Leadership team development activities are just as crucial for leaders as for team members. The best team building activities for leadership help develop and strengthen the skills effective leaders require. This directly impacts the entire team’s dynamics by boosting efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. So what are the best team building activities for leaders you can organize?
An effective team depends on a successful leader. While everyone has their own leadership style, essential leadership skills are required for effective teamwork. For example, anyone in a leadership role must have excellent communication skills, work under pressure, have good problem-solving abilities, and plan well.
However, effective leadership isn’t only about giving team members instructions to get a job done. Effective teamwork involves trust. Therefore, senior executives and leaders must work on building trust among the entire team.
What are the best leadership team building activities to plan for your next corporate event? Please read on to find the answer to this question.
After reading this article, you will know the seven leadership traits and which leadership training activities you can use to strengthen them.
What is Leadership Team Development?
Leadership team development refers to strengthening teams to work more effectively together. A successful team must be a cohesive group that enjoys collaborating. Developing team leadership strategies help identify roles, improve communication, and reduce potential resources of friction in a team. This training helps everyone work towards achieving a common goal.
Team leadership development activities are vital for improving efficiency. For example, one report found that 33 percent of team meetings are perceived as a waste of time. Researchers found that teams can spend 25 to 80 percent of their time in meetings. Due to the cost and time lost, unproductive meetings cost organizations between $54 and $3.7 billion annually in lost revenue.
Therefore, investing in team-building activities can improve your organization’s effectiveness and save money in the long run.
What are Leadership Activities in Team Building?
Full Till Team Development organizes a wide range of leadership activities for people in senior management roles. These fun games and activities are designed to help provide leadership to organize high-performing teams. In addition, these leadership games help anyone in a senior management role focus on their professional and personal development.
Here is a list of ways in which leadership team development can benefit your organization:
- Improve communication and collaboration
- Develop leadership coaching skills
- Help to strengthen decision-making and problem-solving abilities
- Teach active listening
- Break down silos and encourage effective collaboration among team members
- Develop resistance to work under pressure and hone time-management skills
- Help identify future leaders
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7 Leadership Traits — How Team Building Activities Develop Essential Leadership Skills
The best leadership activities help leaders show the seven essential traits required to organize and motivate groups of people. Whether the team building activity is in the office, off-site, or at a leadership retreat, many group activities are useful for senior leadership team members.
1. The Ability To Listen and Communicate
Successful leadership requires excellent communication skills. To do this, leaders must practice active listening and know how to communicate with clarity. Effective communication is not only about giving motivational speeches. Instead, communication involves listening just as much as speaking.
Only when team members trust management can effective communication flourish. Therefore, leadership exercises that create a “trust battery” are crucial for team development.
What is a trust battery? A trust battery is an overview of all interactions to this point. To recharge the battery, you need to do different things in the future. Poor communication is a sure way to run down the battery. However, if interactions are positive, the trust battery recharges — in other words, there is a higher degree of trust and more effective teamwork.
The Best Team Building Leadership Activity
The Behavior Style 360-Degree Matrix is an excellent leadership team development activity to improve communication. This fun activity blends elements of Strengthsinder, Meyers-Briggs, and DISC tests to identify areas for improvement. Teams must work on specially designed challenges to discover individual behavior, communication, and leadership styles.
This activity helps team leaders gain a better perspective and understanding of how they communicate and how others try to get their point across.
2. Effective Leaders Know How To Delegate
Delegation is an important leadership trait that requires training to do it effectively. Delegating tasks helps to engage the entire team and keep everyone involved. This also allows future leaders to develop themselves and expand their skill sets. Delegation helps you and your team to develop professionally, saving time and resources.
Unfortunately, not all leaders are good delegators. Some like to offload tasks they don’t want. Whereas others delegate and then micromanage the project. And some leaders feel that delegating means losing control and power.
The Best Team Building Leadership activity
Mission Incredible is one of the most effective leadership activities to teach delegation skills. This fun game involves assigning roles and working together to overcome obstacles within the allotted time. In addition, the leadership team activity helps the entire time develop a strategic approach while working under pressure.
