01/07/2025
Leadership: a topic you see a lot in the social media dog training sphere with not a whole lot of explanation. Here’s one trait every good leader has that’s in scarcity, weather it’s in the work place or dog ownership:
Often, you have two types of leaders:
1. Ones that only correct and react when something bad happens (these are the worse) these are the “leaders” you often only see when something has gone wrong. While addressing the bad is important, there’s a lot more to being a leader than that.
2. The ones that only reward the good and never address the negative, this has its benefits of course but once again - a lot of negatives such as poor actions never getting addressed. The idea that you can just reward good behaviour and that will somehow eliminate the bad is nonsense.
Now, the best leaders:
3. The ones that have a combination of both. The leaders that correct when something goes wrong but they also address and reward when something goes well. These tend to be the leaders that are actually respected and looked up to. This also makes communication very clear for dogs.
Imagine you’re doing a math worksheet in school, your teacher comes over and says “Look how many you got wrong” and corrects them for you or they they go “You got half of those right, good job” and walk away. The best teacher is the one that’s going to say “You did a great job on these questions here, but here’s how we fix the ones we made errors on”. We all prefer the last one.
Remember, dogs didn’t choose to be here - we brought them into our little human world and it’s up to us to help navigate them through this terrain. The best way to do that is clear communication through rewards and consequences. That could be something as simple as a “no” and a pat on the head when they do it right.
