Passionate leaders in any workplace play a major role in an organization. Fostering leadership activities will help you increase your team’s performance and productivity. By conducting leadership workshops, you can improve their abilities and take them to the next level.
There are various team or individual exercises that permit you to assess and enhance your abilities in a monitored situation. Let’s understand how conducting such drills can make you and your team prepared for any unforeseen situation.
Table of Content
Leadership skills aren’t always inherently present but something that individuals can hone. Therefore, leadership development workshops and training programs enhance the practical skills of an individual. It provides:
- Leadership exercises and experiential activities to encourage team collaboration, communication, and sharing of ideas.
- Realizations as to how one’s actions greatly influence others.
- Lectures, digital workbooks, videos, PowerPoint slides, and activities designed to engage the participant.
- Leadership development coaching sessions that include pre and post-assessments and introspections help the participant discover their strengths and improve further.
- Group problem-solving tasks that encourage conflict resolution through a better understanding of human behaviour and group dynamics.
Leadership development training workshops are a great way of providing individuals with a platform to work on their leadership skills. We have put together a list of some intriguing leadership development programs that can be used to introduce and kickstart leadership training in employees.
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18 Ideas for Leadership Workshops
The following are some highly effective activities aiming to train young individuals and equip them with leadership development skills.
Follow The Leader
As the name suggests, this leadership training workshop activity or coaching process helps establish cohesion in groups.
First, participants have to work in groups and communicate to develop real-life applications and shortcomings of a proposal. Then, to come to a unanimous decision, the group will engage in multiple rounds of discussions.
Then the group is required to build upon each others’ ideas and evaluate the most practical and implementable idea proposal befitting the real-life situation.
Stepping Into The Shoes Of Your Manager
One of the leading leadership development programs and workshops, Stepping Into The Shoes Of Your Manager, involves taking up multiple personas (of strong leaders) and listing down behaviors appropriate for a manager in that particular situation.
Inappropriate behavior is also noted. Participants are then given time to reflect on their list and make changes following which the lists are exchanged. Subsequently, the participants formulate a list of behaviors that they consider appropriate for managers and (senior) leaders.
This helps managers understand what employees expect from them and understand the rationale behind their manager’s actions.
Leadership Canvas
Effective leaders are a culmination of their experience and skill.
This leadership workshop activity offers a self-assessment framework for participants to identify the skills and leadership style they consider essential for effective leadership and whether or not they possess the same.
This will help participants understand their shortcomings and to work towards developing these leadership traits.
This activity is done best when there is a dialogue between the participants and the managers. To achieve significant impact, try using an online whiteboard and encourage comments if you’re conducting such a session for remote teams on a virtual online platform.
Team Introspection
As the name suggests, this leadership development workshop activity helps participants identify their strengths and weaknesses as a team. In addition, since this activity implores the participant to think about their skill set, it serves as an excellent exercise for initiating reflection and dialogue around personal values that help build an effective team.
Mentor’s Mentorship
One of the most effective ways to instill leadership qualities in an individual is mentorship. Via this leadership training and development workshop activity, established team leaders will formulate a training curriculum that they think works best for the entire organization. After all, these tried and tested business methods will save time and provide priceless insights to many employees.
Implementing Curriculum
Despite what anyone says, theoretical leadership knowledge will only go so far in developing an aspiring leader. This leadership workshop activity caters to the gap between theory and practicality that is bridged by hands-on experience. Participants will be put in the shoes of prospective managers and will be given the responsibility to lead a small team on a mock project.
Understanding Technical Skills
Something that distinguishes an extraordinary leader from an average person is the technical and managerial knowledge they possess. These technical skills may include understanding your product or service, which allows you to better understand your company’s workflow from top to bottom.
For example, a factory manager won’t ever have to operate the assembly line themself but understanding the process will help maximize efficiency and output. Participants will discuss such skills that they feel are necessary for their domain via this leadership training workshop activity.
Sessions From Industry Experts
Bringing in experienced industry figures and leadership consultants from outside your company to coach your employees will:
- Empower participants to understand their shortcomings and
- Facilitate the development of these leadership traits.
Effective Analysis
Via this leadership workshop activity, participants will be intimated with how to analyze leadership training activities effectively. Skills like soft skills and decision-making can be hard to measure, but during this session, participants should be taught qualitative measures that help get a ‘feel’ of how effective your program is.
