Promote Supervision Which Prevents Problems

Knowing if your shopper is promotion-focused or prevention-focused helps you choose the right benefits statements to offer when making a sale. A pair of social psychologists from Columbia University say that the distinction between promotion-focused and prevention-focused also influences how to best supervise the staff who serve those shoppers.
     Promotion-focused people play to win, while prevention-focused people play not to lose. At the extreme, the promotion-focused think creatively, welcome risks, and plow through issues quickly. At the other end of the dimension, the prevention-focused anticipate problems and so work meticulously to dig into issues rather than plow through them.
     Most of the people you supervise will display a mix of prevention- and promotion-focused characteristics at times. However, the Columbia research indicates that each of your staff almost surely has a predominant orientation, and the research indicates that each of your staff is highly unlikely to have both a promotion and prevention mindset at the same time.
     Identify who’s where so you can customize your management style to get maximum effectiveness for minimum effort.

• Stories are powerful tools for teaching employees the culture of your business. Promotion-focused staff are most affected when the story is of a role model such as a highly successful salesperson whose methods can be imitated. On the other hand, prevention-focused staff learn best when hearing about people who, in good faith and with the right intentions, erred, and then what this role model did to turn things right. 
• Praise the excellent work of the promotion-focused, saying specifics of what they’d done well. Too much talk of shortfalls will discourage them. With the prevention-focused, coach with specifics about how they can avoid or overcome impediments to achieving the objectives both you and they have set. Too much praise for their successes will make them fret that you’re not leveling with them. They’re always on guard. 
• A reward system in which bonuses are earned beyond a low base amount would be attractive to the promotion-focused. A better fit for the prevention-focused would be a system in which a high base amount is set and deductions are made when there’s a shortfall in the staff member’s performance. One way to evaluate where each of your employees falls is to ask each which type of system would be preferable to them. 

     I predict you will find that most of your sales floor people, like you yourself, are solidly promotion-focused.

Click below for more: 
Sell Either Protection or Promotion 
In Cause Marketing, Portray Effectiveness 
Mythologize Your Store 
Give Comparative Feedback to Your Staff