Every organization needs leadership training to prepare its employees to be ready if one day they are chosen to become supervisors or managers. Even though they don't get a certain position, at least they can retain a lot of leadership skills that they can use in their lives. To build a leadership spirit in employees, you need to carry out leadership activities and do them regularly in the office. The activities include games, training, and challenges for employee development and building team spirit.
We have summarized the best exercises to help employees have leadership training, hone their leadership skills, and become good leaders.
What are leadership games?
Leadership games are activities and challenges that are fun but effective to help players hone leadership essential skills and improve their leadership knowledge. Becoming a good leader requires a lot of practice, theoretical knowledge and also in real-world scenarios. Sometimes learning about leadership will feel easy when we read books or listen to it from mentors, but it will be difficult if we do it in a work environment. With leadership games, employees can learn a lot about leadership in fun ways.
How do you make leadership training fun?
Creating leadership activities in fun ways is good to make it easier for employees to carry out and absorb important information. But you must be able to ensure that the activity is effective, your team is enthusiastic when doing something fun.
The most essential thing before doing leadership games or activities is to know your objectives. You must understand what you want to achieve, what learning outcomes you want your team to gain from the activities. You need to measure the progress and feedback, align the game with your leadership development strategy. Having clear objectives can help employees to focus on the game and ensure they understand what they are learning.
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To keep the activities fun while learning, you need to choose the right format. For example, some leadership games will be more exciting if played outside rather than in the office. You can set a special time for some activities such as weekends or work anniversaries. Ensuring employees carry out activities with enjoyment is the key to making leadership training fun.
12 fun leadership activities for workplaces
Having leadership activities can increase productivity both in participants' personal lives and at work. Below are training and challenges ideas for improving employees' leadership skills.
- Flipping a rug over
This game is a challenge for teams to flip a rug over without having to leave the rug's boundaries. Perform the challenge by dividing the group into smaller groups. Prepare a rug, mat, or sheet according to the number of participants in a team. After all participants stand on their rug, ask the groups to flip over the rug to the opposite side, but if one member leaves the rug, then one team dies. The first team to successfully flip the rug over wins. This team challenge aims to teach patience, problem-solving skills, and teamwork.
- Crossing the crocodile river
This fun activity requires focus, high level of balance, teamwork, and strategic planning. Each participant will learn to express their opinion to the team as a form of leadership. Play this game outside the office, find objects that can imitate a stepping stone like paper, small pieces of plywood, or discs. Provide the stepping stones depending on the number of players. Mark out two lines to indicate the start and the end of the river.
The goal is using stepping stones to cross the river without leaving any player behind. Time will be counted once a player steps stone, touches the river, od goes out of the boundaries. If one of the participants touches the river, then one team will start again.
- Icebreaker trivia
Icebreaker is a great idea for fun leadership games for almost any event. Ask your team a lot of icebreaker questions like "which leader is your role model?" "What quote do you always remember?" "If you were asked to choose one superpower, what would you choose and why?" The team members will take turns answering the questions. It will be good if all participants provide their answers, and after everyone has finished submitting their answers, whoever can name more than 5 answers from their friends will get a prize.
This will teach employees to actively listen, observe, while respecting others for differences in answers and opinions.
- 30 seconds experience
This is a short fun activity before you start meetings or events. Each team member will convey their happy experience or best experience in life in just 30 seconds. Other team members must be able to understand what their friends are saying, and find out why the experience means a lot to the narrator.
The 30 seconds experience teaches employees to summarize a story and convey it directly and clearly, while learning about time management and being productive in a short time.
- Debate
Debate is a leadership training activity that helps employees communicate with one another. Divide the team into two or more groups. Each debate topic will be carried out by two groups against each other. The leader of the group chooses to be pro or con on the debate topic. You can choose the topic about work-related or non-work related.
Give the groups several minutes to have a private discussion to prepare possible arguments. Set the time limit for each group to present their argument. After the time runs out, other groups will defend their arguments or come up with new arguments. The debaters will keep rotating to speak until the final time runs out.
- Silver lining
This activity promotes the motivation and the leadership skills of positivity. Break the participants into two groups and explain that they are doing a project together. The first group will talk about the negative experience they had on a particular project, while the other group will talk about the positive aspects of the same project.
If they take turns conveying their aspects, the two groups swap roles to convey the positive and negative aspects of the other project. This activity will teach about motivating their team members, and team bonding.
- It’s our ideas
Make several groups with each group containing employees from different departments. Each employee in the group needs to write down what activities they want to do for self or team development. Collect papers from the group, and choose the 2 best activities from the ideas written down.
Give each group time to convey their ideas and why their group chose that. This activity teaches how to choose the best ideas from the team and if one team can do it without problems. It is hoped that each group will carry out according to what they wrote for their development.
- Marathon eating challenge
Prepare some food and drinks and arrange them on the table. Each group contains 4 or five people. Make sure the food and drinks you prepare are different in type and taste. For example, you can put the first table with sweet foods, the second table with savory foods, the third table with can foods, etc.
Each group member must finish the food in front of him before other team members can start eating their food or drinking their drinks in sequence. Each team has 5 minutes to determine who eats what. The team with the fastest time is entitled to a prize.
- Complimenting team members
This is a fun activity because it gives each employee the opportunity to convey the good work of their coworkers and their strengths. Each employee is required to convey one or more strengths to the person in front of them. Do this alternately until each employee has complimented all of the coworkers.
- Defend the ducklings
Break employees into several groups, gather all groups in one place. Each group will line up, holding their friends' hips in front of them. The leading person is the mother duck, and is tasked with protecting their ducklings. The game is simple, each mother duck can take ducklings from other groups, but can only take those at the very back.
Continue the game until a large line is formed. Give a time limit of 10 minutes, and the group with the most ducklings is the winner.
- Complete the sentences
This activity teaches teams active listening, concentration, and the ability to remember information. All employees sit in a circle. Starting with one employee who starts a sentence with one word, followed by another word from the person next to him. If one of the members forgets the order of the words in the sentence, then go back to the first person. To be fair between one another, the first person must change position randomly after successfully saying the sentence.
- Leadership retreat
Every leader also needs time to relax and take a break from leadership pressures. Give free time to leaders and employees to boost their morale. Invite employees to have dinner, karaoke night, or any activity funded by the office outside of work matters. After giving free time to leaders and employees, assign them to make the next full schedule and re-address their next challenges.
Leadership skills can be obtained by every employee by training and carrying out activities to boost individual or team skills. Every leadership game and activity can be done in a fun way but still has to be effective. By improving leadership skills, it is hoped that employees can increase their productivity, prepare to be good leaders, and boost their morale.
That's all about fun leadership activities. If you want other information on leadership skills or progressing your business, visit the SMEbrother site. We prepare various information about finance, licensing, and tips to advance your business.
