Making Horses Drink by Alexander Hiam Learn about leadership from the actions and experience of other leaders.

Interview #1 with Jere Calmes, Entrepreneur Press

Interview #2 with Amy Friedenberg, Husson University

Q In your book, you say that we can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. You also say that the same is true in organizations. So, how can a leader make the team "thirsty"?

A The old saying about horses reminds us that there are many things we cannot force. This is especially true in organizations. The person in position power can force some things, such as a change in scheduling or a new employment policy, but the really important things can't be dictated. They have to happen through the active, willing participation of many people throughout the organization. Sales growth, improvements in quality levels, and great new marketing ideas are good examples. You can't just make sales grow through threats and orders, unless there's a good sales strategy and a group of skilled salespeople ready, able and willing to implement that plan.
You ask how the leader can make a group "thirsty" for success. Well, the point is, everyone thirsts for success, and everyone hungers for achievement, progress, recognition, respect, and all the other higher motivates that make us the most productive of all forms of life on this planet. What I say to leaders in my workshops is, first, please make sure you aren't ruining your people's appetite for success through heavy-handed management, a lack of a clear, compelling focus, inconsistent or unfair treatment, poor communications, and all the other plagues of the modern workplace.

Q You explain that the organization can be compared to a stable full of winners, but which only represents a lot of potential energy that isn't much use to anyone unti it's harnassed to some worthwile goal and encouraged to work under good leadership. How can a manager encourages his "horses" to believe they are winners and to run their hardest? How is it possible to make sure the "horses" want to win the race too?

A Of course I don't necessarily go as far as to compare employees to race-horses, some employees think that's compliment but others don't! Still, by analogy, yes, a stable is giong to have some fast runers and many others who don't enter, let alone win, any races. Yet in a business, we really want everyone we hire to perform well, to be champions. Ths means we need to consistently treat them like champions. Let them know why they are important, why you hired them, what they can contribute. Reward them for past "wins" fairly often, and give them good treatment all the time. If you never pay attention to a horse, it won't perform well and it might not look, at casual glance, like a winner. The same is true of your employees. If they don't feel like "the boss" even knows who they are and what they do, where's the incentive to perform well? Why not just do the minimum to get by?

Q Why do you say that hiring the most qualified candidate don't ensure good performance?

A Every employer spends a lot of time and energy screening candidates and seeking the best. This helps get a good match, someone who has more or less the appropriate skills and experience. But beyond that, it does very little to affect performance. Hiring processes just give you the raw material of future performance. Each new candidate can have a good, bad, or ugly experience when they show up and begin to learn their work.
I strongly recommend putting more resources into working with and for that new candidate in the first six months of the job. If you can cut some expenses on the front end of the hiring process to spend more on training and mentoring new hires in their first year, do. And good supervision and leadership, all through their tenure in your employment, will produce great performances, even from second-or-third-choice candidates. In my experience, leadership can make such a big difference in performance that the right leader can get results with almost any group of people.
Too often in business, we assume the problem is the employee, when really, it's the leadership approach. I'm in favor of working harder on our leadership, and worrying less about who we hire. Most people who are reasonably well educated and prepared for their job are capable of being the best—with the right leadership, that is!

Q How can a manager develop an even more positive approach and management style to become a true leader?

A The first thing I suggest is that everyone in a leadership role needs to be fully aware of their leadership attitudes and their assumptions or beliefs about those they lead. No coach ever lead a team to the finals unless he, first, believe they were capable of going all the way. It's the same in business, so one of the things I do in workshops is to ask leaders to list all the positive things they can about their employees. We then compare our attitudes and behaviors based on this list, with how leaders might behave when focused on employees weakness, errors, and shortfalls. Obviously, leaders focusing on their people's strengths are going to articulate higher goals, encourage employees to stretch higher, praise and motivate others, and so forth—all the behaviors associated with winning leadership. So yes, it's important to work on the attitudes of success first, they are what make success possible in the first place.

Q Do you believe that motivation is always self-generated or is it possible to inspire others?

A Both. I've never met a person who wasn't motivated. But to do what, when, where, how hard, for how long? It depends. Humans, as Abraham Maslow so famously observed, are "wanting animals." We're overflowing with motivation. But if it's being directed at shopping, or hobbies, or our love life, but not our work, well, then people can appear demotivated or lazy to their supervisors. So, give people something worth getting motivated about, and suddenly you've tapped into that powerful internal drive of each employee, and they will help you accomplish great things.
You need to provide compelling opportunities for each person to accomplish something they will feel good about. Many of the hardest-working people in the world are not getting paid a cent for their work. They are volunteering to help others, or doing art, or playing sports just for the fun of it. Great leaders have but to inspire others to this natural level of peak performance, and great things begin to happen.

Q Could you please explain what "the best rides are often on unfamiliar trails" really means?

A Boredom is the enemy of motivation. If work (or life) becomes a dull routine, there is nothing much a leader can do to turn people on, except change that routine! I sometimes get a call from a manager who says, "we'd like to challenge our people with motivation goal, but we can't think of anything new to do." What? How long do you plan to stay in business? In business, change and creativity and innovation are essential, all the time, so every leader needs to keep things a little off balance, tilted toward the future.
I recomend not just telling people what the new idea, plan or goal is, but challenging them to invent it. And creativity is definitely a key ingredient in motivation and peak performance.

Alexander Hiam
> Back to top

Q What made you want to write this book?

A I was leading numerous workshops for managers on employee performance and motivation at the time, and wanted to bring some helpful stories together as I thought that stories and examples were lacking in the field and that I was teaching too much from models and abstract concepts.

Q What gave you the idea for the story about the boy and the horse?

A I just incubated the topic for a while, then sat down and wrote that story. It seemed to work as a good lead in to the book. But it hadn't been planned when I proposed the book to my publisher. I sometimes do write in novel form so the idea of a fictional tale wasn't that outlandish for me as a writer.

Q Out of the ten segments you wrote about what managers should do, which one do you think is the most important?

A I'd say number 3, leader's personal perspective. I think that's what you build the rest of your leadership on. Interestingly, since I wrote that book I was asked to design the Leadership and Management School, an intensive one week course that the U.S. Coast Guard puts all officers and managers through, and they asked me to make the first module about the leader's personal perspective because they feel it's the most essential place to start. So if I write a new edition of the book I'll move it from #3 to #1, like we did in that course. (Communications is of course a close runner up for the #1 position since it's essential for leaders to communicate often, clearly and well.)

Q Why do you want to share your knowledge on leadership in business?

A There's such a huge need. Everyone has leaders, and most people also take on leadership roles, perhaps many in their lifetimes, yet the state of the art and practice of leadership is fairly primitive. 99% of leaders have really no idea of the large amount of research and knowledge that is accumulating on the topic. There's a gap that needs filling, and when you help people learn about leadership the effects are big since each leader influences so many other people.

Alexander Hiam
> Back to top