Horse sense helps future leaders

You've read the book, you've seen the film, now, courtesy of Manchester Business School, you can practise the technique ­ of improving your management style! No longer the preserve of gnarled cowboys or trendy equine psychologists, horse whispering has now galloped into the world of corporate management.

You've read the book, you've seen the film, now, courtesy of Manchester Business School, you can practise the technique ­ of improving your management style! No longer the preserve of gnarled cowboys or trendy equine psychologists, horse whispering has now galloped into the world of corporate management.

Manchester's unusual course in creative leadership came about after director John Arnold accompanied his wife, Sylvia, to a demonstration of horsemanship by equine behaviourist Kelly Marks. Marks, a former showjumping champion, learnt her skills straight from the horse's mouth: Monty Roberts, the Californian cowboy whose books inspired the Robert Redford film. Arnold immediately saw her control and training methods as a metaphor for strong leadership and signed her up on the spot to run a three-day senior management programme for Alcatel.

On the basis that you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can never fool a horse, Arnold has probably hit on a true test of management nerve ­ the equine version of a lie detector. Horses know instinctively when a person is uncomfortable or is trying to persuade them to do something unpleasant, such as wearing a saddle.

The training took place in the paddock of a farm in Cheshire. Ten slightly bemused executives found themselves jockeyed for pole position as they took turns at whispering horses. By the end of the course, the managers were enthusiastic converts to the carrot rather than the stick approach to motivation. Following on from the success of this course, Manchester plans to repeat the experience and has already purchased a second-hand corral and has been offered access to a farm and horses from Dawn Gibbins, chair of Flowcrete.

The course is not yet a part of Manchester's MBA programme, but the only thing getting in the way is logistics. With 120 MBA students on its full-time programme, the problem is finding an arena big enough to join students and horses in a meaningful dialogue.

Horse whispering has a lot to recommend it to managers because it is based on building trust through reward rather than punishment. Kelly Marks explains that, like badly trained horses, employees only contribute a fraction of their potential. Managers who place too many restrictions on staff stifle creativity and initiative and set up a situation where performance suffers.

Marks demonstrated the principle by showing how it was possible to build up trust with a "difficult" horse and lead it up a ramp into a horsebox. "Forcing horses just doesn't work," she says.

As the film shows, whispering takes a very long time. Long enough in fact for Robert Redford to fall in love with a career woman from New York who had brought her horse to him to be whispered to. Manchester Business School were not letting their students loose on bucking broncos, but managers whose closest encounter with a horse was the annual flutter on the Grand National were on unfamiliar territory.

Tudor Rickards, a professor of creativity, recalls: "They had to learn body language: not to approach the horse face-on, which would be seen as threatening, but to approach sideways on. The decision to get out and start negotiating with the horse was taking about 20 minutes to half an hour."

Videoing people's attempts at pacifying their horses, Rickards brainstormed and discussed the various different approaches that were observed. "What came out of it was the discovery that non-directed or enabling leadership could work."

Horse whispering is of course just one of many ways into creative leadership. Cranfield has its Praxis centre and the Shakespearean acting lessons of Richard Olivier; the London Business School favours exposing its students to sketching and conducting an orchestra. There is even a corporate poet doing the rounds who can tune executives into heroic concepts and inspirational messages.

But horse whispering is way beyond any performance art. It involves unlearning mechanistic approaches such as performance management and adopting an intuitive and pragmatic "touchy-feely" approach. It is a metaphor for leadership that is more in tune with the uncertainty and pace of change of today's business world. Rickards says: "We've gone through the heroic round-the-world yachtsman school of leadership training based on lone endeavour. There's nothing that says endurance makes you a better leader."

Horse whispering is all about developing negotiating skills, motivating, sharing a vision and developing trust. It is also an arena where concepts of leadership ­ being tall, muscular, physically perfect ­ break down. Everyone is at a disadvantage when attempting to control a horse.

Rickards says: "Kelly Marks is five foot and a bit and a woman; I'm a five-foot-nothing, overweight Welshman, and Alexander the Great was small but apparently godlike ­ very few people look like natural born leaders."

Photo opportunities of business types smoothing up to docile nags have ensured plenty of column inches, but Rickards says there is a serious purpose behind asking people to stroke horses' heads at the risk of being bitten or trampled. "We're about to start research into trust-based leadership ­ why some people are able to engender trust and some aren't. Take most politicians! Trust comes high in what followers say they need in a good leader. We'll be working with the Industrial Society and hope to get going in the summer."