Corporate Leadership Development & Retreats
Navigating the Post COVID-19 Era
Employees currently face the stress of global uncertainty, screen fatigue, social isolation, and challenges in remote syncing and effectiveness. Companies are facing a rise in mental health issues, and burnout, alongside longstanding areas for development around team communication and cohesion.
Together with our partner organization, Emergence Leadership Consulting, we custom design corporate retreats and leadership development programs that respond to these and other need areas. Across the board, our programs support personal and team well being, support effective communication and team cohesion, and grow individual and team leadership capabilities that are necessary in the modern workplace.
Build Leadership. Develop Teams. Cultivate Wellbeing.
Our half, full, and multi-day programs are hosted at our 55-acre ranch-retreat facility in Boulder, CO alongside several other unique partner venues in the Denver area. For convenience we regularly facilitate at ranch and retreat locations close to client locations in the U.S and abroad.
Program Details
Our programs blend the following alongside our partner, Emergence Leadership Consulting.
Leadership Development with Horses
Equine facilitated leadership sessions and debriefs take place on the ground inside the arena with our equine partners and in accompanying workshop spaces. Through individual and team groundwork exercises, they explore:
· Deepening relationships and building trust and cooperation as the foundation of leadership
· Surfacing difficult team dynamics and developing the versatility to skillfully navigate ambiguous and charged situations
· Emotional intelligence, decision-making, and collaborative leadership methods
· Immediate feedback that facilitates real-time adjustments in leadership style and behavior
· Cultivating tools that facilitate innovation and creative thinking
· Cultivating collective commitment and alignment around shared purpose
Corporate Team
Development
We partner with Emergence Leadership Consulting in offering pre, during, and post comprehensive offsite experiences that support wide ranging team development objectives.
Sample Additional Team Development Experiences:
· Executive team mission, vision, and/or purpose development
· Discovery and codifying of organizational values
· Foundational leadership experiential trainings (e.g. Communication Core Competencies, Coaching as a Manager, Delivering Feedback)
Executive team engagements often include formal assessment processes (Hogan Assessment, Leadership Circle, & MBTI), 360 Reviews, facilitated processes around mission, vision, values, and strategy, and ongoing coaching.
Corporate Wellness &
Retreat
Retreat experiences take place on the ranch-retreat facilities we facilitate out of and include a variety of experiences designed to support employees in cultivating well being, bonding with other members of their team, and having fun.
Some common experiences include:
Guided Creative Expression
Guided hiking
Mindfulness Experiences
Yoga
Experiential Team Building Games
Our ranch-retreat facility in Boulder, CO has extensive walking trails, quiet sitting areas, and a variety of other spaces that we utilize for wellness programs. Meals are either catered to the ranch or arranged at local restaurants. Clients typically lodge with partner hotels in the heart Boulder, CO.
Client Reflections
For all EquusLibere programs, no horse experience is necessary and no riding is involved.
Our Team
Bridgit Wald is a coach, organizational development consultant, and the founder of EquusLibere. She custom-curates programming oriented around individual and team leadership development, employee engagement, and the cultivation of thriving, innovative workplace cultures. She has trained extensively in the equine facilitated learning space and is the lead facilitator for EquusLibere programs. Her approaches to coaching, facilitation, and program design draw heavily on her training in Design Thinking, Theory U, and regenerative systems frameworks, along with the study and practice of embodied leadership frameworks. She serves clients from a wide range of sectors, from non-profits and educational institutions to Fortune 100. She holds a B.A from McGill University in Montreal, QC. Organizational short list includes Google, Lego, and the University of Colorado.
Robin brings 30+ years of experience as an executive coach, change agent, group facilitator and thought leader. For nine years, Robin was Research Director at Deloitte, where she led the firm’s global research on the human aspects of organizational performance. Prior to Deloitte, Robin led global production as Vice-President of Cole-Haan, a subsidiary of Nike. She has immersed in dozens of leading-edge methodologies – forever seeking the most powerful approaches to foster self-awareness, leadership, innovation and transformational growth. She serves as a trusted guide through transformational change, where territory is unfamiliar and answers are unclear. In addition to growing up immersed in the world of horses, she holds a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Florida, an M.A. in International Economic Policy from Columbia University. Organizational short list includes Microsoft, ABB, HP, IBM, Eli Lilly, Fujitsu, Techstars, and IDEO.
Over her 30+ year career at Fortune 50 company Procter & Gamble, Heidi led global innovation for brands which accounted cumulatively for over $100 Billion in sales. As a senior executive, she led thousands of people across Europe, North and South America and Asia, consistently creating high performance, socially and emotionally intelligent teams who delivered their stretching goals. Favoring a servant leader, inclusive, relationship-supporting, balanced, transparent and action-oriented, pragmatic approach, Heidi has enabled excellent workplace culture, and highly engaged, productive global and remote teams. Since her time at P&G Heidi has earned additional certifications in organizational human system mapping and Matrixworks group facilitation and she currently serves as an executive coach and passionate facilitator of human systems assessment and transformation. Organizational short list includes Proctor & Gamble, NSIDC, and Coty.
