Team Building Activities to Build Leadership Skills

Finding new leaders within your team is a crucial part of business success. You’ll need confidence in the ability of your employees to lead various projects and manage people while ensuring that the business goals are met. It’s proven that team building activities strengthen how well your team works together, and even reveals group leaders.

However, developing strong leadership qualities isn’t easy – it requires a set of particular qualities and skills that many people don’t naturally possess.

Luckily, with the help of team building activities, you can expedite the process and help your team members become more confident and effective leaders in various work-related situations.

The best news? You can use exciting outdoor and indoor team building events that are not only extremely useful but can be very fun for everyone involved as well.

But what activities should you choose to get the best results? After all, there are plenty of indoor, as well as outdoor team building activities, so finding ones that are right for your situation can seem like a difficult task.

So, to help you get started, we’ll explore some of the more interesting and effective team building activities that have proven to be extremely valuable. 

Leadership Envelopes

One of the most popular and most effective indoor team building events is called leadership envelopes.

The reason why team building activities are so useful is the fact that it helps to identify the specific leadership traits that are important in your workplace, as opposed to generic ones that can be more difficult to tie together with real-life work situations.

Also, the leadership envelopes game encourages communication and discussion between colleagues, which can have huge benefits on its own, and help people learn and grow in the process.

So, what’s the exact process of team building activities?

1. First, divide your participants into teams.
2. Next, the number of participants is quite flexible and can vary anywhere from six to thirty or even more.
3. After separating the groups into teams of equal size (aim for 3-6 members per team), prepare the materials that you’ll be using for this team building activity.
4. Take five or another number of famous leadership principles. Use Google to find a short list from an established leadership book – and write one principle on one envelope.
5. Seat everyone and introduce the five leadership principles that the activity will be focusing on.
6. Give an envelope with one leadership principle and four index cards to each team.
7. The task for this team building activity is to discuss the leadership principle within the team and them come up with a few short examples of how that principle could be applied in the workplace. Use everyday examples and write them on one of the index cards.
8. Also, don’t give too much time for the task for this team building activity. Just give about five minutes.
9. Once everybody is done, have them put their index card with the examples inside the envelope and pass the envelope to the next team.
10. Repeat this until everyone has had a chance to discuss every principle.
11. Next, distribute the envelopes again, and have team members evaluate the examples and applications of the principles that were written on the index cards, giving them scores based on their merit.
12. Once every index card is evaluated by every team, calculate the results, announce the winner, and have a discussion about the most valuable lessons that you can take from the activity.
13. Lastly, don’t worry about the time! Allow 1-2 hours for this activity.

Team building activity – Active listening

Another extremely useful team building activity and leadership activity is called active listening.

Being able to listen to others and be fully engaged in what they are saying is a crucial aspect of being a good leader. When guiding a group of people towards a single goal, it’s essential to be able to listen to their input and catch even the smallest details that could be important.

And this activity helps to improve listening skills better than most other indoor our outdoor team building activities.

What’s even better, it’s super simple to organize.

1. For this team building activity, start by dividing your employees into groups of three.
2. One of them will be the subject, one the active listener, and another the observer.
3. The subject talks about a chosen topic, such as “How could I improve my work performance?”.
4. During the 20-minute discussion, the listener pays attention to what the subject has to say and asks open-ended questions and encourages him to speak.
5. The observer will also participate, but without engaging – he will listen from an outside perspective and observe the dynamic of the other two people.
6. After twenty minutes, have them switch roles, and then have them switch once more so that everyone gets a chance to be in all three roles.
7. Again, don’t worry about the time. Allow 1-2 hours for this activity.

Team building activity – Play the “what if” game

Being able to quickly deal with various situations is one of the biggest responsibilities that any good leader must know how to handle. And the What If Game is perfect for exploring such scenarios and training your employees to think in terms of solutions.

You can either perform this team building activity in a group or do it one on one with each employee.

1. Come up with a list of relevant and challenging work-related scenarios that require good leadership qualities.
2. Lastly, present these situations to your employees and have them explain how they would handle the situation.

This activity will allow you to see the strongest potential leaders in your team. It also reveals the people who are the most confident and have the best ability to come up with effective solutions to various problems quickly.

However, when organizing this game, it’s important not to discourage people who aren’t able to come up with a good answer, and instead, have a discussion together with the group about what could be the right answer in that particular situation.

Author Bio

Sarah Hill is a content writer at Seven Events Ltd – one of the leading corporate team building events in Birmingham who specialized in organizing events, incentive travel, and conference organizer. She started her career in the events industry almost a decade ago as time progressed she became an avid event blogger sharing her insight on corporate event planning.