Leadership can be a constant challenge, but you can partake in various leadership training exercises that will aid you in honing your skills and help you to develop new ones.
Using Leadership Training Exercises to Visualize Different Leadership Styles
When using leadership training exercises, role playing can be a very effective way to learn about different leaderships styles, and it can also have a lasting impact. To do this exercise, recruit four volunteers. The role of one volunteer will be that of a team member who has missed a number of meetings or consistently arrives late. The three other volunteers will each take on a different type of leadership role. Give each of the three volunteers a trait to use to create a leadership persona, such as the softy, the lecturer, the self-absorbed leader, or the blamer, and then give the volunteers time to contemplate their individual roles.
Have the group form a circle and put two chairs in the center. Set up the scenario for the leaders in regards to the team member who is missing meetings and arriving late, and ask each leader how he or she would handle the situation with that team member. After each leader plays out the scenario, the group should comment on the various approaches to leadership as a whole. Make sure they discuss what was effective, what could have been handled differently, and how an ideal leader might have handled the situation. This exercise opens team members’ eyes to the various leadership styles that are available and their different effects.
Do What You Say
This is one of the leadership training exercises that examines how core values impact leadership behavior. Team members can work separately or in pairs as you have them identify and clarify different leadership behaviors. Provide team members with unique leadership values and ask them to determine how each value translates into a particular leadership behavior. Some of the leadership values that you can have them focus on include excellence, integrity, accountability, and positivity.
If your organization has stated core values, be sure to use those, also. This exercise will provide an opportunity for team members to discuss the power of organizational language and the ways that leaders actually interact with those values to make them a reality.
Who Do You Dance With the Best?
If you want team members to talk to each other about the best practices of specific leadership styles, this is one of the best leadership training exercises to use. Every leader has his or her way of leading, with some styles working better for some team members than others. When you do this exercise, have each team member choose three other team members who they want to interview, and then give them a set amount of time in which to interview those members about leadership.
Provide the interviewers with specific questions to ask the interviewees, including some of the following. How do you keep your team members informed? How do you keep your team focused on goals? How do you clarify and hold team members accountable for meeting expectations? How do you reward success? How do you motivate team members? These are just a few of the questions you can use.
When the interviews are complete, have the team meet together to discuss any strategies and tips they learned from the interviewees. This exercise will help the team members to explore different strategies, determine which ones work best in what situations, and which strategies work best with different types of team members.
Leadership and Flexibility
These leadership training exercises are excellent tools for teaching team members the impacts of different leadership styles and the ways that they can both succeed and fail. They also give team members some insight into how being flexible when it comes to selecting a leadership style can be incredibly beneficial to any organization.