright. So obstacles get downplayed, challenges get underestimated, and past failures are all too quickly forgotten.

It won’t surprise you, then, that the same confidence that fuels promotion motivation comes at a cost. Looking through the promotion lens, the perceivers will rarely see the need to consider what will happen if things go wrong or to create a plan B. They’ll be unprepared for bumps in the road. They’ll give little thought to maintaining the gains they have already accumulated or protecting the progress already made. Promotion-focused people will get in over their heads, saying yes to too many things at once. Even someone as successful as Richard Branson has a few rather spectacular failures to his name. (Have you ever had Virgin Vodka? No? I thought not.)

If you have—or have ever had—a boss who sees through a promotion lens, then you know all too well how that can be both a blessing and a curse. The enthusiasm of promotion-focused people can be infectious, and their generally positive, open-minded outlook can help foster an environment where new ideas and fresh approaches are welcome. They are rarely micromanagers, so if you have an independent spirit, it can flourish under a promotion-focused leader. On the other hand, you will probably receive far less guidance and feedback than you would like, your mistakes will go unchecked, important details will go unnoticed, and you may find yourself crushed under the mountain of work that your boss will assign you, as he or she eagerly says yes to every potential project that comes into your group’s orbit.

Perhaps it would be better to work under someone who runs a tighter ship? Well, let’s see . . .

The Prevention Lens: Measure Twice, Cut Once

Looking through the prevention lens and seeing a world filled with dangers to be avoided like potholes on a highway, people naturally acquire a very different set of skills and preferences. The prevention-focused are thorough, deliberate, and reliable. These are the people who balance their checkbooks monthly, never run out of clean underwear, and can get you a copy of any important document they’ve been given in the last ten years in three minutes or less, because they know exactly where it is.

Looked at through the prevention lens, abstraction and creativity seem reckless and time-consuming. Prevention-focused thinking is concrete and specific and heavy on the details. It leads to better memory not only for what has already happened, but also for what still needs to be done. It’s also time-consuming—sometimes painfully so. Give an assignment to a prevention-minded person, and don’t hold your breath waiting for him or her to finish it. They hate mistakes, and the only way to avoid errors entirely is to take it slow. (Legal departments are filled with prevention-focused people, by the way. Which explains a lot.)

When you are obsessed with avoiding mistakes, it’s only natural for you to become concerned that the people who report to you might be making them, too. Prevention-focused leaders have a tendency to tightly supervise—even micromanage—their employees and to have trouble delegating important tasks to the control of others. On the other hand, they are more likely to provide necessary guidance and feedback and to have a more realistic sense of what you can accomplish with the time and resources at your disposal.

Admittedly, prevention-focused people aren’t the most innovative people in the word—but they do have a distinct advantage when it comes to analytical thinking and reasoning. Studies show that while looking through the promotion lens leads to greater creativity, the people who look through the prevention lens are the ones who can tell a high-quality, usable, creative idea from one that will never cut the mustard.

Prevention-minded people are also cautious. They tend to say no to opportunities more often, having what psychologists call a more conservative bias. They are reluctant to disengage from one activity to try another or to change the status quo, always preferring the devil they know to the one they don’t. But their conservative nature also makes them less likely than their risk-loving promotion lens colleagues to procrastinate, for fear that they won’t have time to get the job done.

The prevention-focused expect to encounter obstacles, so they spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with them. They don’t just have a plan B; they have a plan C, D, and possibly E. They take nothing for granted and are prepared for the worst. Again, this doesn’t necessarily make them fun at parties—but it makes them invaluable members of the team when things do go wrong.

And while it is really easy to come up with a long list of well-known promotion-focused people, when I try to think of a famous prevention-focused person, I have a really hard time coming up with even one. That’s because the people who look through the prevention lens are always the unsung heroes of any success story. They don’t rush in to rescue people from disasters—they are the ones who make sure disasters don’t happen in the first place. They’re making sure that the airplane you are flying in doesn’t lose an engine midair, that the medicine you are taking won’t accidentally kill you, and that there’s a plan in place if your city is struck by a hurricane, a tornado, or a bout of swine flu. Keeping things running smoothly won’t make you famous. So if you are prevention focused, you probably deserve a lot more thanks than you are likely to ever get.

Looked at through the prevention lens, motivation feels like vigilance, rather than eagerness. The thing about vigilance is that—unlike eagerness—it actually increases in response to negative feedback or self-doubt. Think about this observation for a minute, because it will probably blow your mind a little. For the prevention-minded, believing you might fail is really motivating. There’s nothing like the looming possibility of failure to get your prevention juices flowing. Too much confidence or effusive praise—the kind of stuff the promotion-minded can’t get enough of—will lead a prevention-minded person to let down his or her guard and actually undermine the person’s motivation.

To be clear, it’s not that the prevention lens leads you to believe that you will fail. True pessimism is never good for anyone. Instead, it leads you to believe that you might fail, if you don’t do everything in your power to keep that from happening. Failure is possible, so you need to be on your guard. Psychologists call this quality defensive pessimism, and it is as strong a predictor of success in the classroom and the workplace as optimism—whether or not it works for you depends on the lens you are looking through.²

So, you know that colleague you have who always seems to be doubting himself or herself, even after enjoying a long string of successes? The one who looks physically uncomfortable when singled out for praise? The one you keep telling to lighten up? You should probably leave colleagues like this alone. They know what they’re doing. (And if you are that person, then by all means continue to tune out the cheerleaders for positivity. They mean well, but they just aren’t looking through your lens.)

