A basic test of leadership is the ability to foster followership. In fact, I believe that many managers never step into leadership out of fear they will look over their shoulder and find no one following. What is a best practice in getting people to follow?
A great teacher of both leadership and followership is a humble, soulful guy in cowboy boots named Buck Brannaman. A new documentary about him, titled “Buck,” is must-viewing for anyone who hopes to lead others. Brannaman is not a leadership or management guru but a horseman. In a voice-over at the beginning of the film, he wryly comments, “A lot of times, rather than helping people with horse problems, I’m helping horses with people problems.”
The goal of working with horses is to motivate them to follow, yet following humans doesn’t come naturally to them. Historically they have been “broken” with fear and pain—and Brannaman knows firsthand what it means to be broken. As a small boy, he and his brother were brutally whipped by their father. His goal? To get them to follow his vision of them as child entertainers.
After growing up breaking horses the traditional way, Brannaman encountered a different way of working with these animals while watching Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance, pioneers of a method called natural horsemanship. What Brannaman saw became his calling, and over the past 30 years, he has developed natural horsemanship into something that is more a philosophy of life and leadership than merely a horse training method. His way is not anything tricky or particularly difficult; rather, it is about understanding, vulnerability, relationships, respect and time. Brannaman’s philosophy is beautifully laid out as filmmaker Cindy Meehl follows him around the country while he holds clinics to help people work with their horses.
Getting a horse to follow without fear and punishment demands an investment in time and is about understanding the animal’s nature and developing a relationship based on trust and understanding. In a patient drawl, Brannaman explains that the very act of getting on a horse’s back challenges the animal’s basic instinctual fear of being attacked from behind by a lion. As he explains this concept, he demonstrates bringing a wild, head-tossing filly not into submission, but into a trusting followership.
If this makes Brannaman sound “new age” or soft, he’s not. He stands fearlessly in the ring with some big, aggressive animals and explains that at the core of successful relationships is a two-way street of respect; he does not allow horses (or people) to walk over him. In a powerful scene he demonstrates the difference between being hard and being firm by having a human participant hold a rope while he shows the impact of a hard jerk on the rope. This scene questions the motivation and purpose of what we often call disciplinary procedures.
In one of the most surprising and stunning scenes in the film, a woman brings a vicious, out-of-control stallion to one of Brannaman’s clinics. The woman has had the horse since its birth but has done nothing with it. “Your horse is a mirror to your soul,” Brannaman observes, “and sometimes you might not like what you see.” How this episode turns out packs a powerful lesson about the failure to lead.
In a world hungry for admirable leadership, Brannaman is a compelling, practical and worthy inspiration for anyone who works with others—horse or human. In one of his clinics, while speaking of learning to patiently work with horses from a perspective of trust, relationship, respect and time, Brannaman says, “If you can find a way to fit this thing right here, it will make you better—it will make you better in areas you didn’t think related to horses.”
