This last weekend I attended the IL Horse Fair.  I had the opportunity to watch the magic of Guy McLean train a horse.  He was able to get a never ridden, energetic horse to walk, trot, canter, back, side pass, do complete circles and more in less than three hours under saddle.  For you non-horse people, this is truly amazing.

Natural horsemanship is a very popular way to train horses.  Basically, it uses reassurance over punishment, you create a rapport with your horse, you use communication techniques derived from observation based on how horses communicate with each other, it is kind and gentle and pressure and release is used to get a horse to do something they might never do naturally.  What if you used these techniques in your world?

Guy claims to use the following four things to teach a ½ ton animal to do what he wants:

1. Knowledge

Guy has been working with horses from before he could walk.  I often talk of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory.  Guy has this beat. What if you approached life with curiosity and an insatiable desire to gather knowledge?

2. Compassion

Guy’s attitude is wonderful.  He is truly an expert, yet does it with tremendous humility.  The best horse people I know rarely blame a horse when something goes wrong.  They know it is truly a human error.  If the horse doesn’t do what you want then you are not asking correctly.  When Guy is training and the horse does not do as planned, you will hear him say something like, “oh sweetie, I guess we will do something else today.”  What if when someone doesn’t do what you want you look in the mirror instead of blaming and approach them with tenderness?

3. Patience

Guy has a philosophy of: if the horse never fights against you, it will never fight for you.  Often a horse will want to back when he wants to go forward.  Instead of punishing the horse, Guy will change his plan and work on backing instead.  He knows too much punishment could ruin the trust he is trying to build in the relationship.  If a horse trusts you it will eventually do almost anything you ask of it.   With people this is one of my biggest struggles.  I tend to lack patience.  I hope my horse training seeps through in my people world which it often does.

4. Imagination

Guy talks of finding a better way.  He thinks tradition can be both good and bad.  He does not follow the status quo.  He experiments, listens and comes up with his own technique.  Horses will teach you problem solving.  When horse training, we usually enter the training session with a plan.  However, we all know the one thing you can count on in planning is that the plan will change.  With horse training you have to learn to go with the flow.  When my challenging Andalsuian, Lexi, wants to dance around the trail instead of having a nice leisurely ride,  I often use that opportunity to teach her to dance instead.  I give a leg cue with pressure and let her do what she wanted to do in the first place.  Later she will hopefully understand that language and we can dance when I ask for it.  Is there a way to use this idea in your people world?

I think the world often sees cowboys as just tough and hard.  Yet, the truly amazing cowboys are tender, patient, kind and compassionate.  I’ve seen more poetry written by cowboys than many other professions I hang with.  I think it takes heart to write poetry.  You can see some of Guy’s poem’s here.

As I was walking around the horse fair this weekend, I pulled out my warm my ears head band and it was covered in hay.  I told the cowboy walking near me that everything I have seems to be covered in hay this time of year.  He said, “that’s a sign of a life well lived.”  I think it’s better than sitting on the couch.

Do you like sales?  Most people say “no”  yet, we all sell everyday.  We attempt to move people to our viewpoint, convince our boss, get our kids to do their homework, encourage healthy behavior, pitch our idea, etc.  I am currently listening to Dan Pink’s book, To Sell is Human.  His chapter on attunement (the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes) struck home with me.  My management team and I have worked on improving our emotional intelligence over the years.  Several of us had low empathy scores on our EQ testing.  Empathy, similar to attunement, is the ability to read the emotions of others.  Having these skills is important in building a connection with others and increasing trust.  It is key to building good relationships.

What can you do to improve your attunement?  Daniel Pink suggests:

1. Increase your humility.
2. Improve your Emotional Intelligence.
3. Be a Chameleon (mimic and find commonalities with others).

What are some behaviors you can work on to improve your empathy?

1. Start a conversation.  A good starter question is, “where are you from?”
2. Find something in common with the other person.
3. Improve your understanding of group dynamics.
4. Improve your listening skills.
5. Improve your self awareness.
6. Don’t judge.

