Leadership Activities

The signs of outstanding leadership appear primarily among the followers. Are the followers reaching their potential? Are they learning? Serving? Do they achieve the required results? Do they change with grace? Manage conflict?

Leadership is a quality that some are born with whereas many people have to work really hard to acquire. Leadership qualities can be honed right from childhood through interesting leadership activities. We'll see why such activities are important and then look at some examples of them.

Benefits of Leadership Activities

• Leadership activities help the participants to introspect and look at the positive and negative aspects of their own behavior. Once they know their shortcomings, they can think about improving themselves since they know exactly where they are lacking.
• Leadership activities help to boost the morale and enhance the overall confidence of people who participate in them. Participants get over their stage fear and are capable of expressing their ideas and views more articulately to a group of people.
• Leadership activities help to develop great team-building skills amongst the participants. People who participate in leadership activities tend to pick up excellent organizational skills and the knack of handling a group of people with coordination.
• Leadership activities thus help in the overall personality development of an individual making him better equipped for different kinds of tasks in the future. People who develop strong leadership qualities acquire a habit to excel in every field, but most importantly, they acquire a habit of taking their team ahead along with them.

Suggestions for Leadership Activities

Here are some fun and interesting leadership activities that you can use for children at schools, colleges, and even employees at office.

1. The Leadership Task

If you are a fan of Donald Trump, and have been watching The Apprentice, this is an activity that you will thoroughly enjoy. From among a group of people, short-list a few people by means of a debate competition, or an essay competition. Make these short-listed candidates the group leaders and make them choose other players from the group to be a part of their team. Once the groups are formed with their individual team leaders, assign them a task. You can pick any task like setting up a lemonade booth, and check which group manages to sell the maximum number of lemonades. At the end of the tasks, hold a meeting and discuss the success and failures of every team leader and the team as well. This activity will help the leaders know what they did right, and where they lacked.

Qualities you should be looking for in a winner of this task:

• Enterprising skills
• Ability to assign tasks to the group members
• Coordinating the entire team towards victory with control and confidence

2. The Leadership Race

This is a very simple leadership activity that can be conducted in schools, colleges and even workplaces. Make a handout that contains qualities and general statements that convey the qualities of a true leader. For example: "I always take responsibility for my failures and try and learn from every failure". Distribute these handouts to the participants and make them stand at a common start line. Now, read the first sentence aloud and ask all the participants to judge for themselves whether that sentence holds true for them, and if it does, they can move one step ahead. While taking that step ask participants to narrate or illustrate a short example to support their assertion. Continue the activity until you have a winner of the race.

Qualities you should be looking for in a winner of this task:

• Confidence to accept one's positive and negative points
• Honesty

3. The Thinking Hat

Ask every participant to write down his/her view about the essential qualities of a leader. Give the participants a fixed time to write down their thoughts and then ask everyone to take the stage and vocalize their thoughts with the others. Ask them to do it in an innovative way. While a person is presenting his views on the dais, provide feedback forms to others and ask them to rate the person at the end of his speech. Calculate the winner at the end of the activity and explain why he/she emerged as the winner.

Qualities you should be looking for in a winner of this task:

• Ability to gather thoughts, pen them down and communicate with the audience without prior preparation.
• Ability to generate quality ideas and think rationally within a short span of time.
• Also look for creativity and confidence during public speaking.

Such leadership activities and games go a great way in developing a sense of leadership and responsibility in children as well as adults. So try them out and see the difference.