I have had the opportunity in recent years to participate in the sport of Agility with my dog, Ivy. In the course of this experience, I have reflected on the lessons I have learned in the sport and the astounding fact that most of them were very similar to lessons I had learned over a career in teaching and leadership in higher education. There is something very powerful to me in this discovery and so I want to share it with you.
In that spirit, then, I am going to introduce you to my Agility team-mate Ivy, to the sport of agility, and share with you some of what I’ve learned from and with Ivy, and the analogy I perceive with my experience as a teacher and leader with human organizations.
[Please don’t think I’m suggesting here that people are just like dogs or that I treat my staff like dogs (although by the time we’re finished with this session, I hope you’ll believe I treat my dog pretty well!). What I’m really talking about here in both these activities is the underlying deeper processes about how animals learn, how to communicate clearly, and the importance of relationships. Maybe there are some general truths about those processes, regardless of whether they operate within or across species.]
Ivy is my five-year old Bearded Collie. We have been partners since she was 8 weeks old. The Beardie (as they are called) is an ancient Scottish herding breed. They’re highly intelligent, active and they require a lot of time with a brush. Ivy is, first of all, a member of our family, my companion and friend, and secondarily she is a canine athlete and my partner in Agility.
Agility
is a rapidly growing sport, introduced into the
In competition, the course is laid out by the judge, and neither dog nor person will have seen the particular course before. The obstacles are “standard”; correctly executing the sequence is the challenge. The human gets to walk the course in advance but the team gets only one chance to perform it perfectly together.
In a trial, at the advanced level, you have about 40-60 seconds to complete approximately 20 obstacles arranged over a 10,000 square foot field.
Each member of the team has a unique part to play. Neither can play the game alone. You can’t even learn the sport alone.
The human’s role on the team is first, to teach the dog and herself the basic skills of the game (jumping hurdles, balancing on the dog walk, see saw, and hitting yellow contact zones, etc); second, to develop with the dog a system of communication whereby the human can make clear to the dog which obstacle is to be executed next; third, to give clear and correct directions in the course of a competitive event. For me, the most difficult and time-consuming part of the human’s role is developing the system of communication between you and the dog. This is a teaching/developmental process in which you invest years.
The dog’s role on the team is first, to learn and take responsibility for executing each obstacle correctly every time; secondly to learn to read the communications from the handler in order to understand which obstacle to do next, and, third, during a competitive event, to go as fast as she can.
The hardest part for the dog in competition is keeping track of the human, and, while executing the obstacles, understanding correctly what she’s supposed to do next.
So, to the analogy: I am suggesting that our jobs as leaders with our IT organizations are similar in many respects to the role we play as handlers in Agility. I see our jobs as leaders as being made up of a “Developing”, or teaching, role and a “Directing” role. In the Development part, the job is to prepare the organization with skills, structure and process, to facilitate a system of effective communication and to make sure the organization has the space, tools, training and emotional support it needs. In the Direction part, the leader has to understand the specific challenges of the environment and communicate those in such a way that the organization can quickly and accurately perform.
I’m going to spend the next few minutes, reflecting on ten specific lessons I’ve learned with Ivy about how to be successful in Agility. I’ll describe each lesson; first, in the Agility frame of reference, and then, for each lesson, I’ll try to explain some of how I’ve seen the lesson also apply in my human leadership life… I’m hoping to provoke some similar realizations from you.
Here Are Some of the Lessons I’ve learned With Ivy:
Lesson #1. Trust is the foundation for everything.
In order for you and your dog to have the confidence to compete successfully, you each must have a high level of trust in each other. You build that trust by working together successfully over time.
In this video, I’m practicing with Ivy, teaching her to find the correct entrance to the weave poles on her own without me being there to show her.
