Sample Team Building Program:
Lessons From the Herd—What Horses Can Teach Us About Building Exceptional Teams

by Christina Haxton

Effective teams are comprised of individuals who understand the process of working together and actively encourage and value the contributions of its team members. Energies are directed toward problem solving, task effectiveness, and maximizing the use of each member’s resources to achieve the team’s purpose.

This program incorporates the use of horses for its team building exercises. Horses are ideal teachers: they are responsive beings with acute awareness of and sensitivity to their surroundings. Like people, horses have individual personalities as well as physical abilities and limitations. Horses very accurately sense a person’s level of trust, confidence, awareness, and interpersonal skills. Horses are herd animals and followers. Exceptional leaders benefit from learning "what followers follow."

As with human-to-human relationships, goals can be accomplished only after a partnership has been created. A partnership is based on self-awareness, knowledge of relationship dynamics, and understanding the "other's" perspective. Horses give us immediate and honest feedback about what we need to know and change about achieving partnership with others in order to accomplish our goals. When you set out to accomplish a goal with the horse as your "customer" or "client" or "current challenge," you get a powerful and unique opportunity to learn what you need to do to succeed back at the office.

NOTE: This team building workshop does not incorporate riding and all lessons are ground-based. In an arena with two to three horses, participants will form a team, and together they will create a "problem," define goals individually and collectively, and solve the "problem." Most importantly, beyond experiencing the benefits in the arena, you will also learn how to integrate what you’ve learned back into the workplace to take your group's performance and productivity to the next level.

Benefits:

Upon completion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Set achievable goals, both individually and collectively
• Communicate effectively under stress
• Build creative teams that achieve goals collaboratively and capitalize on the strengths of each member
• Increase individual and team motivation
• Exercise their new-found team building skills in the workplace

Solution-Focused Facilitation Model: On-the-ground activities will be facilitated with the horse(s), each increasing in difficulty, requiring the team to use the skills learned in the previous activity.

Achievements:

Upon completion of each activity, participants will be able to:

• Identify personal strengths
• Recognize what worked and what needed to change to achieve the next task
• Take the team to the next level and find creative solutions
• Identify the "What" (what happened?), the "So What" (what difference did that make in achieving/not achieving the goal?), and "Now What" (from lessons learned, what will you do differently back at work to achieve goals?)

Methodology: There will be activities for those participating in the arena as well as for those who choose to observe outside of the arena. While those in the arena actively engage in an activity, the remainder of the participants will be given solution-focused observation tasks and will participate in the processing upon completion of each exercise.

Time Frame: One-half day to two days or longer, depending upon organization needs and goals.

This unique program represents one of many team building options we offer. Please ask us about our other team building offerings that may fit your organization's requirements.

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