“I’m stumped,” Sarah explained. “I am trying to get my team to do things, to do them my way, and they seem to just go off and do something else. Somehow, some way, I need to focus on motivation. I need to figure out what I can put out there, as some sort of an incentive to get them to perform better.”

“Do you want to be a psychologist, or do you want to be a leader?” I asked.

“I don’t get it,” she replied.

“Psychologists are always convinced they can figure out a way to motivate people. Don’t get me wrong, they didn’t start with people, they started with rats. First they starved them, then put them in a maze and were astounded when the rats desperately searched and found the food. Amazing, isn’t it, that starving rats would go in search of food.”

“What’s that got to do with people?” Sarah wanted to know.

“That’s a good question for the psychologists,” I replied. “They took their findings of rats and generalized them to people. Except people are more complicated than starving rats. Even the rats, once they found and ate the food, stopped searching. Motivation is elusive. We can find short term external motivators that give us the illusion that we are in control, but that’s not the way people work. External motivation is really manipulation, and only works for a short time and usually only when the manager is around. The only motivation that works long term is something inside the person that causes them to behave in a certain way. You have difficulty causing yourself to work in a different way. Why do you think you have the power to cause someone else to work differently?”