Effective Leadership In Riding Program

I have not reached the two minute warning but I am clearly playing in the fourth quarter of my life. I understand the impact that programs like ours have in radically improving the lives of program participants. I want nothing more than to see more programs like ours pop up around the country. I want potential programs to learn from our successes and from our mistakes.

 I used to lament having not started the program twenty years sooner. But if I had I am not sure that it would exist today and I am sure that it would not be as effective as it is today. Self reflection and age allow me to understand things that I completely misunderstood when I was younger. Even up to about age forty I believed that sound leadership was essentially the ability to put in place, and carry out, a plan and an organizational system that would have at its root the ability to control the behavior of others.

Running  a natural horsemanship program has little in common with running a business. Leading a trauma informed, natural horsemanship program has even less than nothing to do with running a business. In fact, few things get in the way more than trying to lead a program based on concepts of organization and structure.

Though the thought might seem heretical to fight fans, I am not sure that Muhammed Ali would have beaten George Forman if Ali had fought him when Ali was young and in his natural prime. A young man might punch hard and try to dominate a powerful opponent like Foreman. Instead, as an older man he bore the indignity of leaning against the ropes and allowing Forman to  pummel him until George Forman wore himself out. He then proceeded to fight against a tired young man who could not give more than Ali could take. 

When I was young I was embarrassed at the way Ali fought that fight. Now I see the effectiveness of that strategy.  The bottom line is that leadership requires one to be able to absorb punches and stay on your feet until the fight is over.  I did not understand that fully until I was in my fifties. 

It is easy to create a program that appears to be successful. It is easy to appear to be a great kindergarten teacher if one is only given the most educationally advanced, well adjusted, well behaved kids. The reality is that only the teacher who can bring learning to each child, regardless of the child's background and talent can only be called great. And in dealing with the difficult children over the years the great teacher takes many figurative blows. 

One need not acquire new traits to lead effectively . Instead one needs to get rid of the traits that one often brings to the table. The first step, and it is only the first step, is to work hard to utterly disregard self interest. In the eighties the profoundly wicked concept of "self care" came to leach itself into popular psychology.  People do not need to be taught to care more for themselves. Greed, selfishness, materialism, and laziness are so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that pretending that growing more of it is a virtue is as absurd as teaching that we need to learn how to absorb oxygen.

When one learns to ignore self interest one finds that one has much more time to accomplish things that need doing. Time is not wasted seeking additional "comfort."

Ignoring self interest opens the door to effective leadership in a natural horsemanship program, but one can only walk all the way through that door when one learns to ignore an innate drive nearly as strong as that of being self interested--the drive to control the behavior of others.

Much of what we call "planning", "organization", and "structure" in our society is nothing more than an allocation of how power is to be exercised over other people. The need for such coercive techniques is so deeply ingrained in our concept of leadership that we actually view coercion as leadership.

One simple example best illustrates the power of non-coercive, effective leadership. Our program has no paid employees. Everything that is done is done by volunteers. There is nearly always work that needs to be done. 

Consider the very simple question of how to get more hours of productive volunteer work out of program participants. One could have a rule requiring all participants to put in a certain number of hours of volunteer work each month. How could that be enforced? Well, one could have another rule that called for the expulsion of any members that do not do so? I cannot imagine how such a policy would build cohesion. I can easily see how it would create division.

So how can power be effectively  used? Is complete anarchy what is called for?

No, if one wants to increase the amount of volunteer hours that program participants invest in the program to, say, up to five hours a month one can best do so by personally putting in forty hours a month of volunteer time. This must be done without resentment, without calling attention to oneself, and most of all without appearing to be a martyr. 

Effective leadership is leadership by example. One could try to enforce the virtue of generosity in a program or one can learn what is perhaps the most important lesson from the book, "Black Elk Speaks".  

Black Elk mentions, in what seems nearly like a side comment, that Crazy Horse never kept a great horse. Whenever he acquired a truly great animal he gave it away to a poor family.

That is leadership.  By the the time of the fight at Little Big Horn Crazy Horse was no longer a Shirt Wearer. Without any formal authority, without any power to order others to follow him, he rounded up a band of fighting men to go into battle with him urging them to be thinking of "the old people and the children."

With such leadership one can build a powerful program.