In competition, I have to trust Ivy to find the correct entrance to the weave poles, for example, and to touch the yellow contact zones no matter how fast she is running, because I can’t always be right there to coach her. Likewise, she needs to trust that when she comes out of a blind chute or tunnel, I will be there to give direction about what is next and she needs to be absolutely certain that I won’t ask her to do anything she can’t do.
Trust allows you to work at a distance from your dog. You both have to develop a sense of each other that allows you to perform with confidence even when you’re far apart. You must be able to communicate directions at a considerable distance and your dog must be willing to look to you for direction even when you are not nearby. She needs to develop the instinct to keep track of where you are even when she can’t look at you all the time.
The reason this distance work is important is that dogs can run much faster than people and your team will never exhibit winning performance if you allow your slow human-speed to hold back your team.
With other humans, I believe that trust also develops as a result of repeatedly demonstrated integrity. Others can come to trust me as a leader when every time they observe my work, they believe that I have acted with honesty, fairness and good judgment.
Lack of trust is probably the most serious roadblock to effective human leadership. People in an organization cannot execute with focus and energy if they don’t truly believe that “someone” knows where all of this is leading and will provide the needed support when the going gets rough and they need to be sure you won’t ask them to do something they can’t. Likewise, organizational leaders quickly get timid or turn sour about making commitments and “fighting the battles” for their organization and they start micromanaging if they aren’t sure the organization will actually be able to deliver on its promises.
Members of the organization you lead need to be encouraged to work on their own, exercising their basic professional skills, without your micromanagement because the whole organization’s pace will be retarded by your limited ability to know as much as each of your experts knows. You need to build a culture of respect for the skills and capabilities of your people that lets them own their own performance and lets you provide higher-level direction and strategy. At the same time, they need to develop their instincts about which direction you’re running next even when you’re not in direct sight.
Trust takes time to develop as people working together are able to prove to each other that they understand each other and that they can be depended on.
Lesson #2.Work=Play=Work=Play…
You really have to make agility FUN for both you and your dog.
In this video you see me working to improve Ivy’s A Frame contacts. As Ivy gained confidence and enthusiasm, she started going faster and leaping over the yellow contact zones, which is a fault. I wanted to keep the confidence and enthusiasm but to get her to again take responsibility for hitting the contacts, even though she is going fast. I’m using treats as rewards when she does it right.
You’ll also see us using treats to reinforce her sits and stays on the table.
Part of making work play in agility is to Use ONLY positive feedback. In good Agility training, no corrections of any kind are allowed. The only negative feedback is the lack of a reward. It is so tempting to say “no” or even to frown when your partner makes a wrong step, but you have to bite your tongue. This rule is important if you want your partner to be enthusiastic and love the sport, performing with enthusiasm, speed, and gusto. This attitude is essential for a winning performance. You cannot criticize your teammate into a brilliant run. With Ivy I’ve even had to learn that I can’t criticize myself when we’re working because she interprets it as her failure.
A corollary of using only positive rewards to signal correct performance is that while you get to decide WHAT to reward, your partner gets to decide WHAT THE REWARDS ARE. In agility, Ivy loves grilled hot dogs, cheese, and garlic flavored chicken breast. She especially likes playing ball. Sometimes it is a pain to have to cook up the specific treats she loves, but I’ve learned that if I want the best performance, I have to make that investment in her. I can’t expect outstanding performance if I insist that she should be willing to work for kibble or milk bones!
Make sure you have “bonanza” rewards. It really makes an impression on them if you can deliver a big handful of something super-good when your partner performs extra special well.
Using only positive feedback with human organizations has been much harder for me than with Ivy, but as I have seen how incredibly powerful it is with her, I am compelled to experiment and discover how far I can take the analogy into practice.
With humans, the rewards can be as obvious as the “attagirls, attaboys” that we all use-or-one great benefit of working at a private institution like Cornell is that we can provide bonuses and other direct, tangible, personal rewards.
