Leadership
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.

Self-awareness is one of the important competencies within emotional intelligence. Self-awareness is about understanding your strengths, limitations, attitudes, values and motivations. In this exercise, delegates have an opportunity to reflect on their values and see exactly what matters to them the most. Self-awareness helps people understand what they believe now and how this might have changed from the past. Hence, this exercise can be conducted periodically, such as once a year, and you can expect to get different results each time. Comparison of these results on their own can be quite educational and further help to increase self-awareness.

This is a team building exercise where group members need to solve a problem together. Only two people are involved in the actual task and they cannot be replaced. Other team members should provide support or suggest solutions for the two people to follow through. As a result, this exercise provides ample opportunities to see how teams approach a given problem, communicate ideas and solve problems.

In this team building exercise, delegates work together to complete a task. It requires concentration, planning and fast execution. Here, the decisions made by one team can affect the performance of another so planning has to be as dynamic as the changing environment. This exercise is ideal to train people on quick decision making, leadership, persuasion skills and team work.

This is a team building exercise where delegates need to solve a problem while deprived of a particular sense. The purpose is to see how the group self-organises, communicates, understands what needs to be done to achieve the goal and executes their plan efficiently. This exercise is ideal for large groups.

This is an entertaining and educational activity designed to test a group of people on their creativity as well as teamwork. The task involves producing a video. However, the video production is only an excuse to see how a team goes about a common task where several distinct roles are involved. There is a strict deadline, limited resources and a sense of competition with other teams.

The activity can be used to explore many subjects on interpersonal skills such as leadership, resource management, conflict management, coordination, teamwork, reaching deadlines, accepting limited resources and a focused approach to producing results. It is also ideal for courses on public speaking and presentation 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.

In this team building exercise teams work together on a common problem. The problem is intentionally designed to be simple to understand though when several people are involved it may not be as obvious as on how to go through it. The exercise will highlight weaknesses and strengths. To succeed a team must work cooperatively and with foresight.

This exercise is also ideal to examine how a group of people self-organise, assign a leader or approach a problem solving task under pressure.

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.

This is a great teambuilding exercise that helps to cover several areas on leadership, teamwork and problem solving. You can run it like a competitive game for a large group. Allow the delegates go through the exercise several times to see if they can become better at the task. In the process they can learn how to work as a team towards a common objective.

The task is also fun to perform so it can be used as an energiser or even as a fun exercise to run during seminars and conferences. It provides a shared experience and an opportunity for people to have a laugh while also being able to address subjects related to teams and task completion.