Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities

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.

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.

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.

A persuasive activity where participants "give" each other terrible presents.

Spoken activities such as presentations or role play conversations are transcribed then analyzed.

A bingo game that is played throughout a live session using common virtual session occurrences. 

Used as a post-session follow up or multiple session activity, participants share their action plan or project success. Results can be posted and discussed on a shared network or brought to a later live session (such as a review session or informal group catch up). 

Help your team practice their pitching skills while having fun with this improv activity perfect for remote teams or virtual meetings.

This activity is for communication style module. This is better conducted post  completing the part on communication styles (Communication styles - Passive, Aggressive & Assertive). 

Powerpoint Karaoke is an improv game where volunteers take turns presenting slide decks that they've never seen before, in front of a live audience.

This teamwork activity requires participants to work closely together to build a tower from a set of building blocks. 

The players need to coordinate their actions in order to be able to move the wooden blocks with the crane they have, and this can only be solved by precise planning, good communication and well-organised teamwork.

You may use this exercise to emphasise the following themes and outcomes:

• In Leadership training: identifying interdependencies in systems, leadership communication, dealing with risk, giving feedback
  
• In Team building: communicating effectively, cooperating, being an active listener, maintaining the balance, working with values
  
• In Project management: simulating strategic planning, working under time pressure
  
• In Communication training: meta communication, facilitating, dealing with different perspectives