Just like dogs, individual people care about very different things. If you can find out what these things are, you can use them to reinforce outstanding performance. Some crave recognition; others would love to have lunch alone with you; some relish the opportunity to be in control of an aspect of their work; others care more about having fun toys to play with. Whatever it is, try to give it right at the time of the achievement, not 3 months later! Make the connection between the reward and the performance that earned it as direct, clear and explicit as you can.
Another aspect of the “Purely Positive” lesson is about control….
Everyone is happier and learns better when they have control. This is the same thing as “learner centered; learning by doing.” Dog training has progressed immensely in the last decade. It used to be that trainers employed coercion, punishment and physical compulsion to get dogs to “execute commands”.
In this video, you can see us practicing heeling.
Notice that there is no choke collar, or even a leash. Ivy is choosing to work with me and to heel because there is something good for her in it. If you’ve participated in old-style “jerk-the-choke-chain” obedience training, you can probably appreciate the joy and focus she exhibits in contrast to the way dogs act that have been trained with force and compulsion.
Now just about all successful trainers are using positive methods based on operant conditioning in which the trainer “catches them doing something right”, and marks and rewards that correct behavior. Learning is much faster, and of course, more fun for both dog and trainer. This approach produces a teammate who is enthusiastic about learning and behaves eagerly to problem-solve and find out what the trainer wants done rather than sitting back and waiting to be told or resisting being compelled.
While coaxing good performance from people and organizations is definitely more complex, the “catch them doing it right” approach carries immensely greater power than the alternative of repeatedly correcting mistakes.
If organizations or individual people aren’t performing the way you really want, it’s useful to mark and recognize performance that is even “close”, or in the right direction to what you really want. Then as you observe more of that, you’ll find opportunities to recognize even better performance and eventually shape it to become the result you want.
You can think of it in some ways as using a “pull” technology where the organization and individuals in it have control and choice and you’re creating a positive value proposition for them to come along with you. This contrasts with the sometimes used “push” technology where the boss pushes, or forces compliance. Human beings and human groups exhibit classical “opposition reflexes” in response to being pushed or jerked around. Maybe it is just because I’m not big enough to push very hard, but I have not found that approach to work well in either Agility or human leadership.
Lesson #3.The way you envision it is the way it will be.
In Agility, if there is something you have not trained well, or a new problem has surfaced and you are facing a competition, it is very easy to let your mind both in preparation for the trial and during the actual trial, dwell on the activity that concerns you.
As I mentioned before, I’ve recently been working with Ivy on speed and enthusiasm, and as she is improving on that she has started leaping with glee off the contact obstacles before touching the yellow zone. Of course every time we approach a contact obstacle I can’t help but start worrying about whether she’s going to fault it or not. I am tempted to baby-sit the contact anxiously. The problem with this is two-fold: First, it is well known that the mental images you play for yourself are perceived by other parts of your brain as if they were reality. So if you obsess over your potential failures, you’re actually rehearsing them and making them more likely. The second problem with dwelling on the possible failures is that you actually may communicate those wrong signals to your partner, causing what you’re hoping to avoid. The alternative that works much better for both reasons is to push the negative images of failure from your mind and rehearse over and over the ideal performance you seek.
In organizational terms, how many times have I found myself walking across campus to a potentially difficult meeting, with a frown on my face, my muscles all tight, and my mind just spinning about all the ways the meeting might go wrong. It makes a tangible difference if I walk into the meeting in this frame of mind instead of relaxed, smiling, and projecting confidence and warmth.
At another level, we all talk about leaders who are visionaries, or who “have vision.” The main value of having “a vision” is that you can effectively paint a positive picture for people of the world as you want it to be. If you can keep that picture clearly in people’s minds, it has a way of taking them over and thus becoming the reality.
There is a mantra in Agility: “You have to train the dog you hope to have; not the dog you think you do have”.
If you treat other people the way you want them to be instead of the way you perceive them to be (even if it is a big stretch!), you can increase the chances they’ll actually be what you want.
Lesson #4.You have to practice!
