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Mane Event: Executive Coaching Straight from the Horse's Mouth (Part 3)
March 27, 2009
Horses teach a Midwestern financial services institution about leadership growth and deveopment.
By Margery Weinstein
Banking and horses don't usually come up in the same sentence, but that’s no reason they can't go hand and hoof, especially when it comes to leadership growth and development. That's just what a Midwestern financial services institution discovered about two years ago when it decided to bring its leadership team to Wisdom Horse, a Minneapolis-based program in which executive coaches Lynn Baskfield and Ann Romberg facilitate participants, most often senior executives, through equine-guided learning experiences.
The first step in creating the custom Wisdom Horse experience was an in-depth phone call between Baskfield, Romberg, and the client to ensure the company's development needs were met. "They asked me a lot of great questions around what our objectives were, what we were trying to work on, and where we had been challenged in terms of our leadership," says a senior executive for the bank, "so they could custom design exercises specifically for us." The custom-tailored day of activities Baskfield and Romberg put together for the team was followed by a classroom session with a leadership consultant who helped synthesize the equine-guided epiphanies to enhance retention.
The team's Wisdom Horse day began with a game of cards—not black jack, poker or rummy, in case you were wondering—but one in which cards, each with a different horse and horse-related saying, were chosen at random. Participants then had to tell the group how what was written on the card applied to their leadership journey. "People were surprised at how the card they selected was the perfect card for them and the current challenges they were facing," the senior executive recalls.
After this reflective beginning, the management team moved onto an exercise that, like all the exercises that day, divided the group of approximately 20 learners into two halves. One half of learners would observe and offer feedback to the other, and vice versa. What they would observe and comment on wasn’t so easy that you'd necessarily want an audience watching you do it. The exercise required each of the two groups to convince a horse at one end of the corral to walk to the center of the corral, and get him or her to jump over an approximately two-foot barricade—all within 10 minutes, and all without talking or touching the horse. The one break from these rules was the option to call a time-out one time during the 10-minute period for a three-minute "team regroup."
 The teambuilding skills brought to the surface from this exercise were enlightening, says one participant. "We were trying everything to get the horse moving, and nothing was working. We took a time-out, and assigned new roles, and what we figured out is we had to work more as a team to get it to work. People were trying to get in front of the horse and to scare the horse into moving, but what ultimately worked was when we surrounded the horse, and moved our energy from the back of the horse to the front. Then, as our whole team surrounded the horse, there was momentum."
Mission accomplished, the group forgot something (or someone) during their celebration: the horse. Baskfield and Romberg pointed out they forgot to acknowledge the horse's part in achieving their goal. Baskfield and Romberg asked them to consider what that meant to their leadership style. "How does that correspond to when your own team achieves goals? You led them, but they’re the ones that did it," Baskfield and Romberg noted. "We thought, 'Well, maybe that tells us we need to do a better job of celebrating our team's success rather than only celebrating our own success'" says the senior executive.
Lessons on the importance of teambuilding and employee recognition under its belt, Baskfield and Romberg asked the management team to do the exercise again. The impact of their recent realization was immediately apparent. "The first time we did it, it took us eight or nine minutes," the participant noted. "The second time, because we were working as a team, we got the horse to do it in about three minutes, and we made a point of celebrating with the horse." That celebration took the form of a "victory lap" with the horse around the corral. This joint celebration with the horse, or worker, in the exercise was a key learning moment.
"This was one of the most profound moments to see the joy in the horse about co-celebrating with us on how, as a team, this was accomplished," says the executive. "The horse's head was high, his tail was arched, and he was prancing with us around the corral in a very proud, physical way. It really emphasized to us how important recognition and celebration is with your full team when you achieve success."
Along with the power of recognition, there were lessons to be learned about not leading with an authoritarian style, in which you're pushing workers to finish tasks in an inflexible, prescribed way every time. In addition to the exercise just described, the learners picked this point up during an another exercise that day—one in which they had to lead a horse on a halter around the corral while peers observed, taking note of how the employee and horse interacted, and what that interaction said about his or her leadership style. Just as you can't force horses to go someplace they don’t want to go by tugging at them, you also can’t force too much on employees and expect sustainable high returns. "Leading from behind, and encouraging in a positive way from behind, is probably more effective than pulling from the front," says the executive. "That was a lesson that was physically manifested with the horses, and their energies and our energies, throughout the day."
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Photos by Nancy Peregrine
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