Take it outdoors to build team
For the AJC
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Finding that team-building workshops and leadership seminars don’t always achieve lasting changes in employee behaviors, some corporations are thinking outside the office for training.
There’s nothing like putting a team in a corral with a horse and a task to accomplish, or placing them 40 feet in the air in harnesses to take people out of their comfort zone and heighten their attention span.
Photos by Leita Cowart / Special
Jennifer Kogel runs the Inward Bound Equine Assisted Learning Center in Douglasville. Her horse is named Jeremiah.
Matt Marcus, Adventure coordinator at Georgia Tech looks over the models of the Leadership Challenge Course on display at the Museum of Design in downtown Atlanta.
Stacey Hodgson (from left), Denise Hargon, Christie Mills and Ruby Byers take horses through obstacles at equine learning center.
New horse power
Jennifer H. Kozel, a certified life coach and founder and CEO of Inward Bound Equine Assisted Learning Center, believes that horses have a lot to teach humans about honesty, objectivity, respect, safety and ethics.
She uses her knowledge of horses, coaching and human resource management to help clients learn life skills, teamwork, conflict resolution, leadership skills and better communication by “observing, interacting and learning from the natural, unfiltered behavior of horses,” she said.
“Horses are prey animals and have heightened senses that alert them when they may be in danger,” Kozel said. “Their survival depends on their understanding our intentions. When a human enters a horse’s space, he immediately assesses the threat level to his own safety. A horse is like a blank slate that will pick up and react to someone’s strongest emotions.”
Using the standards and practices of the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association and the International Coach Federation, Kozel provides hands-on, experiential learning by bringing together an equine specialist, coach and/or therapist, a horse and a client or group of clients.
She asked four previous clients to demonstrate a teamwork exercise. Their task was to lead a 2-year-old horse and a 5-month-old horse over an obstacle course using a piece of thin string.
They could not touch the horses and had to stay connected with one another over the obstacles. Kozel took notes about what she saw and heard.
The group tied the horses together with the string with the older one first and as a connected group began leading the horses through the obstacles.
Kozel noted that two people had assumed leadership roles, creating some tension. All went smoothly, however, until the baby refused to walk over a low jump. Coaxing led to a broken string. Several other plans didn’t work and, finally, the older horse wandered off in another direction.
“I told them that they only had to be connected over the obstacles, but they self-imposed the rule of staying connected at all times,” she said. “Listening is very important in teamwork, and so are rules. When should they be broken?
“No one thought about moving the obstacle. When people get frustrated, creativity goes down. The more frustrated a group is, the more real it [the learning] gets,” said Kozel, who finally brought the group together for debriefing.
“I love this way of coaching and training because it’s out of the realm of what anybody’s ever done,” said Stacey Hodgson, a regional operations manager with Home Depot who has brought teams through the program.
“People start out thinking they’re just horses — what can I possibly learn? Then they find out how powerful it can be.”
She’s seen people gain a more genuine view of themselves and each other, roles change and stronger bonds formed.
In an earlier leadership exercise she had worked with a horse that was blind in one eye.
“I made assumptions about what he couldn’t do, and later realized that I was the one with the blind spot,” Hodgson said. “It changed my management style. Now I ask people what they can do.”
Ruby Byers, mentor coordinator with Douglas County School System, watches adult mentors and kids build relationships through equine-assisted learning experiences.
“Jennifer has a workbook that helps kids compare human facial expressions with horse ‘body language.’ When they figure out by themselves why a horse pins its ears back and relate that to their own lives, it makes an impact,” Byers said.
Upward bound
The idea of using rope courses to facilitate personal development has been around since Outward Bound in the 1960s, according to Matt Marcus. He saw the concept adapted to business needs in the late ’90s and the managed the challenge course at George Mason University for five years.
“We trained our own coaches and had about 200 corporate and government groups participate in our programs every year,” Marcus said.
Now as adventure/recreation co-ordinator, Marcus has helped to design the new Georgia Tech Leadership Challenge Course, slated to open this spring.
“This will be a powerful learning tool for students and for corporate groups. Instead of presenting a new idea in the classroom or training session, people will actually learn the concept by doing an activity that models it. It’s called experiential learning,” Marcus said.
Georgia Tech’s unique course will be more steel pole- and sustainable wood- construction than ropes. It will sport three 40-foot towers, two hydraulic zip lines, a dozen elements to cross and three levels of challenge.
“Most courses reserve the high ropes part of the course for individual training, but ours will be team-oriented,” Marcus said. “We can take groups of four to eight people up 35-40 feet and challenge them to get from one tower to the next. Spanning that large a space would be impossible to do solo; it will take teamwork to achieve the goal.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Georgia Tech program unless technology was integrated into it. Participants will gather and share information through laptops, video cameras and GPS-type devices that could have participants racing around the campus to find clues.
Initially, the university will offer four workshops: Five Leadership Behaviors in Action; Problem Solving in Seven Easy Steps; Getting to Consensus Quickly; and Kick Start Your Tribe. They can also customize programs for organizations.
“People’s first reaction to a challenge course is often, ‘We can’t do this: it won’t work,’ ” Marcus said. “Once they start working on it, they change their perspective and get excited.
“This is an alternative method of teaching people simple concepts. We teach it, and let them practice it. They get swift feedback on whether their approaches are working and will have an opportunity to readjust and try again,” Marcus said.
“They’ll learn how to work well together and with technology in the process. It’s energizing and because they are learning by doing, it sinks in.”