I think one of the most important behaviors is to improve your listening skills.  Listening is not a passive behavior.  It takes effort.  You have to clear your mind of what you want to say and truly take in what you are hearing.  Here are some things you can do to listen better:

1. Repeat back snippets of the speaker.
2. Ask clarifying questions and stay curious.
3. Talk less.
4. Don’t interrupt.
5. Don’t offer advice – remember people only want advice that they ask for or pay for.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” To Kill a Mockingbird, spoken by Atticus Finch.

Today’s guest blogger is Rick Riccio. Rick is the owner of Riccio Exhibit Services and is now in his 18^th year of teaching History Museum Exhibits to graduate students in the Historical Administration (HA) Program at Eastern Illinois University. He has worked on museum exhibitions in one manner or another since 1974. Each of the exhibitions with which he has been involved has had its unique challenges and problems to solve. Rick has guest blogged for us before.  You can read his previous posts regarding the process he guides his students through so they understand what is involved when creating exhibits here and here.

After just reading “No Place like Home” by Dan Erickson in the Jan./Feb. 2013 issue of Museum, I feel compelled to respond. Having been on exhibit staffs of museums myself, I agree with him that museums should not eliminate exhibit staff positions. But his reasons pit for-profit companies against in-house staff, which I think misrepresents both. His main argument for producing exhibits in-house instead of outsourcing is the issue of “quality.” In-house staff, he argues, can produce better quality exhibits than commercial firms for two reasons; one, exhibit companies need to make a profit and two, museums (and their staff) have better access to specimens and information. Erickson has worked for both commercial firms and a university museum. When tasked with making a small prehistoric shark model with the commercial firm, he was given basic book illustrations and two weeks to complete the project. Asked to produce a similar model as the university museum employee, he accessed fossil references at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH), consulted with the vertebrate fossil curator there, and invested a couple hundred hours on the project. The problem with this comparison is that same information at the CMNH is available to anyone with a serious research project. You don’t have to be a member of a university museum staff. Furthermore, if a design company were only interested in the profit margin, they wouldn’t stay in business for long. There are good reasons for choosing to produce exhibits or some exhibit components in-house, but the main reasons lie with the particular skill sets of your staff, and any exhibit manager should know what her staff is capable of accomplishing in-house and what tasks need to be out-sourced. Even commercial firms are more qualified for certain exhibit services than others. If a shark model is needed, go to those firms skilled in that kind of exhibit fabrication. There may be exhibit firms out there that don’t work closely with museum staff, but that is not typical of the industry. Most museum staff would feel insulted at the least, if they were not closely involved in the exhibit development process.

Museum staff should, as Erickson points out, share their expertise with other institutions, but this arena of cooperative engagement is not limited to museum staff. Just look at posts on listservs like the one NAME hosts, and you will see that solutions to problems come from exhibitors in both the non-profit and for-profit worlds. Exhibit firms want to develop long-term relationships with their clients. My firm created epoxy resin Indian house models for a state historical society so they could distribute them to their historic sites. We then gave the molds to the museum and instructed their exhibit staff how to make additional casts if they desired.

I agree with the author that museum exhibit staff are underutilized at many museums, and he offers creative ways that other departments can tap their varied skills. But the in-house vs. outsource issue is not an either/or proposition. They are two sides of the same coin, and museums are better served when the option for either choice is kept open.

Have you ever noticed how you operate in your business/work life often applies to your personal life too? Do you learn things that benefit you at work and then help you in your personal life and vice versa? It seems if you were to generalize most issues at work they come down to a communication problem. I believe that is too broad of a categorization. The problem you identify is the problem you solve. We try to be more specific and offer clarification when problems arise. This has lead to much work on how to specifically improve our operating procedures. Couples and families also establish standard operating procedures. When do you go to bed, when and what do you eat, how do you handle illness, how do you handle vacations, how are household tasks done, what do you do on holidays, etc.