Schedule a Complimentary Consultation
Why Partner with Horses?
For over 56 million years, horses have roamed in herds across the planet. Long before their partnership with humans began 6,000 years ago, horses were one of the most successful mammals due to their agility, sensitivity, sociability, and resilience.
Equine Facilitated Learning is an experiential learning approach that partners individuals and organizational teams with horses for learning and development. The primary focus of equine facilitated learning is relational problem solving and immediate and actionable feedback from the horses facilitates the integration of new leadership styles and behaviors in real-time.
Through a series of groundwork exercises, participants accomplish tasks that require communication, cooperation, and the ability to draw on all team members' resources. The result is more flexible teams that embrace and respond to new and unpredictable challenges with greater ease.
Individual team members develop their emotional intelligence, decision- making skills, and other leadership capacities. They also learn to magnify presence, impact, and influence as well as identify blind spots and obstacles to powerful leadership.
Core Development Areas During Leadership Development Sessions:
Self-Regulation
Horses hearts are 4-5 size the times of human hearts and scientific research shows that the frequency of their heart rates positively influences our bodies. Time spent with horses raises our Heart Rate Variability, an indicator that correlates to increased regulation in our nervous systems, higher immunity, and reduced depression and anxiety. The therapeutic aspects of time with horses combine with the joys of connection and building relationship to calm, balance, and inspire. It is a powerful antidote to the stressors and isolation present in employees at this time.
Connection
Leaders, equine and human, create a strong connection with those they serve by being acutely aware of and responding to the cues and needs of their followers. As prey animals, horses have a heightened sense of hyper vigilance. They must feel we are looking after their safety and have their best interests in mind to trust our leadership. Horses do not care about who we are; they only care about how we are. They want us to show up in a consistent, clear way that enables them to relax into and follow our leadership. Through keen perception, perpetual awareness about the comfort level of the horse, and making clear, non-predatory requests, we can modify our behavior to act in ways that strengthen the relationship and increase collaboration.
Congruence
Leaders, both equine and human, earn trust by being congruent and demonstrating integrity by ‘walking their talk.’ Horses give us feedback when we are emotionally incongruent, i.e., hiding an emotion and pretending to feel something else. With a horse, it is much safer and productive to be honest, admit vulnerability, and become congruent on both the emotional and physical levels. Pretending makes horses nervous. Horses will only willingly follow our lead when our actions consistently align with our intentions. Generally, the instant we become congruent and act with authenticity the horse relaxes and cooperates with our requests with ease.
Feedback
Horses provide feedback on every action we take and every emotion we hold. Horses are constantly interpreting and responding to feedback in both their internal herd and external environments. They rely on their capacity to give and receive feedback to make moment by moment decisions that allow the herd to stay safe. This feedback is devoid of the judgment, criticism, and projection that is common in human communication. In order to be successful in communicating with horses, we must learn to receive honest, in the moment feedback and to take different actions based on that feedback.
Somatic Intelligence
Powerful leadership is built on the foundation of somatic intelligence, the ability to integrate and respond to information at the mental (IQ), emotional (EQ) and physical levels (PQ). Horses have a high physical intelligence with an almost 360-degree awareness of spatial relationships. This allows them to be highly perceptive and responsive to the environment. Working with horses supports us in developing and integrating IQ, EQ, and PQ. Successful partnership requires we enhance our capacity to take in vast sensory information from stimuli in the environment and act on it in an adaptive manner.
Our Ranch-Retreat Facility
We operate out of Wildsong Ranch, a 55 acre ranch-retreat facility that has beautiful walking paths, ponds, and sitting areas in which we spend time being with the horses and connecting to the natural world. This calm, engaged time in nature helps participants to find new inner and outer space away from all of the layers of the remote working experience. These places of refuge, space, and inner safety support the cultivation of well being and reserves of strength within our participants.
Wildsong Ranch has indoor air conditioned and heated workshops spaces, private coaching offices, a heated indoor arena, and various outdoor horse facilities. Due to the moderate climate of Boulder, CO and heated indoor spaces, we run sessions all year round out of Colorado.
Explore some of our partner sites and development experiences in Boulder, CO
Meet Our Herd
We select horses for each program from a 28-horse herd that are best suited in unique personality for each individual client group. Through observation of the herd as a whole, participants learn about the prey animal instincts we all share, the innate intelligences of horse and human bodies, and the ways in which the herd leadership structure can teach and inform human systems. Below are some photos of our wonderful equine partners enjoying life in the herd.
