Leadership shouldn’t just be a title—the best leaders know that leadership development activities are the key. They’re your secret weapons for creating extraordinary teams and harnessing your superpowers.
Too many of today’s leaders get caught up in their titles and status, completely missing the point of true leadership. They forget that leadership development activities and training exercises are essential to continually develop their skills.
Successful leadership is a daily practice that relies on people-focused personality and skills—these skills have nothing to do with how you look on an org chart. As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
This article explores how true leadership can serve as an ongoing journey of growth and how leadership training activities can help. Are you ready to lead differently?
How Does Leadership Affect Teams?
Leadership is all about influencing the behaviors, attitudes, and thoughts of others. As a leader, your actions are held to an unspoken standard of what’s appropriate and what’s not.
Team members learn about acceptable behaviors by observing the actions of their leaders. Office dress code is a good example of this. By wearing clothes that meet the dress code, a leader demonstrates in an indirect manner which attire is acceptable.
While employees should have access to a clearly defined dress code, they’ll likely also take queues from how their leader dresses. This is called leading by example.
Likewise, when you get your employees involved in leadership team building activities, you’re strengthening their bonds and skills. You’re also showing them what’s expected of leaders in your organization so they know what to aim for in order to advance their careers.
4 Tips for Strong Leadership
Before we start looking at some popular leadership development activities, let’s review some of the essentials of strong leadership. From productivity to consistency, each of these top tips will help strengthen your foundation and be the leader your team members need.
1. Do the Work That Others Expect You to Do
Actions speak louder than words. What you do, the steps you take, and the decisions you make have an overall impact on how others perceive you.
If you’re hard-working, meticulous, and dependable, you can subtly set expectations and encourage your team members to strive to meet similar standards. The same goes for the quality of your work—if you don’t do the work that’s expected of you, you can’t expect your team members to do what’s expected of them. And even if you do, it won’t make you a good leader.
Your actions as a leader have a large impact on company culture, and it’s up to you to show your employees what your workplace is all about.
Bottom Line: Great leaders hold themselves up to the same standards as they would their team members.
2. Be Positive
Effective leaders don’t just hear problems—they find positive solutions. You should be able to help solve the problems your team members are facing on a day-to-day basis.
When your team comes to you with problems, they expect you to help solve them. Being positive while you do so helps encourage them to continue turning to you for help and shows them how to behave when they’re solving problems, too.
Be a compassionate listener, provide helpful advice, and follow your words with concrete actions. If you don’t have a solution for a problem, take ownership of that fact, be positive about the situation, and work with your team to solve it. It’s all about helping your team find a solution and guiding them through the process of finding alternative methods of addressing the situation.
Bottom Line: A good leader can use positivity to turn obstacles into learning opportunities.
3. Be Approachable for Your Team Members
As the team leader, you’re one of the most important resources for your team. It’s important to make sure that this resource (that’s you!) is accessible to them at all times. When you’re not there for your team members, you’re wasting company money and preventing your employees from flourishing.
If you exude positive energy and a judgment-free attitude, your team will be more likely to approach and trust you with their concerns, questions, and suggestions.
One of the best ways to ensure open communication is to create an open-door policy—this allows all employees to chat with upper management whenever they have concerns. It’s a great way to build trust and transparency, and you can tweak it however you need to for your organization and situation.
Bottom Line: Approachable leaders foster trust and open communication, which helps teams strengthen trust and collaboration.
4. Always Be Consistent
While anyone can be placed in a position of authority, it’s the leaders who can gain the respect and trust of their team members. Your employees need to see you consistently setting a good example.
An inconsistent leader sets the standard for an inconsistent company culture. Unless you want inconsistent team members, that’s not the way to create a productive and healthy workplace.
Make sure you’re always doing what’s right for the team. Support them in developing their skills, and be there to defend them in the good times and the bad.
Bottom Line: Trust and respect are built on consistent supportive and positive behavior.
12 Impactful Leadership Development Activities
There are many ways to improve leadership skills within your organization. It’s important to extend leadership skills activities and training to all team members, not just the team leaders.
These types of leadership team building activities are designed to highlight people with natural leadership abilities. Who knows, you might find that you have one or more team members who should move into a leading role in your organization!
Leadership training activities, workshops, exercises, and training programs also help employees build a wide range of skills.
The 12 leadership development activities highlighted below can help team members learn to manage stress, connect, identify their strengths and weaknesses together, and so much more.
1. Cultivate Team Improv Skills
Improv is a unique tool to get your team to tackle difficult subjects in a fun and non-confrontational way. At TeamBonding, we’ve designed group improv programs that train employees to perform at their best—even when faced with uncertain and volatile conditions.
This is a necessary skill set leaders must have and a great way to bond. There’s something special about the relaxed environment these programs create. Who can argue with creating a safe place to build trust through shared laughter and fun?
