When it comes to motivation, the first question is: "What motivates you, professionally speaking?". Asking the question so directly, I'm afraid the answer might come just as quickly and simply: money. So we'll try a more roundabout approach, because if we sit down and think about it for a moment, there are other factors too.
It could be money, the desire to learn, power, recognition… But it could also be the environment you work in, right? And the environment can make you productive, efficient, and able to deliver what's required of you. And I say this because of the rat park experiment. You'll find the details below.
"The rat park experiment" took place in the early 1970s at Simon Fraser University in Canada and dealt with addiction. We often associate the term addiction with other words: drugs, alcohol, smoking – all harmful habits. There are other associations too, like "being addicted to your gaze," but even then, addiction still doesn't carry a positive connotation.
The research concerned addiction induced by drug use, and the studies were conducted on laboratory rats. At first, the rats were drugged daily, for a set period of time considered necessary for addiction to take hold. After this first stage ended, the rats were given the freedom to choose: they could drink plain water or water containing the drug administered in the first week. The conclusion of this first experiment shows that, overwhelmingly, the rats could not resist the temptation of the narcotics and continued to drink the drugged water, ignoring the plain water.
One element that was considered much later, however, relates to the conditions in which those laboratory rats lived. Each rat was confined alone in a metal cage, isolated from contact with other rats, and its only interaction was with the lab technicians who came to change its water, feed it, and clean its cage once every three days. These interactions lasted a few minutes every 24 hours; the rest of the time, the rats were completely isolated.
One researcher noticed that, in the wild, rats are extremely social animals and that wherever there is one rat, its family is surely living there too. And where there is a family of rats… soon enough an entire colony of dozens and hundreds of individuals appears. With this behavior in mind, a question arose: would rats, in their natural environment, develop the same addiction to drugs as those isolated in cages?
Bruce Alexander, that is the researcher's name, redid the experiment that demonstrates that drugs cause addiction, but he made a few small changes. Thus "the rat park experiment" was born. He followed exactly the conditions from stages 1 and 2 of the original experiment, but instead of individual cages, he built an amusement park for rats. In a large cage, several square meters in size, with glass walls (so that light could get in), he created climbing spots, tin cans as individual hideouts, running wheels for the rats, soft, nice-smelling wood shavings as a place to sleep, and he even put up a few nicely colored pictures on the cage walls.
The last element: he introduced several rats into the cage, of different sexes and ages, so that they had the opportunity to socialize, climb, play, and have fun. Under these conditions, in the second stage, when the rats had the alternative of drinking plain water or drugged water (the same addictive drugs), it was found that most rats didn't need "thrills" to live a happy little rat life. So, Bruce Alexander conducted the same experiment, but his study's conclusion was fundamentally different from the first.
Do you remember that we started from the question: what motivates you? And we mentioned the rat experiment to see the influence of the environment on your motivation. Whether you're at the office or at home, look around you – do you feel like you're in an amusement park or are you isolated in a cage?
Personally, I like a workplace where I have the chance to interact with colleagues, drink coffee and talk about our projects, fiercely defend our ideas, change them, improve them. Then take a break, hold an ad-hoc contest of throwing sheets with bad ideas into the trash bin, with the loser making the coffee. I like going out to eat together, among ourselves or with clients, I like… Wait, I got carried away and was describing the workplace where I like to work.
However, I didn't ask you whether you'd want your workplace to look like an amusement park – and there I made the classic mistake: I discovered what motivates me and automatically assumed it would motivate you too. So here are a few questions that help us avoid this trap and give motivation a clearer shape:
- How do I behave when I am motivated?
- What lies at the root of my motivation?
- What motivates others, who are different from me?
- What can I concretely do to motivate others?
- How could I create a motivating framework for my team?
These questions, but especially the answers – are integrated into the "Management Academy" program, delivered together with my colleagues at Marco Polo CEE. You'll also find them in the "Presentation Skills" course.
Article written by Alexandru Caruntu