Soft skills Engagement Game
This is a good game to begin a workshop. It sets everyone on the mood to learn, share, and participate.
Library of facilitation techniques
Leadership and Personal Development Group Activities
Activities to support personal development and train new soft skills. Help your participants to reflect, grow self-awareness and learn new interpersonal skills.
61 results
Fishbowl
The Fishbowl game is an effective way to activate attention—to prime our natural listening and observing skills so that a more substantive conversation can take place.
Tower of Power
This teamwork activity requires participants to work closely together to build a tower from a set of building blocks.
The players need to coordinate their actions in order to be able to move the wooden blocks with the crane they have, and this can only be solved by precise planning, good communication and well-organised teamwork.
You may use this exercise to emphasise the following themes and outcomes:
- In Leadership training: identifying interdependencies in systems, leadership communication, dealing with risk, giving feedback
- In Team building: communicating effectively, cooperating, being an active listener, maintaining the balance, working with values
- In Project management: simulating strategic planning, working under time pressure
- In Communication training: meta communication, facilitating, dealing with different perspectives
Back-turned Feedback
Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be led with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics.
Remote pencil pitch
Help your team practice their pitching skills while having fun with this improv activity perfect for remote teams or virtual meetings.
E.T.
The ET acronym stands for “Effective Trainer”. We use this activity in our train-the-trainer sessions.
Participants work individually, with a partner, and in teams to prepare a list of suitable techniques for providing effective training. Eventually, each participant selects a technique that he or she wants to use immediately.
Reflection: Individual
Individual reflection helps to pick apart complex experiences so that the successes of the experience can be repeated and the failures can be avoided in the future. The format is flexible, taking you through key stages of the reflection process, and ending with key action points.
Keep Your Finger on the Pulse
Public speaking is reported to be one of the top stressful events for all people. This jolt uses that fact to make a learning point about the physiological effects of stress on the body.
Participants take their pulse at the beginning of a session. They are later told they will be participating in a stressful event. When they retake their pulse, they realize how much the thought of the stressful event has caused their pulse rate to increase.
Novice or Expert?
Trainers have difficulty imagining how people feel when they are forced to learn through their weak learning styles. This activity enables them to experience the frustrations of working though a weak learning style—and the positive feelings of using their strong learning styles.
Communication Styles : P.A.A
This activity is for communication style module. This is better conducted post completing the part on communication styles (Communication styles - Passive, Aggressive & Assertive).
Friendly Flyers
This is an exercise to build up relational and communication skills. While creating paper flyers in teams, you learn about your group members one-on-one as you build paper planes with them. Afterwards, you get to know more about the rest of your group when you play a personality-matching guessing activity.
Shift and Share
You can quickly and effectively share several innovations or useful programs that may lie hidden within a group, organization, or community. Shift & Share gets rid of long large-group presentations and replaces them with several concise descriptions made simultaneously to multiple small groups. A few individuals set up “stations” where they share in ten minutes the essence of their innovations that may be of value to others. As small groups move from one innovator’s station to another, their size makes it easy for people to connect with the innovator. They can quickly learn where and how new ideas are being used and how they might be adapted to their own situations. Innovators learn from the repetition, and groups can easily spot opportunities for creative mash-ups of ideas.