3. Strategic Thinking Is Vital For Good Leaders
Leadership exercises can help develop the ability to see the big picture and motivate individual team members to work toward a common goal. As one of the most important leadership traits, strategic thinking means focusing on the goal and not getting distracted, even under pressure.
Strategic thinking encompasses several vital leadership qualities. These include delegating, communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, and excellent organization.
The Best Team Building Leadership Activity
The Mandala Leadership Challenge uses a tailored approach to help achieve your objectives. This coaching leadership challenge helps improve communication and strong relationships and develops outside-the-box problem-solving.
4. The Best Leaders Show Empathy
Leadership training can help senior leaders to be more empathetic to team members. Empathy is one of the seven leadership traits that promote healthy teamwork. Good leaders understand that individual team members are more important than tasks. This requires developing qualities like being willing to listen and learn, showing awareness, and having emotional intelligence.
It can be challenging for leaders to show empathy when under pressure. Therefore coaching sessions to help strengthen interpersonal skills, intuition, and emotional intelligence are vital in team building leadership exercises.
The Best Team Building Leadership Exercises
One of the best activities to teach empathy for leadership team development is the Wheelchair Build Challenge. This fun activity is a memorable event that creates a sense of unity and purpose among team members. Teams work together to earn the tools and supplies necessary for building wheelchairs.
At the end of the event, the wheelchairs are donated to a local charity. But it’s not just empathy that this team event teaches. The Wheelchair Build Challenge also teaches time management, leadership skills, and collaboration.
5. Integrity Is A Vital Leadership Trait
Integrity is a vital leadership quality because it provides a good example for team members. Leaders should always do what’s right, sticking to their core values to guide their actions and decisions. As a result, they are dependable, consistent, and reliable, always doing what needs to be done even when they must make tough decisions.
Honest and transparent leadership earns trust and respect. This is because leaders with integrity hold themselves accountable for their mistakes and are not afraid to give credit where it is due.
The Best Team Building Leadership Activity
Kidnapped: A Rescue Mission is a leadership development activity suitable for indoor or outdoor events. Teams must assign specific roles to solve a staged kidnapping crime. The ultimate goal is to collaborate and communicate to rescue the hostage. This is a great leadership activity to teach the importance of trusted relationships.
6. Flexibility Is A Crucial Leadership Trait
Every leader has unique management styles; some are better suited to specific situations. Good leaders understand their own style but are flexible when necessary. Very often, changing circumstances mean that goals or plans must shift rapidly. Therefore, learning to be flexible is vital to being resilient enough to deal with setbacks.
The Best Team Building Leadership Exercises
The famous leadership activity — the Cardboard Boat Build — is ideal for teaching leaders and team members the importance of flexibility. Everyone must work cohesively to build a boat from tape and cardboard. To win the challenge, teams must think creatively and compete against other teams in healthy competition.
7. Great Team Leaders Know How To Inspire Others
Organizing a leadership retreat is perfect for teaching leaders the skills necessary to motivate others. Being an inspirational force is a vital leadership trait because leaders must energize the entire team. This quality is especially useful if teams come up against challenges or problems.
But being an inspiring leader is not just about giving motivational speeches. Leaders inspire others by being trustworthy, empathetic, confident, fair, and refusing to accept unjust behavior.
The Best Team Building Leadership Activities
At Full Tilt, we know that leadership is an acquired skill that any enthusiastic person can learn. That is why the Authentic Leadership Program is designed to nurture and develop positive leadership skills in your organization. This program helps maintain integrity, create leaders, establish trust, and learn various leadership styles.
The Best Team Building Leadership Activities
Leadership team development is a crucial way to improve leadership skills. Organizing leadership activities can help to develop and strengthen the seven most important leadership traits. The result is that the entire organization benefits because teams work more effectively together.
Full Tilt has many years of experience organizing leadership team building activities for large and small organizations. To find out about suitable team building leadership activities, please get in touch with us today at 310-400-6285 or use this online form.