The best we can hope for in any given moment is to lead and to make decisions based on the information we have available – not just intellectual information, facts and logic but also the information that we gain from our emotions and our gut instinct. Both of these provide us with great insights into what action we might want to take as a leadership choice in any given moment. Emotions and gut instinct have largely been dismissed in favour of logic and reasoning, but they are increasingly critical to the success of business.
Where are you striving to be “in control”?
What happens when you loosen your grip?
Your emotions offer an important source of information. If you are terrified when you first come face to face with a horse, it is feedback that you can use as a guide to how you might approach them and the first leading exercise. It would be foolish to put yourself into a situation that causes you to instantly reach a place of overwhelm, yet many find themselves in overwhelm in the workplace. In a moment of sheer terror, the wise option might be to ask for help, to reflect and observe or to seek more information to help guide your decision. Alternatively, if you feel relaxed when you first come face to face with a horse, then the next step of leading one is not as big a step and might take you only slightly out of your comfort zone. Part of what people learn is how to challenge themselves out of the comfort zone and how to create safety and support in doing so.
Everyone’s comfort zone is different based on values, beliefs, experience, self-awareness and self-esteem, and much more. There is no right or wrong baseline, but it is interesting to know where your benchmark is.
How comfortable are you leading through uncertainty?
How much do you seek control?
People’s default patterns of behaviour show up around the horses. Some clients I work with are confident with the unknown and are able to lead effectively, even if they feel anxious. Others are terrified to the point of overwhelm and need more support to achieve the same task.
Horses respond based on non-verbal feedback and provide a great opportunity to experience where you get out of your comfort zone and how you recover to a place of powerful leadership.
Background to this book
My leadership career began at IBM where I worked for 16 years. I held a variety of roles in the outsourcing business, and in the latter years of my career I was regularly asked to sort something out that was unclear but needed attention, often at a European or global level. I learned how to provide clarity of direction and engage a team to work with me in some challenging senior leadership roles. Always leading through uncertainty. I did the jobs nobody wanted, creating structure and certainty out of chaos and confusion. However, it was only in 2011, when I overcame my fear of horses and started working with them, that I really understood what it took to be an effective leader in uncertainty.
This book is born out of my combined leadership experience of working in the corporate world, running a small business and especially working with horses. I draw on both my experience and my clients’ experiences of working with horses to highlight the key concepts of leading through uncertainty.
Every day I lead through uncertainty.
Each time I lead a horse, I don’t know whether my leadership is enough.
Will the horse come with me? Will I be safe? Am I clear enough? Is the relationship strong enough? Can I achieve what I want to achieve?
Although I don’t dwell on these questions, they are always there in uncertainty. With little horse experience, I have only my leadership to fall back on. The horses will not go along with anyone or anything they don’t want to. Neither will people. They may come grudgingly or unwillingly for a time, but the low levels of employee engagement in business require a step change in leadership to energise people and organisations better.
In October 2016, I brought together a group of thought leaders to explore the topic of uncertainty. I was unfazed leading through uncertainty as a result of working with horses. I noticed that many of my clients were uncomfortable with the concept of uncertainty and not knowing, yet they were experiencing it and struggling with it on a daily basis. I ran a round table and included horses in the discussion. Yes, that’s right: I included horses. I stepped into uncertainty and trialled a new way of running a round-table discussion. I didn’t want the discussion to be purely cognitive and intellectual. I wanted the delegates to embody the concepts we discussed and gain feedback on how we lead from a different species. Horses provide a powerful way of enabling that to happen. My intention was to challenge our thinking on leadership and learning, to expand our awareness of the leadership skills needed for the future of business and to fully embody the concepts we discussed. I wanted us to shift our thinking and create ideas through dialogue and exploration.
The output of that day was a white paper on leading through uncertainty. As I wrote the white paper, I kept true to the discussion that the group had. I wrote up each topic based on the group’s collective discussion and notes, but I realised I had more to say, and it was a struggle not to include my own thoughts in the report. The report was published in November 2016, and the seed of the idea for this book was sown.
| The Leading Through Uncertainty white paper can be downloaded at www.judejennison.com/uncertainty |
When I took ownership of my first horse in December 2011 and started delivering Equine Guided Leadership, I recognised that leaders were operating against a backdrop of uncertainty in their work. I was living and breathing it daily every time I led a horse, as leaders were in their everyday work, sometimes realising it, sometimes not. When I talked about uncertainty with clients, I observed the discomfort they had with that word. Their desire to achieve results meant they were reluctant to admit that they might not be in control. Yet we are never in control.
Over time, the word uncertainty became normalised. We could no longer pretend that we were in control. Fear and polarisation were prevalent, the topic of mental health rose further on the agenda of organisations, and there was a recognition that uncertainty was here to stay, for quite a while at least. Clients realised they were leading through uncertainty and felt the emotional impact of it, yet they focused on creating more certainty by developing strategic vision, managing risk and building resilience for employees.
I’ve repeatedly watched clients try to exert control, only to discover that they get better results by softening their approach, letting go of attachment to a particular way and relaxing into their leadership. I witness them develop greater flexibility, adaptability and collaboration, leading to faster results. I believe our leadership is at its best when we allow it to be easy.
How this book is structured
This book is intended to provide new insights to the challenges we face of leading through uncertainty and the skills needed to create a new future. It encourages you to understand the emotional challenges that uncertainty invokes, and how you can overcome them through human connection.
In Part 1 of this book, I explore the context within which we are working today. I explain why I work with horses, how I came to work with them, the radical change we are experiencing in the world of work, the challenges we face as a human species in a technological world of fast-paced change, the need to evolve our leadership, and why compelling use of emotions is crucial for effective leadership.