Agility can ONLY be learned through practice. While there are excellent books, journals and seminars, I’d wager that even if you read every one of them but never actually did it, you would fail. This is true of most complex behaviors, where the learning has to happen in the sensors and the muscles, not just in the brain.
You’ve already seen Ivy & me practicing, which we do nearly daily. In addition to that developmental practice, competition agility has another execution type practice, the course walk-through, in which the humans have about 10 minutes to experience the course first-hand and figure out their strategy for getting their dogs successfully through it.
In this video you see my training partners Mary Ann and Patricia consulting about the best approach to their course, and also you see me deep in concentration on my walk-through.
With organizations, the role of practice is certainly no less. People don’t become Directors and CIO’s straight out of high school, or generally, even straight out of graduate school. And you can’t learn it all from books. There is a lot experiential learning involved. We rarely face exactly the same situations or decisions over and over, but when you reflect back over the years, there are many general truths that do carry forward as you synthesize your perspective through practice.
I hate to bring up this example, but many of us at this conference have worked at more than one institution in our careers. I’m not necessarily advocating the “3-year CIO rotating door”, but I do believe that there is huge value to having occupied these roles in more than one institution. Back to the agility analogy, by seeing particular patterns of obstacles laid out in more than one course, you can see the generality of both the problem and the solutions, and this makes it much easier to analyze the next course you are faced with. I strongly advocate people in our roles serving as consultants for other institutions. This is the best opportunity I know to be able to “walk the course” on an issue at an arm’s length and test your own ideas about how to solve it.
Lesson #5.Your Partner’s Name is Your Most Powerful Word.
In agility, there are times when you really need to get your partner’s attention turned to you quickly.
In this video you can see how Ivy turns quickly back to me when I call her name…. You need this in competition when your run is going down in real time and your partner has lots of distractions competing for her attention. The one thing you can say that is most likely to get her attention is her name. This is especially true if you have always used her name in conjunction with good things, like pets, treats, and games and attention from you. I use Ivy’s name when I need to get her to turn quickly toward me, on a dime.
In the human world, a person’s name is an incredibly powerful way to “touch” them as well. It connects with them as an individual person, not just their job or position or role in the organization.
Lesson #6.Clear and precise direction keeps everyone on track.
In a trial situation, at the advanced levels, there will be “traps” deliberately set up to draw your dog off course like the tunnel right next to the A-frame here. You have literally fractions of seconds to communicate the correct choice before it is too late. If your direction is late or ambiguous, your partner can’t do the right thing, no matter how hard she is trying. Another factor is that individual dogs develop passion for certain obstacles, sometimes for reasons you can’t fathom, but mostly it is because of your having made that obstacle super-fun. When one of these obstacles is part of a trap, you have the additional problem of not only being clear but getting your request through to the dog in her state of passion toward one of the choices.
It isn’t easy to always be precise and clear in our human leadership roles either. There are “traps” out there and it is hard for you to even see them all, much less get your thoughts formulated in time to help others avoid falling into them. Our staff also develops their own passions for certain technology directions, and it isn’t easy always to understand these attachments or to penetrate them in the time available to get it right.
Part of making your directions clear involves taking into account the perspective of your partner.
In this video, you can see the simple performance of the dog running straight through a tunnel, first from an observer’s perspective, then from the dog’s, then from the handler’s. The world really does look different depending on where you’re sitting!
During an Agility run, the handler has to operate in three worlds at once. She, of course, has to occupy her own handler perspective on what is happening, watching her dog and the course, executing her initial strategy, and innovating on the fly as the run inevitably departs from her planned script. But she also has to see the course from her dog’s perspective in order to realize where the traps are, to understand what the dog might be thinking in the situation, what information she needs to provide, and also to understand how where the handler is affects the dog’s understanding of the situation. Good handlers also at the same time “see” the run “from the balcony”2, where the perspective of distance helps her understand where she is on the course and how current decisions should be made in light of her overall strategy and what is coming up next.
