Horses are used to help people develop leadership skills

When the United Jewish Federation wanted to generate more teamwork among its 20-member professional staff, Chief Operating Officer Harvey Sloan never imagined horses could help.

At the urging of a consulting group that was working with the federation three years ago on an organizational restructuring, Sloan agreed to visit a horse stable in Bridgeville, Pa., where humans interact with horses — and each other — to learn how to become better leaders and team players.

By Joyce Gannon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/national_intl_business/article/0,1713,BDC_2464_3008830,00.html

At Unbridled Performance: The Center for Team and Leadership Breakthroughs http://www.unbridledperformance.com , participants engaged in exercises in which they assumed the role of the boss and the horse served as the employee. Would the animal follow the boss willingly through an obstacle course or around a fenced ring? Team-building activities included individuals putting on blindfolds, mounting the horses and relying on colleagues to guide them through the obstacle course.

Sloan was sold and booked his staff for several sessions. His staff got so much insight into how they work alone and together that a smaller group of managers, including three vice presidents, the chief executive and Sloan, returned for follow-up sessions to develop better supervisory skills.

"It’s not just feel-good bonding," said Amy Skolen, 35, founder of Unbridled Performance, which until this month was called The Equine Business Experience. "It’s much more memorable than classroom learning. It’s a full-body experience."

Skolen, a former communications and management consultant who grew up in a family that raised horses, bought 17.5 acres and leased an adjoining 12 acres four years ago to house 15 horses. She soon started bringing her clients there for retreats, and now is focusing full time on developing horse-based training programs for individuals and organizations.

Count her company among the many competing for a share of the lucrative leadership and team training market that tries to get managers and employees out of the office and into unusual venues that allow them to practice personal and management skills. The market research firm Fairfield Research Inc. estimates that companies with sales of $500 million or more spend an average $3.7 million a year on such training.

Food giant General Mills, for instance, recently sent a group of its Betty Crocker division project leaders, all from different departments, to a St. Paul, Minn., cooking school where they got acquainted by preparing a pasta dinner together. A human resources consultant in Iowa set up sessions for her clients in a corn maze so they could practice goal attainment. And for years, companies have sent employee and management teams on Outward Bound adventure programs to tackle obstacles such as rock climbing and kayaking.

Among the companies that have paid anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 for Skolen’s customized horse training programs are Alcoa and GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare. Besides the hands-on horse exercises, the price includes interviews and surveys before the participants arrive at the stables to determine what they expect to accomplish and follow-up coaching to apply the skills they’ve learned.

For the United Jewish Federation, the skills they learned in horse training still surface at staff meetings, said Sloan, who took photographs of each employee during the horse exercises.

"When things are hot and heavy, and we’re trying to figure out how to move something forward and colleagues are not being as supportive as we want, we ask them to look at those photos and think about what they learned there."

For organizations that can’t afford thousands of dollars on out-of-office training programs, there are low-cost alternatives, said Nell Tabor Hartley, a professor of management at Robert Morris University who has designed training sessions for Bayer Corp., Highmark Inc. and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

"I’m not putting down the horses, but you don’t have to go to that expense. Something as trivial as tossing a rubber ball into a group gets them competing against each other," he said — or even musical chairs. "It establishes conflict. It’s non-threatening but it lets people see how they’re interacting."