The Benefits Of Leadership Development Exercises
A lot of corporate organizations think that leadership training is only important for managers and other organizational personnel above them, which is why they only provide leadership training to said personnel without sparing a thought for other employees below them, who in fact are more concerned with the day-to-day activities of the organization. Such corporate organizations forget that it is your average employee that will one day rise up to be a manager or other high-ranking authority in the organization, so why not sow the seeds of leadership in your employees right from the start?
Leadership training, when provided to all employees regardless of their position, promotes better engagement within the organization, allows employees to relate with the organization’s mission, inspires innovation in employees, identifies talent and potential in the organization, and promotes numerous skills such as communication, emotional intelligence, creativity, problem-solving, delegation and personal responsibility in addition to providing numerous other benefits which are beyond count. But how should organizations be going about providing leadership development training to their employees? Well, there are a number of factors that only each specific organization knows about, however, there are certain leadership development exercises each organization can benefit from if they implement them. In this article, we’ll discuss those exercises.
1. Discuss Desirable Qualities
This is a great exercise that puts the ball in the employees’ court. Divide employees into teams and ask each team to share the name of an industry leader they all admire. For example, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, or any other leader from any industry. Then ask those teams to identify characteristics, qualities, and skills possessed by that leader which they would want to develop in themselves. Once that is done, you can use the listed characteristics, qualities, and skills to create digital learning that trains employees in those, creating a learner-centric, personalized learning program.
2. Tell Me What You See
This is an exercise that develops communication skills. Split employees into pairs and have them sit back to back. One employee gets an object and will describe it to the other one without saying its name (you could also ban saying certain things that give away that object’s identity). The other person has to identify the object being described. You could also give that employee a paper and pen to sketch that object as it is being described. Descriptive communication is very important in business, particularly product-based businesses.
3. Use AR/VR
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are advanced technologies that are going to be commonplace in corporate training within the next decade and already there are a number of organizations that have started using them. After all, implementing AR/VR in your digital learning program isn’t as costly as you might imagine, and a well-to-do organization can easily get their hands on the necessary gadgets required.
AR/VR can also be used in leadership training by creating teams of employees that have one common goal; for example, searching for an item in a virtual simulation (when using VR), or searching for a virtual object in the real world using their phones (when using AR, similar to Pokémon Go). There is no dearth to simulations you can create for AR/VR, which will, however, require both research and expertise. Even the above-mentioned exercise (Tell Me What You See) can be done using AR/VR.
4. Gamification
Gamification is being used freely in corporate training and customer engagement these days and is a great way to provide leadership training to employees. Gamification uses game elements like points, levels, badges, rewards, timers, and leaderboards to engage and motivate modern employees, who are already in the habit of playing games on their laptops and smartphones. This makes any training, and not just leadership training, fun and more relatable, and thus more likely to be absorbed and retained. Gamification can also be used to get employees to work together as a team in pursuit of a common goal, much like AR/VR simulations, which often helps to identify leaders.
Modern training has to be learner-centric, and modern learners usually have the best suggestions on how to make training more engaging, motivating, clear as well as easier to absorb and retain. Thus, it is suggested that you continuously ask employees for suggestions to improve the training and be observant, analytical, and consistent when providing leadership training.
