Leadership Advice from Your Role Model
This structured sharing activity provides a faster, cheaper, and better alternative to buying and reading a lot of books: You tap into the wisdom of the group—and of their role models.
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Five ideas
Five Ideas is an activity that encourages participants to go beyond what is good for their team or their department and work on cooperatively achieving common goals.
Teambuilding activities create high-performance teams whose members are extremely loyal to each other and to their team. Sometimes, however, the emphasis in teamwork results in reduced collaboration across teams. Similar problems occur when employees become so focused on their departmental goals that they ignore or downplay the strategic goals for the total organization.
Review Roulette
Games of pure chance discourage smarter players from mastering new skills and knowledge. Games of pure skill discourage weaker players from trying hard once they fall behind. An effective training game strikes a balance between chance and skill. That's exactly what Review Roulette does.
Double Talk
Participants at a training session are often preoccupied with other important things in their life. Here's a simple jolt to wake them up.
Thirty-five for Debriefing
You might be familiar with Thirty-Five as a structured-sharing activity. Thirty-Five can also be used as an effective debriefing game.
In this version, participants reflect on an earlier experience and identify important lessons they learned. They write one of these lessons as a brief item. The winner in this activity is not the best player, but the best lesson learned.
Features
Understanding and analyzing a piece of advice are important activities. Here is a game that requires the participants to analyze the features associated with different pieces of advice.
Better Connections
We build a stronger relationship with people when we see them as human beings with whom we share similarities in terms of family and life situations. It is very difficult to form strong relationships with people about whom we know very little.
We feel more connected to “full” people. For example, take John, the accountant. If I think of John as an accountant, I might put him into a box of what I think I know about accountants. I might not feel connected to accountants and will treat him accordingly. But when I think of John as a keen mountain climber and outdoor adventurer with two children, one of whom is graduating from university next month, then John becomes human to me, and I can feel connected to him.
Improved Solutions
You can improve any solution by objectively reviewing its strengths and weaknesses and making suitable adjustments. In this creativity framegame, you improve the solutions to several problems. To maintain objective detachment, you deal with a different problem during each of six rounds and assume different roles (problem owner, consultant, basher, booster, enhancer, and evaluator) during each round. At the conclusion of the activity, each player ends up with two solutions to her problem.
Name That Tune
In his book, You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney describes an experiment by Elizabeth Newton that explains the illusion of transparency. This happens during the communication process when others are not privy to same information as we are. While we may think all of our thoughts and feelings are visible to others, we often overestimate the actual transfer of information.
The participants pair up and one partner taps out a familiar song with fingertips. The finger-tapping partner predicts the listener will be able to guess the tune. These partners are surprised to discover that while the tune is obvious to them, their listening partner is unable to guess it.
Wishes: an Opener
What wishes do participants have for your training session? Which of these wishes do the most participants share?
Here's an opening activity that helps the participants to generate a list of wishes, discuss them, and identify the highest-priority wishes.
Everyday Hassles
It is a great activity to show participants that it is plausible to change our automatic behaviours and reactions to annoying situations.