Creative Workshop Exercises: Easy and Engaging Workshop Activities #24 Coaching for Inspiring Leadership
Impact: Greater ability to inspire others as a leader
Materials Needed: One pack of Inspiring Leader Cards
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Professional Use:
Who is Coaching for Inspiring Leadership for?
The exercise is designed for executive, career and leadership coaches to assist them in helping their clients understand how their particular strengths can help inspire others to greater performance.
How does it help with creating Inspiring Leadership?
Through developing an awareness of their unique inspiring leadership strengths preferences profile, each leader gains an understanding of what strengths they bring to the leadership challenge. Through discussion, and with coaching support, they learn how to maximise the use of their particular inspiring strengths profile to meet their present or future leadership challenges.
Preparation
Remove the title card
Arrange the remaining cards in their dimension pairs, i.e. in the pairs showing the two versions of each strength.
How to run the exercise
Explain that this exercise is to help your client understand their inspirational leadership strengths better, to enable them to become more effective in their leadership role.
Explain that all these strengths have been identified by research by studying a variety of inspiring leaders; and that there is more than one way to inspire others to follow and to achieve.
Direct their attention to the first dimension and ask them to identify which of the two poles of the dimension best reflects their preferred way or working or being. You can flip the cards over for more information to make the two approaches clearer.
Ask them to imagine that, at present, all the cards lie at the midpoint of a scale. Moving the cards away from this point represents a movement along a scale from this midpoint towards one or other extreme.
So with a very strong preference for one dimension, there will be a large movement of the card, for a less strong preference, a lesser movement.
Then ask them to indicate the strength of their preference by moving that card from the central position. Rough and ready is fine.
Do this for each of the dimensions, discussing their choices as they go. You should have a profile that looks something like this
Then, ask them to identify two of their chosen preferences they feel happy with, that they believe enhance their abilities as a leader. Discuss situations in which this preference has proven to be an asset and identify any other situations where it could be helpful.
Next, ask them to identify one of their preferences they are less sure about, one where they find it hard to see what benefit it brings to leadership.
For instance here the person might be quite satisfied with their ability to create engagement through their attentiveness, and to create a sense of gravitas through being impactful, but be less sure about their preference for obtaining power through collaboration over being directive.
For example let's imagine your client has just taken on a new team who aren't responding well to this approach, or perhaps she fears, given how other leaders around her act, that her style might be perceived as weak.
Use the information on the reverse of the card to identify its potential benefits, then explore potential leadership situations where it would be of help.
For example here the conversation could explore how collaboration helps build relationships and encourages personal growth and development in others. Encourage her to tell stories of past success in this area.
Discussion might reveal that the team's previous leader was more directive and her staff are a bit unsettled by the change in style. So you could discuss how she could explain to her staff how she likes to work and the benefits of working in a more collaborative way, while making it clear she will help them to get things right and do well. And that she is not abdicating a leader role, just doing it differently.
As to other audiences, like her peers or supervisors, you could discuss how she could direct their attention to successes and achievements in her team, achieved through collaborating. Maybe she could share stories about how her staff are growing in capability and so increasing the working capacity of her team.
You could also explore with her when a more directive style could be used, even if it's not her preference. For instance when someone doesn't know where or how to start working something out for themselves, or when time is extremely short and effectiveness in the moment is the key priority.
Continue in this way as long as seems valuable.
To conclude, pull out three ideas from all the discussion for how to use their inspiring leader strengths more effectively in their current or future leadership position.
An extension of the exercise
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