Leadership Team Building Games

All around the world, the trend of leadership team building games and activities have grown. Every organization considers leadership management training exercises to be extremely useful. This activity is now seen as a sign of effective leadership to unleash creativity, lateral thinking and interactivity amongst employees.

 

Benefits of leadership management training exercises:

• These activities help employees to see things differently and use alternate thinking styles.
• Leadership team building games and exercises help to stimulate the brain. Besides this, it improves retention of ideas and increases fun and enjoyment all around.
• Reviews and discussions are extremely useful to mould or change employees’ perceptions on relationship issues at the work place.
• The Leadership team building activities become ice breakers and fortify team work and team understanding.
• Employees are encouraged to show their dormant effective leadership skills during these exercises.

 

Here are some simple exercises to start with:

 

Animal Favorites

Give the employees a list of animals comprising of lion, dog, parrot and elephant. Each animal represents a list of specific qualities that you can maintain in a list.

 

Ask the employees to rank the animals individually in order of their personal preference. The gist of this exercise is to prompt the employees to assess, identify and consider their own self-perceptions. In this activity, there is no right answer or wrong answer as such.

 

Then, when every one is finished, you can emphasize that the exercise is mostly for fun. The second goal is to provoke inner reflection and discussion.

 

Numeric Value

 

Each numeral represents a value as given below:

• How you want others who are significant in your life to perceive you
• How you think others actually perceive you
• How you would like to be perceived by others in future
• How you truly want to be – without worrying about what others in your life think about you

 

Interpretation

Let’s say someone lists order of preference as: Lion, elephant, dog and parrot. It means the person wants others to perceive him with lion like qualities. These qualities are dominance, detachment, aloofness, decisive and proactive. The person however believes he is perceived by others with elephant like qualities. These qualities are passive nature, tolerance, calm, strong, controlled and so on.

 

Discussion Points

So you can formulate the following discussion points for employees to discuss after they have all gone through their lists:

• To what extent do we mould our self-image and goals based on other people’s opinions?
• To what extent do we understand how we are actually perceived by others?
• To what extent do other people’s opinions matter to us?
• Should the influence of the people around us affect what we want to be in future?
• If you prefer to list different animals, what would the list read like? What new things would it reveal to you about yourself?

 

Wear the Thinking Hat

End the activity with emphasis on the fact that accuracy of the result is not important. What is important is thinking about who we are and what we want to be.

 

This is actually a simple exercise. But it is highly effective because it lifts employees out of habit. It questions their complacency, encourages deep evaluation of personal goals, and work values.

 

It is also ideal to encourage post-discussion or activity feedback. The point of these discussions is to revive the ‘refreshness’ factor at the work place with renewed dynamism.

 

Simply put, leadership team buildings games, for employees, are a great way to kick start the thinking process with creative, fun filled dynamism. It lets them know that deep within; there is a leader in each one, waiting to emerge.