In the human context, leaders clearly benefit if they can be seeing the world through these same three perspectives.
Let’s face it – “leadership is an improvisational art.”2 You clearly have your vision, plans and strategy that help you execute your role, but what you do in any given day depends very much on the specific way issues and situations present themselves. You make those real-time decisions from your perspective as leader, but you also have to “see” the direction you want your organization to take from the perspective of the folks you are trying to lead. Only from that perspective can you frame the value propositions that will cause them to eagerly come along. It is also very important that you be able to exit from your and your staff’s perspectives and sit for awhile “in the balcony”2 to understand where the course is heading and how, when you go back into the fray, you may need to change in order to keep progress in tune with your high level strategy.
Another aspect of seeing from others’ perspective is that….your signals aren’t always what YOU think. Humans are verbal animals and when we start working with an agility dog, we think our verbal instructions to the dogs are what are conveying our intentions to them. We say “jump” as we approach a hurdle or “weave” as we approach the weave poles, just as we would teach a child about objects in a room. We also think the way we wave our arms around, pointing to things is communicating those things to our dogs, as if the concept of “pointing” held inherent meaning to a dog. [Have you ever seen a dog raise its paw to point out anything?] Later we learn that our dogs are actually taking their instructions from our body language. This came home to me astoundingly in a workshop when the instructor asked us to run the course silently. Ivy performed perfectly. “How did she do that?” Then they asked us to keep our hands behind our back and be silent. She still was perfect. “How could this be?”
I eventually learned that she was reading the angle of my feet and the direction my shoulders were pointing. What was astounding was that I had no idea there was useful information there. I had not taught her about feet and shoulders, but she sure had learned it! I thought I had taught her verbal objects and what I was pointing at, but she wasn’t using that information. Now that I know this, I can more consciously use these other channels.
Now, of course in communicating with other members of our own species we may be able to make better assumptions about the communications channels, but I have been led to reexamine some of these assumptions in my own world. For example, my plans, articles and speeches are “natural” leadership tools for me, and I have relied on them extensively as the way I communicate directions with my colleagues, but I sometimes do wonder whether they get any more information from these formal representations than my dog does from my yelling “A-Frame.” If not, what ARE they seeing/hearing from me? Is it possible that the actual way I interact with them in individual encounters conveys more about the direction we should be going than our plans, articles and speeches? If so, what does this say about how I should be spending my time?
Lesson #7.It’s OK to Fail.
Many dogs are very sensitive and want to always “get it right”, just like people. You have to work with this type of dog to help them feel confident enough that they’ll risk making a mistake. Handlers also need to be willing to try something difficult even if it risks failure. And sometimes the two partners unintentionally limit each other in this way!
This video shows Ivy’s weave pole performance at a trial, where she is always very slow, because she doesn’t want to make a mistake, and at home where she’s comfortable and knows that I’m there to throw the ball. I am working on taking the pressure out of the trial so she’ll be willing to risk failure.
When you’re trying to correct a failure, it’s important to always…
Quit while you’re ahead. You always want to end a workout on a positive, successful note so your partner will feel enthusiastic about trying again another day. If whatever you’re doing isn’t working, don’t keep at it. There is a rule that if you try something more than three times and your partner continues to get it wrong, you’re actually reinforcing the wrong response, just through practice. So try to go back to an easier task, get that right, celebrate that one, and then quit! Most dogs will think about it overnight and the next day things will work better.
In our leadership roles, sometimes we get working an issue and the other members of our team just “don’t get it”. It is so tempting to just keep pressing your perspective, because you’re sure it is the right one. I’ve found that if you persist too long, people harden to the idea and you actually make it less likely that they’ll come around. If you can back off and focus the group on something else for awhile, something where you’re all together on an easier piece of the problem, and then later cycle back to the difficult topic, you can also see a changed perspective. People’s understanding does develop in the meantime if you let it.
