The Dog Whisperer Pattern

Have you seen this show on television? If so, you might already know the punch line. If not, it’s a show that involves a dog trainer coming into someone’s home to fix a problem dog.

Behavioral issues such as aggression, being territorial, insubordination/biting, and severe anxiety are typical of those manifest in dogs featured on the show. And you know what? It’s (almost) never the dog’s fault. The “problem” dog is usually being miscommunicated with and mismanaged- in almost every single case. The “dog” whisperer ultimately ends up coaching the owners to behave correctly as leaders of the pack as much as fixing any inherent problem in the pooch. Change the behavior of those in control, change the behavior of the pack.

There is an object lesson in this pattern for managers and leaders. If you see unwanted behavior in your organization- take a hard look at what you are communicating and how you are communicating it.

In the show, there are a finite set of “cures” for most ills as dog psychology is fairly well understood. In the people world however, the dynamics of teams and complexity of human behavior means that some level of root cause discovery has to be performed. It’s not as easy to say, behavior x is cured with process y.

Often, this means getting an external viewpoint to understand the environment objectively. Just as the dog whisperer reveals to the problem dog owners behaviors that they had no idea were problematic, an objective assessment of the organization can yield many pathways to unblock your vision of success and put your team on the high performance track.

Are you ready to take your leadership, your team, and your organization to the next level? Ten Mile Square has expertise performing such assessments and helping leaders to address these type of issues- resulting in stronger leadership with better aligned, higher performance teams.