Point of View
One of the best ways to improve communication is to be open minded and willing to truly listen to the other person’s point of view. They may see things very different than you or do things very different than you. Don’t judge the way they see things. And you have to be open to considering their way of looking at the world. Maybe making a change for them is not that big a deal and can improve operations.

We recently had a diagram sent to us from a client. Several of us were looking at it and instantly had a different point of view at first observation. My point of view, was dang it, our client did a lot of work on this and that is not the customer service I want us to provide. My art director looked at it and thought we need to improve our quality on this and get on it right away. My accountant looked at it and thought, boy this is going to cost us a lot of money. We all laughed when we realized our different point of views. Putting all of those together and out on the table makes us a better team.

My boyfriend and I had different approaches on when to communicate a concern. I feel more clear headed after a night of sleep. So I often brought up issues first thing in the morning. It takes him a bit more time for him to wake up and think about big things. It also isn’t as productive for us at work if we start the day with an issue. I now attempt to not throw out big concerns in the mornings.

One of my clients after much asking on what we could improve said the hardest thing for them was contract negotiation. Since we do it often it does not bother us to talk about contract requirements. Yet, we don’t want to start the relationship out tense with any client. We have attempted to make this process more palatable for our clients.

Standard Operating Procedure
All this willingness to have conversations, put the issues out on the table and be willing to make a change leads to better operating procedures whether it is at work or home. These operating procedures might be as simple as what temperature will we keep the room to how will we have conversations.

As an example, maybe you like the temperature to be 72 and others like it at 65. Can you make a change to make most people happy? At TSI, the PMO is strict about keeping doors closed to keep that room warm. Pete sits near a drafty wall and has adapted by wearing warmer clothes. At my house I like it warm, my guy likes it cool at his house. I wear sweatshirts when I go to his house.

If issues and new ways to operate are not discussed relationships can deteriorate. What operating procedures have you negotiated to make your life easier?

21 Thought Provoking Tidbits

I was struggling for a topic for today’s blog.  So, I decided to flip through some of my notebooks.  I have notebooks all over the place so I can write down what I learned, thoughts and so forth.  Now with an iPad, I kind of miss my habit of notebooks, they have slipped lately.  Yet, I refer back to them often.  I encourage it.  I decided to just give you some tidbits from one of my notebooks.  I’ll give you a bunch of one liners that will hopefully be thought provoking.

1. In the absence of information, people make it up.
2. All people are social or pack animals.
3. If you don’t know who you are in bed with.  You don’t know if you are making love or getting screwed.
4. There are no surprises in life; you just weren’t paying attention.
5. Maximize clarity by being slow to understand.
6. The problem you name is the problem you solve.
7. Confrontation is merely a search for the truth.  Do it early, easy and often.
8. The reason for divorce is there on the first date.
9. The care of rivers is not a matter of rivers, but of the human heart. – Jenaka Shozo
10. Never launch into a project without a mission.
11. It’s not instruction, but provocation.
12. You are mature when you do the right thing.
13. Are you emotionally mature enough to look in the mirror?
14. You are either a leader or you are being led.
15. What is the worst decision you made in the last five years?
16. Give me an example of when you paid the price to maintain integrity?
17. It is easier to change people than it is to change culture.
18. You are what you tolerate.
19. Stick to your values.  Say, “we’ll miss you” if necessary.
20. Your journey as a leader begins when you understand who you are, what you care about and why you do what you do.
21. When you hire someone, you hire the group they came from.

Which one is your favorite?

We often keep track of the pithy things we say in meetings.  Or maybe they are just silly.  Yet, humor is culture too and I find them to be funny sometimes.  Here are a few from some of my meetings.

1. Beyond this, I’m incompetent.
2. Sell crazy somewhere else.
3. Did you cut your own hair?
4. They want their luck buttered.  Attributed to Mark Twain.
5. My favorite thing about this group is lunch.

Do you carry notebooks with you?