Another important point about learning through “failing” is that:
Mistakes are your fault. If your dog makes a mistake, it generally is because you either didn’t train well in the first place or weren’t clear in your directions.
In the group I train with, we have a thing called a “screw-up cookie”. When you’re trying something with your dog and it doesn’t work right, you quickly ask the dog to do something easy to earn a cookie. The name refers to the handler’s “screw up”. The idea is that YOU screwed up. You don’t want to penalize the dog or even let her think she caused the problem.
With agility and human leadership the best assumption to make is that the leader is at fault. Even if this isn’t always 100% true, it is by far the best set of assumptions to make in terms of building the future relationship with your partner. At a practical level, if you take full responsibility, then you have many options for improving performance. You can go back and retrain, you can proof the behavior in new environments, or you can analyze your own signals to see what was unclear. On the other hand, if you just blame your partner, there isn’t much you can do, and your team is “stuck”.
Lesson #8. Basic skills belong to them; direction belongs to you.
This clip shows my training partner, Patricia, and, first, her 10-month old Briard puppy, Gremlin learning the first step toward weave poles; then it shows her 6-year old Briard, Mischief, showing how Mischief owns this skill.
The trainer’s job is to teach the basic skill, build the dog’s confidence and ownership, and then step back and let them own it. By doing so the handler can move on to providing strategy and direction. Teams where the handler continues to baby-sit the weave pole entrances or the contacts are fundamentally handicapped because the handler is doing the dog’s job. The problem with that is, of course no human can be as good a dog as the dog can be, and also, when the human is trying to play that role, there is nobody to do the handler’s job.
Our individual staff and our organizations have to learn specific skills and we have to build management structures and processes. Putting those into place with an organization is the “teaching” phase in your relationship. You have to help them to “own” those basics so you can focus on strategy and direction.
Lesson #9.The prizes are theirs.
In Agility, the handler/trainer’s job is a “back room” operation.
Even though I don’t think Ivy cares one bit about them, all the prizes and titles are issued to her, not me. This does not say that among we humans, we don’t know who the best handlers are (we most certainly do, but we do let our dogs be the stars!)
In the organizational leadership arena, I think it is very important that the leader step to the rear and let the organization shine. There is nothing more de-motivating for staff than to have the CIO or manager running around hogging the limelight. Among us, of course, we all understand the important role the leader plays in the achievements of her organization.
Lesson #10.The Right Goal Depends on Who & Where You Are.
You might wonder “What is the best kind of dog to do Agility?” The answer is “It depends on what your goals in Agility are.”
In agility, if you want to garner the most national titles and if you’re personally up to the challenge of competition at that level, you’d be well advised to get a border collie. At the same time, many other kinds of dogs do win national championships! And even more teams with a huge variety of kinds of dogs achieve amazing things and have a wonderful time together. Like me, you may love another kind of dog and choose to take it as far as you can. The question isn’t what is the best kind of dog; its what do you want to accomplish in Agility?
On the human organization level, this is called “institutional strategy.” Are you trying to be center stage nationally as the first to implement new technology A or B or is your focus on your own institution and developing the IT services your institution needs as best you can? Even if your secret desire is to be the leading bleeding edge, do you personally have the skills to pull that off? And would your institution actually want that kind of organization if you developed it?
I hate to think of the number of Visiting Committee’s “IT Reviews” I’ve seen from various campuses in which either the issue or at least a major issue is the campus assessment that “Yeah, they do have a national reputation for doing cutting edge things, but here at home we are not getting our basic support needs met. Who’s setting the priorities around here?” This happens often enough that it makes me think that the question of “What kind of dog should we have?” should be asked more often and we leaders should pay more attention to what they hear in the answer.
These, then, are ten of the lessons I’ve learned with Ivy…
Let me end with a few more general observations:
First: Reflecting on my work with Ivy and thinking about how the lessons apply to my human leadership activities, I have for the first time understood clearly the two parts of leadership, Developmental and Directive.
