Giving Feedback
Training Exercises and Resources

This exercise helps delegates explore the concept of temperament, understand what it means, how it is formed and how it can influence their emotional intelligence. Temperament refers to aspects of an individual’s personality that are mainly biological or innate as opposed to learned. Temperament is basically life-long traits that we have acquired early on in life or simply inherited. Here are some examples:

• “I am shy in social settings. I feel uncomfortable if I suddenly find myself at the centre of attention. I guess it comes from my childhood when I was brought up to be a quiet kid.”
• “I was never very sporty or physical when I was growing up so engaging in sports these days doesn’t appeal to me much. Where I grow up, it was frowned upon for girls to do sports.”
• “I like talking. If I enter a room and it is quiet I have the strongest urge to talk and get everyone to listen. I got this from my mom I guess...” [Carries on talking for a while until stopped!]
• “I have always been sporty, even though I was a girl I always liked any sport even if they were predominantly for boys. I guess I got this from my dad who was very athletic.”

In this exercise, delegates explore the nature of their temperament and discuss this with others to better understand what it means.

In this exercise, delegates practice giving precise and useful instructions. It helps with communication skills, especially within teams where people work closely with each other. Delegates also learn the value of feedback and how lack of feedback can slow down the communication process significantly.

This exercise is different from the standard exercises in this area. In a standard exercise, a delegate is supposed to describe a diagram and the other person is supposed to draw it based on the descriptions given. In some variations of this exercise, it is often the case that the describer can see what the illustrator is drawing and provide corrective feedback. In addition, the describer is also usually told not to talk directly what the image is and instead just describe it.

In this exercise, the difference is that the describer cannot see what is being drawn so can only respond to questions asked by the person who is drawing. In addition, there is no restriction on the type of communication made. For example, if the diagram is a square and the describer is supposed to explain it, he can simple say it is a “square” rather than explaining the shapes such as “4 equal lines connecting to each other at right angles” and then continue to expand on this to make sure the illustrator gets it right.

As a trainer, this exercise gives you an opportunity to cover topics such as making assumptions, how to give precise and clear instructions and how to help when a person cannot see what the other person is doing and needs to rely purely on the quality of the communication.

At the end of a training course, you should always allocate time so that delegates can review what they have learned in the course so you can get a chance to reinforce key lessons. In addition, this is also a good opportunity to provide feedback. When this feedback is delivered by other delegates it can be even more effective. Hence, this exercise is designed to help delegates receive positive affirmations, reinforce learning on those areas and make the experience more memorable.

This activity can be used for coaching skills or making conversations. The basic principle behind the activity is simple and the aim is to provide an easy structure to follow. Use this activity where you need to get delegates to talk to each other about a given topic or a topic of their choice. It is also useful for mentoring or life coaching. You can also use it to get the delegate practice questioning and listening skills.

This activity helps delegates understand the difference between open and closed questions. It is a rather simple exercise however if executed well it can lead to a profound insight. Those people who tend to ask closed questions too often would benefit the most as they can see that they would get a lot more information if they focused on asking open questions. Before going through this activity, you will need to cover what open and closed questions are. Here are some quick examples:

Example of a closed question:

• “Did you book the flight ticket for me?”

Example of an open question:

• “When is the flight ticket booked for?”

Note that both types are useful; open questions are useful for information gathering while closed questions are good for fact checking. The main point to focus on in this exercise is that open questions lead to more information.

You can use this teambuilding exercise to help delegates discover the strengths and weaknesses of their team. The exercise encourages individual thinking without pressure while at the same time helps the team to work together to address potential issues. The exercise focuses on both positive and negative aspects of the team so it is well-balanced. It also allows the team to see if any particular area is considered problematic by many team members which then indicates the scale of the issue. This in turn can lead the team to address the issue with high priority.

In this creative writing exercise, delegates get to write a short piece about an interaction between a teacher and a student where the teacher learns something from the student. This is of course contrary to the role of a teacher but it is actually more common than one might think. It requires thinking beyond the direct lesson to see what a teacher can learn while teaching a student.

While managing a team you may give a series of tasks to various team members. Each time you delegate a task, you expect a member to perform and deliver results. This leads to the concept of accountability. A well-functioning team must be held accountable for what it does. This exercise is designed to help increase accountability of team members by providing a practical system that can be implemented and used on a daily basis.

Note that this is not an exercise to go through in a training course; instead it is a system to implement. The following description covers the application which can be used for a team with any background or industry.

This is an exercise to help team members discover their common interests and skills as well recognising each person’s unique skills and experiences. The setup is quite simple and you can easily customise it to focus on a specific idea based on your training needs. It can be used for both young and mature teams.

The power of this exercise is that it indirectly shows that there can be a lot of similarities between people in a team which will help to bring them closer together as they will acknowledge these similarities. In contrast, they also get to recognise their differences and appreciate that these differences lead to unique contributions which would ultimately make the team more powerful and creative.

Use this exercise to motivate people and help them to view an experience differently. This exercise is fairly simple to execute and yet quite effective. The essence of the exercise is to show that even the most negative experiences can be quite educational and useful in the long run and that if one does not see the benefits, others might be able to see it and bring it to their attention. This exercise is also useful to practice improving emotional intelligence and empathising with others.