Learning From The Past
As the adage goes, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” which is why employees need to be well aware of the company’s past. This leadership workshop activity includes the study of past blunders made by your company’s previous management so that your new team leaders can avoid repeating them.
Additionally, the participants should be provided with the full context of the incident, and they should attempt to come up with alternative ways to handle the situation better. These solutions should then be discussed with the entire group, and discussions should be held about why a particular answer was better than the other.
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Diligence And Direction
This leadership workshop activity instills in the participants the importance of routine and continuous learning. Participants should be encouraged to study on their own and to point them in the right direction. This activity will provide them with a list of leadership and soft-skills-focused books to read and essential news sources, plus blogs that they should follow.
‘Big Bad Idea’
This leadership workshop activity is as interesting as the name sounds. Engage and unlock your team’s creativity and invite participants to share outlandish ideas with the rest and management. Employee engagement for the win!
This will help boost creativity and liberate employees from the pressures of their managers. All the ideas should be noted down, and participants should vote for which bad idea is the most feasible.
Sharing Personal Bests
This leadership workshop activity will help team members open up with each other by sharing their personal or professional achievements. Each participant will share with others, and at the end, the listeners will have to reflect on why the achievement is significant.
This reflection enables team members to identify and acknowledge each other’s development and strengths. It also helps them articulate the value team members bring to the table professionally or personally.
Cocktail Party
This leadership workshop activity helps to break down hierarchical walls to create a culture of collaboration in organizations.
Participants will receive a piece of paper with a number on it. Each number represents a predetermined role. For example, a participant might be asked to act like a CEO or an intern. Once they have their numbers, they pretend they are having a cocktail party, act out their assigned role, and the other participants must guess which part each person has.
At the end of the exercise, participants discuss how they were presenting themselves and what they could do to improve their leadership role.
Icebreaking Session
This lighthearted leadership workshop activity helps employees to open up and become more integrated with other team members. For this session, a list of ice-breaking questions should be ready, and participants randomly pick that.
Some exciting examples could include, ‘If you could have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?’
‘Thirty seconds’
This leadership workshop activity will inculcate a habit of spontaneous public speaking. Participants will be asked to speak (effectively) for 30 seconds about any topic of their liking.
As a result, participants will walk away with more confidence in their communication skills and spontaneity at the end of this activity – two essential qualities of good leaders.
Scavenger Hunts
This leadership workshop activity is an excellent way for participants to collaborate as a team in performing a scavenger hunt and, in the process, work on communication skills.
The activity can be organized by setting up landmarks to visit and items to “gather” (real or virtual) and offer prizes to participants upon completion.
Center stage
In this leadership workshop activity, you will require four to five volunteers. One of them will play the role of the ‘latecomer’ while the other three will play the part of the ‘manager,’ each having their distinct characteristics.
Place two chairs in the center and then ask each manager to confront the ‘latecomer’ in turn. After each scenario has been played out, ask the participants to provide insights on the different approaches — what worked, what didn’t?
This activity helps participants embrace healthy conflict and give valuable feedback.
So, these are the 18 leadership workshop ideas that can be conducted at the office and provide management training to senior employees and managers. Still, have some queries and questions in mind? Here’s the answer to the frequently asked questions.
Leadership workshops are essentially a session in which leadership skills like communication, collaboration, and so forth are introduced to participants. In addition, these traits are invoked as a realization of various group activities that the participant indulges in during the workshop.
The following outline can be followed to set up a leadership workshop:
- Choose a venue for the workshop
- Chalk out a list of participants
- Start with ice-breaking sessions and introductory activities
- Indulge in a PowerPoint presentation, outlining the schedule for the day
- Integrate role-playing activities into the curriculum
- Allocate time for breaks and discussion periods
These are some of the most critical aspects that a leadership training program must comprise:
One of the most critical elements that get churned out through these leadership workshops is that a sense of clarity gets developed. You can have your employees engaged constantly and this makes them retain for eternity.
Also, when it comes to centralizing all the leadership training materials, ideas, topics, and workshop sessions, you can easily create a knowledge base and manage all the docs. CloudTutorial, a knowledge base software, allows businesses of different industries to develop, manage, and share information and data. To learn more about our software, sign up and start your FREE trial today.
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