Horses set to help business professionals reach full potential

A Yorkshire-based company is trying to gallop its way to success by adopting a rather unusual way to teach businesses how to make their staff reach full potential.

Unbridled Success Retreats combines Talent Dynamics, a business development tool, with one-to-one coaching from horses in order to help individuals and teams learn more about themselves, their leadership style, how they communicate with others and the impact they create.

This unique strategy to getting the most out of employees is in line with the recently released Deloittes Global Human Capital Trends for 2015 report, which states that global organisations must form a ‘new world of work’, one that needs ‘bold and innovative thinking’.

The report shows that 78% of company leaders cite culture, engagement and leadership as their key challenges for 2015.

Julia Felton of Business HorsePower, who runs Unbridled Success Retreats, believes her horse coaching approach could be groundbreaking amongst businesses.

Julia said: “Horses have a unique ability to mirror and react to an individual’s body language and behaviour. They can sense whether someone expresses confidence, trust, authenticity, openness and positive energy.

“As a herd animal, they long for leadership and will respond to non-verbal body language to decide who to follow. I combine this with the Talent Dynamics assessment tool so that business teams can gain understanding and insight into their natural abilities and so work more productively together.

“My programme isn’t a team building fun day out on horseback. In fact workshop participants don’t ride the horses at all,’ says Felton. ‘It goes much deeper than a corporate away day. Participants have to lead the horses through a series of challenges. How they do this gives both themselves and their team members deep insight into the way they lead and impact others. I’ve never run a workshop where the attendees are not still talking about the event months afterwards.”

The programme is run from a yard near Whixley, North Yorkshire, although programmes can also be run from other locations across the UK and Europe.