2. Corporate Survivor
Corporate Survivor is a leadership development activity that lets everyone’s skills shine. Your teams will work together to “save” their teammates through a variety of challenges. Each challenge requires a different skill, giving everyone a chance to showcase their strengths.
During this fun leadership exercise, you’ll watch as new leaders emerge with increased confidence in their abilities. You’ll also help create lasting memories and new friendships within your team, which can greatly boost morale.
3. Team DNA
In our leadership development activity, Team and Leadership DNA, team members will complete their Belbin® profile and invite feedback from their colleagues to offer feedback as they do.
Each employee’s profile is then analyzed to identify any balances and imbalances present in the current team roles. From there, a TeamBonding expert introduces the best programs for your team members to apply the insights from their Belbin® Team Roles.
This leadership development activity helps teams maximize their work relationships and boost performance. It’s available for virtual, hybrid, or in-person teams.
4. Professional Development Workshops
Encouraging employees to seek opportunities to grow professionally and personally is an important aspect of being a leader. Try introducing things like professional development workshops, mentorship programs, networking events, or industry conferences.
You might also encourage regular job shadowing to help team members learn about other roles within the organization.
5. Implement Employee Engagement Tools (and USE THEM!)
Don’t guess how your team feels—ask them! Conducting regular surveys and pulse checks represents one of the best leadership activities for adults to improve employee engagement and satisfaction.
Many companies send employee feedback surveys and don’t do anything with them. Instead of wasting this potential, seize it! Use these surveys to make your team stronger.
This feedback can also help the team leaders adapt to best fit the needs of their team. They act as employee engagement tools to help guide your employee experience strategy, which can increase retention and improve productivity.
6. Emotional Intelligence Training
It’s not enough for today’s leaders to say they have a high IQ or an impressive college degree. Team leaders in today’s workplaces also need high emotional intelligence and empathy to connect to their team. It’s a must for facilitating healthy communication!
Emotional Intelligence training courses can serve as effective leadership development activities to help teach essential intrapersonal and interpersonal skills.
7. Digital Innovation Game
Want to spark your team’s creativity? Try the Digital Innovation Game! This leadership activity will get everyone brainstorming and creating. They’ll then decide on their strongest innovation and give a Shark Tank-style pitch.
This exercise helps bond teams and empower hidden team leaders to show their leadership skills.
8. Shark Teams
Speaking of Shark Tank, Shark Teams is another fun team leadership development activity! It lets your entire group try their hand at product development, process improvement, or marketing. True to the TeamBonding style, it’s a friendly but spirited competition that leaves everyone feeling confident and happy.
9. Leadership Stories
Investing in your company’s key players can benefit everyone in the organization. The Leadership Stories program uses the proven powers of gamification to keep even your busiest, most distracted leaders engaged.
Your employees will join small teams to compete against each other. They’ll consider a series of scenarios that require crisp, smart leadership decisions as they choose the best courses of action for each part of the game.
10. Team PechaKucha
Team PechaKucha (TPK) is all about building trust in 6 minutes and 40 seconds! It’s a fantastic way for teams to exchange broad and diverse ideas in a short amount of time.
TPK uses an internationally renowned storytelling format to foster trust through business storytelling. Teams get to pick their topics, plan their presentations, and share their values to strengthen a foundation of trust along the way.
11. ibuild
ibuild is one of our most fun, unifying leadership development activities. It offers strong outcomes by focusing on language, feedback, and the importance of creating a step-by-step project strategy.
This activity is also a great way to emphasize the idea that every member plays a vital role in a team’s overall success. Participants will split into small groups, assign specific roles, and then work to replicate a model in a set amount of time while working with simple components.
12. Strengths Finder 2.0
Strengths Finder 2.0 is based on Clifton StrengthsFinder Training. This simple online assessment comes with accompanying resource materials to serve as guides for discovering the true strengths of your team members.
It’s designed to put success—both in life and leadership—within the grasp of every participant from your team.
Maximize Team Potential with Leadership Development Activities
Investing in team leadership activities exercises will always pay off if your goal is to work toward a motivated and productive team. It’ll show your team that you’re not placing yourself on a pedestal as “The Leader,” but looking to do your best and bring out the best in every employee.
By creating a supportive and healthy environment, you can foster a positive company culture that will benefit your organization and employees. Remember, a title does not define your leadership qualities, but your abilities and behaviors do.
Do you want to strengthen your team and leadership skills? We’re here to help! At TeamBonding, we’ve been learning what works best for over two decades. In that time, we’ve identified the most effective leadership activities for adults everywhere.
Contact TeamBonding to see what we can do for you. Don’t forget to check out the rest of our professional development programs for more ideas.
