Monty Roberts - Horse Sense for People

With humans, as with horses, communication enables Join-Up. Trust keeps the process alive.

Fear and mistrust can be delivered to you by two distinctly different messengers. First “the familiar” and second “the unfamiliar.” Horses bring about fear in people, generally because they are unfamiliar with them. People simply have not taken the time to get to know that, although horses are large and fast, they have no agenda to hurt without cause. Fear of a parent, your spouse or your boss might be established out of familiarity and a knowledge that they have a propensity to “act out” violently.

I tell people who express great fear of horses to get to know them, to study their true patterns of behavior and understand more clearly what the horse wants out of life before branding them as dangerous.

As I examine my own patterns of fear and distrust, it seems utterly foreign to think that I might fear a horse. It is a joke for me to think that I might fear this flight animal more than the man walking on the other side of the street or the person approaching in an automobile. It seems ridiculous to me that a horse could be perceived as more dangerous than an airplane, train, truck or even that awesome instrument of terror, the computer.

What the horses are telling me is that if you can remove fear from the environment, both learning and innovation spiral upward. There is no more fearful situation than when people in the workplace are faced with change. Predictability and routine are all important in the stress-filled world of business. If you take away that predictability, change the routine, you alter the environment in which people work. Change, however, is with us. The speed of change in today’s high-tech world is frightening. One of the most important jobs a manager has is to create an environment in which change occurs without production loss. This can be accomplished by creating an environment in which people are willing to change. Obtaining people’s willingness to embrace change is therefore a catalyst in the process of change.

I ask my raw horse to change from being an uncooperative animal to being a partner with me in a new venture. I do not use force—horses Join-Up with me of their own free will. It should be the same with a workforce. Without willingness, work suffers and the whole organization is crippled. Take the simple situation of lunch and coffee breaks, time off and bonus benefits. If a manager is fearful that the company’s goodwill is being abused, he may try to control the situation forcefully. What he should do is concentrate on making the working environment pleasant and building motivation so that the employee is actually happy to stay busy. If the executive gets his formula right, he may well find that his attention will need to be directed to seeing to it that his people take sufficient time off so as to freshen them for the task. Suddenly you have employees hungry to volunteer their loyalty, in the same way that horses lick and chew to signal their willingness to cooperate. People, like horses, perform much better if they are willing partners.

While attending a conference I noticed that one company put its management team in one hotel and its executives in another more upscale establishment. If cooperation and communication are desirable, then segregation is destructive. In my own organization, I attempt at all times to keep travel and living accommodation the same for all staff to promote the feeling of being a member of the team. I work to create an environment that communicates this theme: each position on the team is important if we are to achieve a successful outcome on tour and at our demonstrations.

On another occasion, a well-known organization came to Flag Is Up Farms for a demonstration. The employees filed up onto the round pen viewing platform. Three of the executives stood by the buses—I was told they were the bosses and we would have to wait for them before I could start. I took no notice and began my introduction. I didn’t see why 98 percent of the people should have to wait for the 2 percent. As the crowd hushed and the sound system came on, I could see the three men had come up the steps and were standing to the rear of the onlookers. In an oblique way I began to describe how corporate families find ways to intimidate and pull rank on their workforce. I didn’t name the men, but I made my position clear to everyone. Remaining on the theme throughout the evening worked like a charm and, at the end, each of those men came to me and told me how much they had learned that night.

Paradyne employs more than 800 people at its corporate headquarters in the Tampa Bay area of Florida in the United States and has regional offices around the world. Paradyne is a pioneer in high-speed network access and is revolutionizing the data communications industry. More than 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies, and businesses in more than 125 countries, have chosen Paradyne.

In 1997, Paradyne had a huge challenge on its hands. The company needed to adopt a new information management system, and get it up and working in eighteen months or less. The company had an archaic information system. It was necessary to install a new system, which would change everything they were doing, from giving a quote to organizing payment at the other end. John Guest of Paradyne brought in management consultants. They put together a team of people in charge of getting change under way and titled it “the foundation team.” The consultants showed the foundation team my Join-Up video. They were not at all sure how the film would be accepted—after all, I was a cowboy talking about horses.

The consultants needed to stir up creativity and willingness, and began by exposing the team to metaphors from the horse world. Time was limited: they had only two days to put the team together. To take an hour out of those critical days to see a video about a horseman was a bold step for these consultants. Would the foundation team see the connection between the nonconfrontational methods I use with horses and its need for people to accept a completely new information system? The team was asked to write down all the connections they saw between the project in front of them and the film. Within two minutes people were nodding, then busy writing and listing the connections as they saw them—more than a hundred in all, including: a nontraumatic, noncoercive environment; allowing bucking to occur; expecting resistance; keeping the pulse rate down; establishing trust; and keeping the dialogue flowing. They recognized the value of never taking out their frustrations on a colleague.

The consultant team sat back at this point, breathed a deep sigh of relief and realized the message was getting through. Join-Up became a metaphor for the willing acceptance of change that the team sought.

The film helped to establish the tone of the workshops and the changeover to the new system went well. In record time, Paradyne was reaping the benefits of change, with a level of acceptance its executives had previously not considered possible.

In 1999, I was in Texas meeting with my friend Flip Flippen about his work with the school systems in parts of that state. And as an aid to our conversation he told me about an interesting experience he had with Transit Mix.

Join-Up has the power to transform a workplace in terms of efficiency and employees’ motivation and satisfaction. Turns out Transit Mix Concrete & Material Corporation was in real need of all three.

It faced mounting costs caused by high turnover among the drivers of trucks used to deliver concrete and materials. It was costing the firm $2,200 to train a driver and the turnover rate was a staggering 72 percent every six months. The cost of accidents also cut deeply into its profits.