Team Building Exercises – Leadership

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rglinsky

Lead your team from the front.

What do a marshmallow, dry spaghetti, some string, and a yard of tape have to do with team building and leadership? Nothing, you might think, until you listen to a TED talk by Tom Wujec, a designer who developed the Marshmallow Challenge team building exercise.

This, and other team building activities, may seem silly at first blush, and often people put them down as nothing but a pointless bit of fun. However, when they are correctly thought through and facilitated, they can help your team build important leadership skills, and allow you to identify future leaders.

In this article, we'll explore how to run three team building exercises that focus specifically on developing people's leadership skills.

The Purpose of Leadership Team Building Exercises

Leaders need to set direction, build an inspiring vision of the future, and develop their team members' potential. They must have strong communication, delegation and decision-making skills, as well as the ability to adopt a flexible style of leadership.

Team building exercises can help organizations identify people with the potential to be future leaders   . Likewise, they give team members the chance to learn leadership skills, and use them in their current roles.

Team Building Leadership Exercises

The following three exercises explore a variety of leadership styles and skills.

1: The Artificial Snow Exercise*

This draws on the leadership styles in the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership® Theory: telling, selling, participating, and delegating. The model suggests that leaders should switch between these styles, depending on their work environment....