Free to run and free to follow: What horses can teach us about leadership

This seems a bit odd. But horses keep popping up in my research on leadership. Leadership writers like horses because their instincts, as herd mammals, appear to mirror core human social needs, especially in groups.

In her excellent book, Pathways to Possibility (2016), Rosamund Stone Zander works through an analogy between horse training and effective parenting which can be applied to leadership. To demonstrate, Zander borrows from the famous horse whisperer, Monty Roberts, who has shown, repeatedly, that you do not have to "break-in" a wild horse, through sustained acts of coercion, to domesticate it. You can "join-up" with a horse by leveraging its desire to belong and by maintaining its safety and autonomy.

I am no expert on "join-up" but the basic stages seem to require the trainer (leader) to:

1.??????Find the right context to create a connection with the horse. This is typically a circular pen that allows the horse to run both ways whilst attending to the trainer's movement

?2.??????Maintain a calm but solid presence indicating trustworthiness and authority

?3.??????Respond gently to signs of submission and allow the horse to connect

?4.??????Affirm the horse’s choice to follow by rubbing it between the eyes

?5.??????Lead the horse when it chooses to follow

Join-up is more complicated than that but in the context of Zander's book, she encourages parents, and by extension leaders, to metaphorically (no pens please) follow the steps of join-up when connecting with their particular wayward human. For example, in leading a team, you could allow a wayward team member to take flight in boundaries you determine and act swiftly and intuitively to "join up" when they make attempts to connect with you, the team vision and values. Once you have established the connection, you could encourage and affirm their decision to follow your way, and lead them gently but confidently in your joint work.

The practice of join-up is not the only thing we can learn from horses about leadership. In an equally fantastic book, Leadership and the Art of Growing Up, Jerry Colonna sees the leadership structure of horse bands as modelling the kind of leadership required to succeed in complex and uncertain environments. He writes:

"Horses, with their supernatural ability to use their limbic nervous systems to discern truth and congruency, do not base their choice of the leader of the herd on strength or intellectual wisdom. Nor is their choice based on which member might keep the herd safe from a predator wolf. They choose the horse - usually a mare - who is most capable of holding that care in a way that calms the whole group. They're marked by the attunement to the inner and outer needs of those they have the honour to serve and lead" (Colonna, 2019).

Both Zander and Colonna emphasise a newly emergent hierarchy of leadership values where care, kindness, compassion, vulnerability, and authenticity come before charisma and productivity. This model of leadership echoes the findings of Daniel Coyle’s research (2018) on high performing groups which showed that the highest performing teams focus on building safety first before outperforming their rivals.

What horses teach us about leadership is that even though we have evolved to act like computers, to thrive, we need to be treated like mammals.

Sources:

Colonna, J. (2019).?Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up. HarperCollins.

Coyle, D. (2018).?The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Bantam.

Zander, R. S. (2016).?Pathways to Possibility: Transforming Our Relationship with Ourselves, Each Other, and the World. Penguin.