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Written By: Dr Leesi Gborogbosi, and, Yolanda Sing
How to make companies in Africa to grow, the role of leadership transformation is of keen interest to Gabriel Domale Consulting, Nigeria and Chloe Consultants, South Africa.
In the last decades, new organisational forms are constantly evolving to meet rapidly changing customers’ innovative demands. The future of business will depend on how your business leaders question current assumptions and retool the organization.
As a business leader, it is critical to decouple the challenges that the future of business will face such as uncertainties and complexities arising from the intersections of global and local markets. Thus it is important to plan for and debottleneck these challenges as they arise.
With rapid changes in the ecosystems, it means business leaders need to transform their leadership skills to secure growth and competitive advantage for their companies. Are there leadership skills that business leaders can learn from highly adaptive animals like the horse?
For horses, leadership is a big part of both herd dynamics and teambuilding. Understanding how horses interact with one another can help business leaders determine and develop their leadership styles in the workplace. Horses seek peace, calm, friendship, entertainment and exercise.
Horses respect leaders who are sane, sensible and strong. They avoid horses that smash into the herd with the intention of breaking them up and taking control. Those who kick and bite, trying to get to the top, are shunned. Leaders among horses emerge because of their intelligence and willingness to calm the others. Horses aren’t going to follow someone who overreacts to every threat.
Teamwork is demonstrated among horses. Horses take turns leading, according to their strengths. A good horse herd is a productive, peaceful team, led by consensus and multiple individuals with different styles of leadership. Most horses don’t want to live in violence and fear. No horse wants a violent herd in which they have to constantly look over their shoulder to avoid being hurt.
People, like horses, respond differently to leadership styles. Good leaders use a variety of styles and strategies to accomplish the task at hand. What is learnt from watching the herd, can be applied to the human world in the areas of team building and leadership?
In The 8 Leadership Lessons from Nelson Mandela, Richard Stengel explores leadership techniques that correlate strongly with the art of leading horses.
Mandela’s first rule of leadership: “Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s inspiring others to move beyond it.” If you are leading a horse that spooks at an object, what is the first thing you do? Act calm. If you feed on your horse’s fear, you compound the cycle of fear. If you act brave and confront the obstacle with confidence, you can move the horse beyond it.
Mandela’s second rule of leadership: “Lead from the front — but don’t leave your base behind.” If, when leading a horse, you get too far out in front of him, you lose sight of him. He loses confidence in a leader who is not paying attention to him. How can he pay attention to you if you are not paying attention to him? You have dropped the connection and the horse is no longer walking with you.
Mandela’s third lesson of leadership: “You can only lead them from behind.” He draws this teaching from his childhood herding cattle. The lesson is to lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front. With too much pressure from behind, it’s arena skiing. But a horse that goes freely in front develops confidence while still listening to the person behind him, and teamwork ensues.
Ten or twenty years ago most executives would turn their noses up at the idea that working with a horse could develop leadership skills, but today’s best business leaders understand that words do not make the man and are exploring other ways to hone their leadership abilities.
Take a look at the following five leadership lessons that you can learn from horses to discover what a little horse sense could do for your business.
1. Projecting Presence
Horses naturally live in herds and each herd has a leader. The dominant horse asserts their authority through their actions and observes the rest of the herd to ensure they understand who is boss. The lead horse guides the herd and keeps them safe. In order to guide a powerful horse, it’s necessary to assert authority in a non-verbal, non-aggressive way and to carefully observe how the horse responds.
2. Being Aware
Horses are always aware of their surroundings and their circumstances. For example, they’ll use their heightened senses to search for food or travel further afield to find the sustenance they need. Working with horses can teach you how to be more aware of the environment you’re in and use all your senses.
3. Conserve Energy
When a new group of horses meet for the first time, there’s lots of jockeying and galloping around, but when the dust settles it’s always the horse with the most integrity and has managed to preserve their energy that emerges as the leader. They can assert their authority with a simple twitch of the ear or nod of the head and have no need to throw their weight around. A good leader conserves their energy and trusts their own timing.
4. Renew Your Spirit
Horses have spirit by the bucket load, which is perhaps why we humans are so drawn towards them. Great leadership training takes spirit too and observing horses as they run, buck and play can help renew your spirit too.
5. Keep Your Herd Tight
Horses form tight nit groups and if one wants to move up in the hierarchy succeeding or not he/she must still be willing to work as part of the team and stick to the rules. Spending time with horses will help develop the leadership skills necessary to give clear directions and set boundaries with staff in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding.
In the world of horses, new members have to earn trust, respect and ranking and Stan is doing this. In fact, because he is small, young, playful and fearless he has introduced a new dynamic into the herd. He stands under their tails when flies are in abundance and they show patience and acceptance.
They allow him to play and at the same time teach him boundaries. And because he is not afraid of things like plastic bags, long sticks and brooms they too have the opportunity to learn that such things are not as scary as they might have thought.
So here we have the leader managing the transition, the conflicts and the new order, the hierarchy being challenged, the newcomer bringing different energy into the group and simultaneously experiencing a new and challenging environment, the dynamic in the herd changing, and a host of other possibilities with new learning for all.
In our leadership workshop, you will experience first-hand the Future Fit Skills to Transform Your Organization. The experience can also be presented on a virtual platform and can be tailor-designed for any Organization.
We offer unique leadership transformation training where we inspire business leaders to learn from the leadership qualities of horses.
Expected benefits:
Using horses to facilitate leadership and emotional intelligence is cutting edge and experiential. It provides a unique opportunity for delegates to get feedback about their personal energy.
More specifically, the results are:
What makes this programme different?
The leadership transformation training can also be presented on a virtual platform and can be tailor-designed for any Organization.
Dr Leesi Gborogbosi
CEO - Gabriel Domale Consulting | Nigeria | https://www.www.gabrieldomale.com/leesi.php
Yolanda Sing
Managing Partner - Chloe Consultants | South Africa | www.chloeinsa.co.za
GABRIEL DOMALE CONSULTING | NIGERIA | +2347034604152 | Email Us Now | Visit Our Website
About us: Gabriel Domale Consulting, a leading management consulting firm, helps companies in Africa to grow, provides insights to leaders and transforms institutions. Our consultants utilize their decades of hands-on experience to provide advisory in finance, strategy, corporate governance, transformation and leadership training to help companies and public institutions to transform their operations. We encourage leaders seeking insights to visit our BLOG here and also Request For Proposal (RFP) for our consulting services here
Published origninally on 1st Oct 2020 21:51:50
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We're glad you enjoy reading this business insight.
Do you want my team to help restructure your business for higher productivity?