Library of facilitation techniques

Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities

Activities to support personal development and train new soft skills. Help your participants to reflect, grow self-awareness and learn new interpersonal skills.
61 results
Hyper Island

Stinky Fish

A short activity to run early in a program focused on sharing fears, anxieties and uncertainties related to the program theme. The purpose is to create openness within a group. The stinky fish is a metaphor for "that thing that you carry around but don’t like to talk about; but the longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets." By putting stinky fish (fears and anxieties) on the table, participants begin to relate to each other, become more comfortable sharing, and identify a clear area for development and learning.

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Hyper Island

Explore your Values

Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.

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Hyper Island

Active Listening

This activity supports participants to reflect on a question and generate their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with it. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being: “the subject”, the listener, and the observer.

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Hyper Island

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue

Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is an exercise for groups or teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. It uses the words “stop”, “start” and “continue” to guide the feedback messages.

Thiagi Group

Seven Words

Ever heard the cliché, “It's not what you say, but how you say it”? The Seven Words jolt dramatically demonstrates this principle. You demonstrate how the meaning of a sentence changes as you emphasize different words. Later, you invite pairs of participants to explore this concept.

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Robert from SessionLab

Your Leadership Coat of Arms

In this leadership development activity, participants are asked to draw their own coat of arms symbolising the most important elements of their leadership philosophy. The coat of arms drawings are then debriefed and discussed together with the group.

After the exercise you may prepare a coat of arms gallery, exhibiting the leadership approach and philosophy of group members

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Hyper Island

Principles of Effective Feedback

The purpose of this exercise is for a group to discuss, define, and come to agreement around key principles of effective feedback. Participants discuss examples of effective and ineffective feedback in pairs, then work together to define “effective feedback.” Then, as a group, they create a list of principles that they will aim to work by.

Thiagi Group

Five "-ful" Envelopes

Hopeful, joyful, peaceful, playful, thankful—these five words are written on the faces of different envelopes to create the five “-ful” envelopes.

According to Barbara Frederickson (and other positive psychologists), these five emotions are among those that contribute to happiness, subjective well-being, and flourishing.

This structured sharing activity helps participants discover how to increase the frequency and intensity of these emotions. This is the first step to increase one's happiness.

Hyper Island

Personal SWOB Assessment

A versatile workshop for personal assessment and action planning, in which participants use the SWOB model (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Barriers) to assess themselves, reflect upon key areas for development and create a concise action plan. It includes an interactive component, in which participants work in small groups coaching each other to make their action plans as clear and achievable as possible.

Hyper Island

Feedback: I appreciate...

Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is a good early feedback exercise when group members have developed some comfort and are still getting to know each other. It focuses on sharing appreciation and curiosity about each other.

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