Our learning goals were to encourage individual accountability but share leadership, to balance people and task leadership and to look at willingness versus compliance. We also wanted to look at management as a leadership team and the behaviours that would make us more effective.

The horse environment was directly analogous to the business environment. We saw the different styles – autocratic, etc. We could see the importance of having a clear goal versus being willy-nilly. You need to have a clear vision with the right balance of authority. We saw this together and we were able to translate it. Some things do need to be autocratic, some are up for discussion, and part of the leader’s job is to determine what those are.

This program is learning by doing. Every form of leadership was actively experienced, plus we had a chance to discuss what happened and learn from that.

The role of the leader is to be the visionary. Horses already know how to walk, just as people already know their jobs. They want the security that you are leading and that you know where you are going. When you are indecisive and uncertain, horses don’t want to walk with you and people won’t want to work with you.

It really showed us leadership excellence. When the horse just follows you, with his nose on your shoulder, because you have earned his confidence, you feel so good!

You have to earn the horse’s trust. We used that opportunity to talk about trust within the team, and it opened the door. You have to connect before you can lead. For us, the most important lesson was the trust and respect, and that has improved our team relationships and effectiveness.

One thing that is different now is how team decisions, roles and authority are handled. We are clear now about when input is needed and where we want the team to make decisions. With the horse, we were given a task and had to figure out how to do it as a team. We learned about our own strategies for operation and learned to work together a lot better. It was really a team renewal. We met some pretty lofty goals. It was a lot of fun but also lots of learning.

It’s Sharon and her style as much as the horses. She doesn’t leave any stone unturned, she goes deeper and deeper to get at the real issues, yet she’s so non-confrontational. It’s the whole package, I can’t imagine anyone else who could do it better. She understands business, human dynamics and horses – it’s really fantastic.

We benchmark different things at the company, and we’ve seen many of our scores improve since working with Sharon. There’s a whole range of leadership behaviours that we track and all of us have seen our scores go up. The Horse Sense program is definitely a big part of that.