The leadership wisdom of rats.
The foundational mistake we make with leadership.
Rats can play hide and seek. Inspired by YouTube videos of people playing hide and seek, Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin, set out to see if rats could learn to play as well. As humans, hide and seek may seem a simple game, but it is a complex game with boundaries, rules, roles, and goals that participants must follow. Within a couple weeks Rats were taught to successfully play hide and seek. What is truly mind blowing about this study is the rats did not play for rewards, they played for fun. Rats express joy by laughing and jumping. This study, rats playing hide and seek for fun, shakes the foundation of how we have discussed leadership for the past hundred years.
How to Win Friends and Influence People. From Good to Great. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. These are the dominating books on leadership which have sold millions and millions of copies. Built on the principles of human behavior, the ideas underlying these leadership texts have gone on to shape how we build businesses, how we govern, and even how we educate the youth. All these systems are built on the behaviorist idea of reward and punishment, the carrot and the stick. We lead others (and ourselves) by attempting to manipulate behaviors.
Think about your education. As a teacher for over twenty years, it was easy to see the behaviorists massive influence on how we try to ‘build’ good citizens. The factory model of education is a system of outside controls reinforced with rewards and punishments. The bells, the rows of seats, the good kids, the bad kids, and the grades. Is this fun or was this forced? Is the natural habitat of a twelve year old sitting at a desk for seven hours a day? The behavioralist taught us that we learn by reward and punishment. We built our business, education and justice systems on this foundational belief. Human history has proven fear is a highly effective emotion to control behavior. Unfortunately, rats playing hide and go seek point to the foundational issue.
Rats play. Rats learn to play games. They learn by having fun. It is deep in the nature of mammals to play. It is deep in our nature to learn through play. Evolution has built in us a natural, internal reward system, joy. The pursuit of happiness. The authors of the Declaration of Independence recognized this as a self-evident truth, an unalienable right for all people, given to us by the creator. Since then we have warped this to mean we must aim our behavior to chase after material rewards. To win friends. To move from good to great. To build highly effective habits. Perhaps if we look deeper than behavior, beyond reward and punishment, if we look to our nature we can find a better way to lead our lives.
If rats can learn by having fun and through play, why not us? Children naturally want to explore, to play, and to create. We do not have to give them a cookie to build a sand castle, to play hide and seek, or to color. Underneath behavior are powerful emotional systems that can guide us in our pursuit of happiness. Maybe we can look to rats to learn a better way to live and to lead:
Life is hard. It is a daily struggle for every person to keep moving forward. Maybe it is time we reexamine how we are leading our lives and influencing the lives of others. Anyone can lead. The question is whether we lead our lives chasing rewards and avoiding punishments or whether we challenge ourselves to lead from our true nature. We are seekers. As we lead our lives, we should grow and learn through exploration. We play together. Leadership should not be a position of authority, master of reward and punishment. Leadership is a position of player and coach where we lead by learning from engaging others. We should find joy. Leaders should be in pursuit of positive emotion, not trying to control others through negative emotions. If we can learn to lead like rats, to seek and to play, then maybe we can get back the foundational belief of western culture, that inalienable right, the truth that we are built to lead our lives towards our positive emotions and stop leading from fear.
