[acb-hsp] The Surprising Secret to Selling Yourself

[peter altschul]

The Surprising Secret to Selling Yourself

by Heidi Grant Halvorson 8:00 AM August 29, 2012

There is no shortage of advice out there on how to make a good 
impression -- an impression good enough to land you a new job, 
score a promotion, or bring in that lucrative sales lead.  
Practice your pitch.  Speak confidently, but not too quickly.  
Make eye contact.  And for the love of Pete, don't be modest -- 
highlight your accomplishments.  After all, a person's track 
record of success (or a company's, for that matter) is the single 
most important factor in determining whether or not they get 
hired.  Or is it?

As it happens, it isn't.  Because when we are deciding who to 
hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we don't 
like the Big Thing nearly as much as we like the Next Big Thing.  
We have a bias -- one that operates below our conscious awareness 
-- leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone 
who has already achieved it.

A set of ingenious studies conducted by Stanford's Zakary Tormala 
and Jayson Jia, and Harvard Business School's Michael Norton 
paint a very clear picture of our unconscious preference for 
potential over actual success.

In one study, they asked participants to play the role of an NBA 
team manager who had the option of offering a contract to a 
particular player.  To evaluate the player, they were given five 
years of excellent statistics (points scored, rebounds, assists, 
etc.) These statistics were described either as ones that the 
player had actually earned in five years of professional play, or 
as projections of how he was capable of playing (i.e., his 
potential) in his first five years.  Then the "managers" were 
asked, "What would you pay him in his sixth year?" Those who 
evaluated the player with potential for greatness said they would 
pay him nearly a million dollars more in annual salary ($5.25 vs.  
$4.26 million) than those who evaluated the player with a record 
of actual greatness.  Potential evaluators also believed their 
player would score more, and would be more likely to make the 
All-Star team.

Tormala, Jia, and Norton found the same pattern when they looked 
at evaluations of job candidates.  In this case, they compared 
perceptions of someone with two years of relevant experience who 
scored highly on a test of leadership achievement, versus someone 
with no relevant experience who scored highly on a test of 
leadership potential.  (Both candidates had equally impressive 
backgrounds in every other way).  Evaluators believed the 
candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at 
the new company than the candidate with a proven record of 
leadership ability.  (Incidentally, if you ask the evaluators to 
tell you whose resume is more impressive, they agree that it's 
the one with experience.  They still prefer the other guy 
anyway.)

In other studies, the researchers showed how we prefer artwork 
and artists with potential to win awards over those that actually 
have, and prefer restaurants and chefs with the potential to be 
the next big thing in dining over the ones who have already made 
their name.  In a particularly clever study, they compared two 
versions of Facebook ads for a real stand-up comedian.  In the 
first version, critics said "he is the next big thing" and 
"everybody's talking about him." In the second version, critics 
said he "could be the next big thing," and that "in a year, 
everybody could be talking about him." The ad that focused on his 
potential got significantly more clicks and likes.

And this is not, incidentally, a pro-youth bias in disguise.  
It's true that the person with potential, rather than a proven 
record, is sometimes also the younger candidate -- but the 
researchers were careful to control for age in their studies and 
found that it wasn't a factor.

So, since preferring potential over a proven record is both risky 
and inherently irrational, why do we do it? According to these 
findings, the potential for success, as opposed to actual 
success, is more interesting because it is less certain.  When 
human brains come across uncertainty, they tend to pay attention 
to information more because they want to figure it out, which 
leads to longer and more in-depth processing.  High-potential 
candidates make us think harder than proven ones do.  So long as 
the information available about the high-potential candidate is 
favorable, all this extra processing can lead (unconsciously) to 
an overall more positive view of the candidate (or company).  
(That part about the information available being favorable is 
important.  In another study, when the candidate was described as 
having great potential, but there was little evidence to back 
that up, people liked him far less than the proven achiever.) All 
this suggests that you need a very different approach to selling 
yourself than the one you intuitively take, because your 
intuitions are probably wrong.  People are much more impressed, 
whether they realize it or not, by your potential than by your 
track record.  It would be wise to start focusing your pitch on 
your future, as an individual or as a company, rather than on 
your past -- even if that past is very impressive indeed.  It's 
what you could be that makes people sit up and take notice -- 
learn to use the power of potential to your advantage.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D.  is a motivational psychologist and 
author of the HBR Single Nine Things Successful People Do 
Differently and the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals 
(Hudson Street Press, 2011).  Her personal blog, The Science of 
Success, can be found at wwwddheidigranthalvorsonddcom.  Dr.  
Halvorson is available for speaking and training.  Follow her on 
Twitter at hghalvorson.