TRAINER'S SPECTRUM

Making Horses Drink, book excerpt

Introduction

Imagine a stable full of stalls. Each of the stalls has a horse in it, and those horses are powerful beasts. (After all, that's where the term "horsepower" comes from.) But most of the time, those horses are doing little or nothing. Left to its own devices, a horse likes to stand around and munch hay. It doesn't look for heavy carts to pull, races to win, high fences to jump, steer to rope, or people to give rides to.
A stable represent a lot of potential energy that isn't much use to anyone until it's harnassed to some worthwile goal and encouraged to work under good leadership.
Organizations are like that too. They may have a great bunch of people on their payroll, a winning "stable" if you will. But without the right touch on the reins, the business produces little more than a stable full of horses. (In fact, like a stable, it actually consumes in its resting state. Anything it produces is waste product, to put it politely.)

Every horse needs a rider. Enter management. So what is management's role? Sometimes it seems like management's role is to force those lazt horses and organizations to get out and do something to earn their keep. The "dumb beasts" need to be sufficiently controled so that management can tug the reins or dig them in the side with the spurs or, if necessary, occasionally crack the whip to get them going in a useful direction. But we know that is not the way to get a horse or a business to do great work. You can't force a horse to win. Horses are big and strong—that's what makes them so valuable to their riders.
But as a consequence of their strength, you can't actually make them do much of anything they don't agree to do. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. When it comes to the kinds of actions leaders seek from their employees in business today, the same holds true. A controlling, directive style might get you obedience, discipline, and compliance—but leaders want different behaviors from their employees: inititative, collaboration, enthuasiam, teamwork, problem-solving. These are not things you can make everyone do. They arise from within, they are the products of internally motivated employees. Perhaps you can inspire and support such behavior, but you cannot order or demand it.

What do you do if you want the fastest horse, if you want to win the race, not just trot around the ring until quitting time? That is what this book is about. Peter Schutz is an American executive who returned to Germany (many years after fleeing as a child to escape the Nazi regime) to turn an ailing Porsche A.G. around. How did he do it? By applying a philosophy he calls "extraordinary results with ordinary people." Because, he points out, winning companies must have good people in them, but they do best when their managers find ways to inspire those poeple to work better and achieve more than they otherwise might.
I had a chance to work with Peter recently and was deeply impressed by how simple and impressively human his approach is. He exemplifies a leadership style that inspires others to reach deep into themselves and produce extraordinary results. People who have worked with hin often describe that experience as the high point of their careers, and they recall having a great deal of fun—as well as achieving significant results. This is a two-sided legacy I think every executive would do well to achieve.

The elements of extraordinary success in many such cases are subtle and sometimes surprising. Each of the ten chapters of the book correspond to a factor that I believe highly successful leaders use. Each is an important element of winning any horse race you wish your organization to enter. While they may seem like common sense, knowing when and how to apply each is a challenge.
Think of the horse as a great body of people who make up your business or whatever other sort of group you wish to lead. It represents your workforce and the potential that workforce has to produce extraordinary results. (Or instead, to balk and buck and shy and run away and fight the reins and refuse and refuse to drink and otherwise cause no end of trouble.) You might think of yourself as trying to climg atop that horse and stay in the saddle as you try to influence its performance and win the race.

How do you win that leadership race to achieve business success through the efforts of others? It is a question as old as the urge to achieve itself. In this book I am going to explore the answers, first by sharing a fable that many people find helpful as they wresle with the challenges of leadership. Then we will move into the "real world" of work by examining hundreds of of stories, tips, and examples. This combination of storytelling and real-world techniques help translate insight into hands-on, daily actions that can make a real difference in the leader's life and the lives of his or her people and their workplace.

To lead people, you must first have opportunities to interact with them. That's why I like actions that increase the overlap between managers and employees. (For instance, Bob Nelson suggests in 1001 Ways to Energize Employees that you make a point of getting together with employees you don't usually interact with, and also enter and exit the workplace through different paths each day, taking a little time to interact with employees you see along the way.)

Some days I feel like my own organization runs faster and smarter because I am in the saddle, but other times I worry that I am just adding weight or slowing it down. My quest as a small business owner and also a trainer and advisor to many other managers is to try to maximize the rider's contribution to the race.
Researching and writing these books had helped me enhance my own understanding of that fascinating challenge, and I hope you enjoy the reading nearly as much as I have the writing.

Have a good ride!

Book, $10.95, signed by the author, reg price $19.95