What You Can Learn from a Horse about Leadership

I have been working in and around corporations for pretty much my whole professional career. I have watched companies make mistakes that astounded me. (Think of Arthur Anderson and their work with Enron. Boeing and its 737 Max debacle. Volkswagen and its auto emissions fraud.)

I have participated in town halls, drafted re-engineering memos for senior-most leaders, and consulted with C-suite executives on big corporate changes that weren't always the happiest things to manage.

And what has astounded me is a consistent and repeated abject failure -- from otherwise educated, intelligent, experienced and kind people -- for leaders to appreciate the environment they were operating in, mine the gaps in their own leadership skills, and communicate effectively to motivate their organizations.

For example, there was that time a company I worked for laid off a whole team that supported a very important sales and client management group, AND decided to not talk about it in our internal re-engineering memos. Of course, when these sales and client managers reached out to that team for support like they regularly did, not knowing that their colleagues had just been laid off, they received the bad news directly from the impacted employees.

Learning about their colleagues' layoffs that way instead of from their leaders severely undermined the trust and morale of these re-engineering survivors. I received over a dozen phone calls from them, disappointed in our leadership's integrity. (No. It was not my decision to not inform the rest of our organization about that team's layoffs.)

Compelling leadership requires self-awareness

I could rattle off at least a dozen similar decisions like this one to demonstrate how corporate leaders can be led astray by their own past success, their egos, and their lack of awareness. But that isn't the purpose of this article. I want to spur change, not focus on past mistakes. The past should only inform a better future.

Recently, working with a small business here in my beloved Hudson Valley, I began to understand how we can change this dynamic. Corporate leaders -- all of us -- need to spend a few hours with a horse. Yes. A horse.

I learned a great deal about my leadership style and better ways for me to lead when I stopped in to help Cori Nichols, the owner of a small horse farm just over the Minnewaska Ridge in the eastern Catskills. You see, horses present people leaders and executives with a very specific and unique challenge in a leadership development exercise. I visited Cori to learn from her.

Cori asked me to lead Taz, a gentle and inquisitive boy, to a place in the pavilion -- using a hula hoop. (Cori's work is based on some decades-old research and experience by horse-lovers and authors like John Lyons and Monty Roberts.)

As you might imagine, this assignment was a pretty difficult one, and I learned my first lesson about why C-Suite executives need to work with Cori. Shortly after we started heading to the goal I had set for us, Taz just stopped walking with me.

Feeling a horse denying your direction can be a pretty powerful experience. You realize that you cannot force them to do anything.

We believe that the typical corporate hierarchy dynamics we operate in help us lead people, but here is what I can tell you. That only works for so long before you destroy the morale and engagement of an organization. And here is something else I can predict with relative certainty. You're probably leaving profits on the table through your misguided leadership assumptions.

We get a lot more out of people when we can provide them with the security and tools that allow them to feel that they too have some control over their future and that they have our permission to be leaders too.

I recently finished reading a book by my newfound friend, Margareta Kull. In her new book, "Courageous Leader," she writes repeatedly about how courageous leaders let anyone in the organization be a leader too. They do this from a place of self-confidence and trust in their people. And she believes from her experience that those are the types of organizations that move from good to great.

"Not all managers are leaders. Not all leaders are managers." Margareta Kull

I learned in that pavilion that horses could care less if you are the powerful leader of a prominent company or organization. In fact, many horses will resist you when you use the leadership tools you employ in your organization. As leaders, we need to share leadership and make everyone capable of leading in their roles as well.

Emotional Intelligence needs to be more than a corporate buzzword

Horses need to feel comfortable with you and trust the direction you are giving them in order to cooperate with you. When I started working with Taz on "leading" him around Cori's pavilion (where she conducts team-building exercises and leadership training), I first had to be in his presence for a little while, for him to size me up.

Being in the presence of a 1,000-pound animal with a will of its own can teach you a lot about how to lead differently. So the second thing I learned in that pavilion was the importance of emotional intelligence.

Horses definitely have a sixth sense about people (I have been around my eldest sibling's long string of horses since about the age of nine). They pick up on our personalities, our current emotional state, and quietly decide whether they can trust us.

But of course, they cannot articulate to us what they think of us, or what they are feeling being in our presence. We have to intuit that by closely observing them and then adapting our leadership style based on what they are telling us through physical communications.

All of this requires we be self-aware, and less self-centric. In corporate parlance, that's called emotional intelligence. If you lack it, you're probably going to be shocked when your organization acts in a dysfunctional manner.

Again, I go back to Margareta's book. She talks often about how self-awareness and emotional intelligence is crucial to leading effectively, no matter where in an organization your role resides.

"Finding the way back to our true selves is the first step on our path to impact..." Margareta Kull

Working with Taz in Cori's pavilion, I had to use all of my senses to get in sync with myself and Taz. Once I did, we moved around the pavilion effortlessly together.

Stop with the conventional leadership training programs

Look. I have been through at least half a dozen leadership training programs. I have had my Myers Briggs style defined for me. I've been through the whole Enneagram thing. Whatever leadership program was the flavor of the day, and being passed around from company to company by a string of disaffected but highly-paid consultants, I have participated in it.

If those programs were so good, why is it the leadership styles in the organizations I worked for never changed? Looking back on my time with Cori and Taz, and thinking about Margareta and her book, I think I have at least part of the answer.

Conventional leadership programs are "check-the-box programs" sourced by Human Resources, or referred to us by peers at other companies, with no real heart or soul. They have no way of truly reaching into the parts of us that we need to be honest about, and make a commitment to changing.

Yes. They get us out of the office for a day or two, allow us to spend thousands of dollars at a fancy hotel or resort, dining with our colleagues on the company tab, and shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to some high-priced consultant who could care less if we actually benefit from their work.

Do you want to see real change in yourself, your fellow people leaders, your organization? Then get yourself out to Cori's place for a few hours with your senior leadership team. Struggle with a sentient animal like Taz, coming to grips with your leadership style and how it might not be serving you and your organization very well.

Open yourself up to exploring your true leadership strengths and gaps.

And let a horse teach you how to be a better leader. You and your organization deserve it.