Identifying Someone’s Promotion or Prevention Lens

In addition to the different behavioral tendencies I’ve already mentioned, like the preference for speed versus accuracy, or risk taking versus risk avoidance, there are a few other cues you can use to identify your own lens and your perceiver’s. Let’s explore these cues now.

How to Speak Your Perceiver’s Motivational Language

A good friend of mine, “Tom,” recently brought to his boss’s attention a product that would allow the company to take its social media efforts to a whole new level and might significantly improve its image. The product would be an industry first and not entirely without risk, but with huge potential payoff.

After hearing his pitch, his boss asked, “Are any of our competitors using this?”

“No,” Tom replied, feeling that this was a strong selling point—a competitive edge.

“Well,” his boss responded, “then I don’t think we want to stick our necks out and be the first, do we?”

Huh?

Tom was disappointed, but not at all surprised. For every promotion lens manager out there trying to encourage innovation, there seem to be ten prevention lens managers standing squarely in the way of it. I spend a lot of time talking to people about motivation and growth, and everywhere I go, I hear complaints like these:

It’s incredibly frustrating to know you have a real winner of an idea on your hands, something that could really shake things up, and not be able to get it past your boss’s prevention-minded biases. Not that the cautious, conservative approach doesn’t have its advantages—but ultimately an organization cannot grow without embracing some risk.

So, how can you get your cautious boss, who is weighed down with responsibilities and understandably antirisk, to go out on a limb and embrace a great, albeit risky, idea? The key is to stop fighting his or her prevention lens and to work with it instead.

In the end, it’s all about language. You may be thinking of your great idea as an opportunity for gain, but you can always reframe it as an opportunity for avoiding loss. To persuade a prevention-minded person, you want to emphasize how the course of action you are advocating can keep your company safe and secure—how it will help your company avoid making a terrible mistake.

For instance, you may be thinking of a new social media venture as a chance to get in front of the pack, but your boss might be more persuaded if you phrased it as a way to not fall behind. (“Everyone is moving in this direction. It’s inevitable. We could lose market share if we aren’t prepared for the future.”)

In general, it’s important to frame your communications in a way that is persuasive to the kind of person you’re talking to. Figure out if the decision maker is looking through the promotion or prevention lens, and pitch accordingly. Remember that even the most timid, prevention-minded person will gladly take a risk, once you help him or her understand why it would be a greater risk not to.

Promotion-minded people generally respond well to arguments framed in terms of potential gains, possible benefits, and the good things that will happen if they agree to do X (whether X is to approve a project, compromise on a contentious issue, accept change, or provide more support to a colleague). The prevention-minded are more persuaded by what they might lose, mistakes that can be avoided, and the bad things that will happen if they don’t agree to do X. The promotion lens is looking for why the perceiver should say yes, while the prevention lens is searching for reasons to not say no.

These differences in framing can translate into big differences in motivation and performance. For instance, in one of my favorite studies, players in a regional league of the German Football Association were told that they would be practicing penalty shot kicking. (FYI, playing in a regional league in Germany is a very big deal. These players are incredible athletes.)

Before taking the first penalty kick, the coach approached each player individually and framed the task in one of the following ways:

Either way, the goal was to score three or more times out of five—so you wouldn’t really expect a little difference in wording to change performance for players like these, who were all highly practiced in kicking penalty shots and highly motivated to perform at their best. But motivationally, there was a big difference—the kind of difference that can mean winning or losing the game. Promotion players performed significantly better when told to “score three times out of five.” The effect was even larger for prevention-minded players, who scored nearly twice as often when told to “not miss more than two times.”⁷

In addition to responding to positive framing, promotion people prefer more-abstract thinking and rely on feelings and intuition to make decisions. They are more strongly influenced by inspirational role models—people who did things the right way and enjoyed great success because if it.

The prevention-minded don’t give a damn about your feelings and intuition—they, like Star Trek’s Spock, want details, reasons, and evidence before they’ll go along with your plan. And if you want to influence them, spare them the inspirational role model and hit them with a discomfort-inducing cautionary tale about the people who did everything wrong and suffered the consequences.

By now you may be wondering if promotion and prevention people can actually get along with each other at all, since the opportunities for conflict seem endless. Fortunately, research suggests that the best partnerships (and by “best,” I mean something like “most adaptive and mutually satisfying”) may in fact be the Odd Couples.⁸ For example, among dating and married romantic partners, those with different lenses enjoyed greater relationship satisfaction than all-promotion or all-prevention pairings. The researchers found that the benefit of this mixed pairing stemmed from the clear advantages of being able to divide and conquer various activities.

After all, couples—like other teams—usually have goals related to both advancement and security. They need to help each other both to innovate and to fulfill their responsibilities. So each person can take on the tasks that he or she is best suited for, knowing that the partner has got the rest covered. Within mixed-lens teams, there is the potential to be more balanced—to be optimistic and realistic—because the partnership contains both the promotion and the prevention points of view.

To capitalize on the strengths of both lenses on a team, rather than getting bogged down in conflicts over whose approach is the best one, you need two things: respect for the advantages that both promotion and prevention thinking can yield (without valuing one over the other) and strategic use of the motivational language that your team member will be most responsive to.

Use the right kind of language when you make requests or proposals to your colleagues (and your family and friends)—language that is tailored to their own way of seeing the world—and you will be astounded by the difference in your ability to communicate and influence effectively. Research shows that fitting your approach to the promotion and prevention lenses makes you significantly more believable and trustworthy, makes your ideas more convincing, and gives them greater value in the eyes of your perceiver.⁹ Communication that doesn’t fit, on the other hand, can sabotage the very best ideas and intentions without either you or your perceiver ever realizing why.