Imagine you are are having a great day at work, and time is just flying by. You grab your morning cup of coffee, blink, and all of a sudden it is lunch time. Blink again and now you are wrapping things up for the day. What were you doing that made time pass so quickly? What tasks were you working on? What type of projects?
When you are firing on all cylinders, accomplishing what you set out to do, efficiently and effectively, you are being intrinsically rewarded through your Motivated Role. So how do you get a Motivated Role?
The Motivated Role is actually something we are born with. It is how we are wired, which is set by around the age of 5. Our brains find certain tasks or parts of a process intrinsically rewarding- we do not have to be chasing a carrot to gain inspiration to accomplish these goals. So when we are in our Motivated Role, we are gaining energy from performing tasks that use our brain these specific ways. Since this is set in from a young age, identifying your Motivated Role is actually the first step to understanding ourselves better. We use the iMAP assessment to gain insight into the Motivated Role and two other constructs- visit our website to find out more.
The second step is applying your newly-found knowledge into your personal and work lives. One person might find testing products is fulfilling, while another is fulfilled by balancing their check register. There are 5 Motivated Roles on a spectrum and they range from generating ideas to maintaining an object, function, or process. The key to the Motivated Role is we don’t just have one, we have a dominant one and smaller “buckets” that need to be filled in the others. To be the most efficient during your day, week, month, and so on, you will need to ensure all your Motivated Role “buckets” stay filled.
Since we do not always have the luxury of telling our boss “no” to something we do not wish to do, a task that is outside our Motivated Role, in order to stay operating at our best we need to time manage. The longer our brains are working outside our Motivated Roles, the more time we have to spend getting our brains up and running at their best. So when we get assigned a task we can’t procrastinate on, we should be breaking up the time spent on the not-so-fun stuff with breaks for activities our brains enjoy. For example, if someone’s dominant Motivated Role is generating ideas, and they need to file their taxes, an operational task outside their Motivated Role, they should work on filing their taxes in 20-30 min increments with breaks for creative tasks or exercises.
For those people who are in permanent roles at work that do not fill all their Motivated Role “buckets”, we often see them fulfilling their needs outside of work through hobbies and personal activities. This can be an accountant who paints in the evenings or a web designer who manages the family finances.
Being advocates for people operating at their best and feeling energized leaving work, we encourage learning about your Motivated Role as part of your professional development path. Feeling burnt out at your job? Let’s take a look at your Motivated Role and see where you will excel. Trouble structuring your team to optimize everyone’s productivity and efficiency? We can use the Motivated Role to help you create a high performing team. To learn more about the Motivated Role and the iMAP Assessment, reach out to us or explore our website.