The agility handler works with her dog over a period of years to teach the dog proper execution of obstacles, attention, and how to “read” the handler’s communications. In the process, the handler learns how to communicate effectively with her dog. And all the time she is perfecting her own ability to read the environment, and execute the best strategy in real time. This two-way, integrated learning process continues over years and becomes a cornerstone of the relationship between the dog and handler. This is Developmental Leadership.
In addition to the developmental process, the best Agility handlers are also very good at real-time execution. They really understand the game; they think well spatially, and they can “think like a dog”. {That’s a very positive statement!} They’re quick physically and mentally and make good decisions “on the fly” when things don’t go as they had originally planned. They’re good Directors.
Both of these observations have parallels in human leadership. In my opinion, we tend to give way too little weight to the developmental element. I have had the opportunity to serve as CIO at 3 major universities now. I have succeeded some excellent leaders who preceded me in these jobs. I have seen first-hand the measure of both their talents and shortcomings as leaders as I have been able to move smartly ahead, making easy progress in some arenas, building on the results of their successes in developing an organization, and held back severely because of their limitations in others. I actually think our greatest legacies as IT leaders are more in the organizations and institutions we leave behind not the systems and infrastructure we build. If we’ve done a good job, those people will continue to pay off for a long time.
I think most of us carry around an image of ourselves as leaders that is kind of like the image I have of myself running a course successfully with Ivy. It’s the “test”, the execution, that is our measure. And, of course, that is the ultimate test of the result of those years of working and learning together.
The second general thought I hope to leave you with is this: In the end agility and leadership have these lessons in common because they are both at the core about the same underlying processes: individuals learning together, communicating with each other, and building a relationship.
That relationship pays off in Agility competition with ribbons, titles, and certificates, but, even more important, is the hours of fun you have together and the amazing way you and this member of another species learn to communicate and share your lives in deeper and more meaningful ways.
When I reflect back now over nearly 20 years as a university leader, the clearest places where I think I see parallels with my work with Ivy are:
First, in terms of Learning. In Agility and human leadership, the fundamental process is learning. As leaders we have to understand how individuals and groups of individuals learn new things in order to effectively manage change. As I have become a nut about purely positive training methods in Agility, I have become keenly interested in how to better use purely positive methods with human organizations, and also in how to give over more control to the individuals in order to make learning more fun and work more like play.
Perhaps this isn’t as great an insight for some of you as it was for me. I was raised as an experimental scientist. The most highly valued personality trait in that profession is critical thinking. She who could most effectively find the flaw or mistake in design or analysis or reasoning or in the data, was the winner. It took me a long time to realize that as a leader just being the sharpest at figuring out what was wrong wasn’t the only or even the main thing necessary to getting it fixed!
About Communication. Communication seems on the surface like such a simple thing. “Just say it”. And yet, the process of learning to communicate effectively---really effectively---with your agility dog, or with an organization, consumes a lifetime.
Communication, of course, has two ends to it, which is what makes it so hard. It’s hard enough to get your end of it right, but that turns out to be of absolutely no communication value if it doesn’t get through to the receiver on the other end, and if the meaning the receiver attributes to it isn’t the same as the sender intends. And of course, you have no direct control over the making of meaning by the receiver end. All you can do is learn how it works by treating it as a black box: observing it and adjusting what you send, based on the result you get. This is why establishing effective communication takes time to develop. Both sender and receiver have to “tune” their signals and receptors and effectors to those of the other.
And, last, about Relationship. It was much easier for me to realize that Agility was all about my relationship with Ivy than it has been for me to realize that about my human leadership roles. It just took me a long time to finally get it through my thick skull that human leadership is as much about relationships as it is about ideas. Of course you have to have good ideas and understand the world you’re working with, but in the end, the investments you make in establishing trust and commitment to common goals with other people are what enables you to effectively negotiate the choppy waters together.
