Creative Workshop Exercises: Easy and Engaging Workshop Activities #21 Leadership Development with the Work Up Card Set
Impact: Helps leaders find solutions to their team-based challenges
Materials Needed: One pack of the Work Up Cards for each group of between 4 and 12 people.
Remember, should you decide to buy one or more packs of cards, you can get 10% off your first shop order with a newsletter subscription
Professional Use: For use by all training and development professionals.
You can download this blog here
Who is Leadership Development with the Work Up Card Set for?
This exercise is great for action learning sets, leadership development activities, general organisational problem solving at many different levels. The resource itself is amazing, jam packed with tried and tested ways to implement positive psychology activities to address common organisational challenges.
How does it help with Leadership Development?
By providing over 188 tried and tested positive psychology solutions from environmental, personal and role perspectives, the toolkit has something to offer almost any organisational challenge.
Preparation
Look through the red card pack (the questions pack) and pick out the cards that seem reflective of the kind of problems team leaders can have.
For example, I selected 15 around the theme of team leadership and management.
How to run the exercise
Divide your group into three ‘solution’ groups and one questioner.
Give each of the solution groups one of the yellow, blue or green card packs
Give the questioner the pre-selected small pile of red cards.
Give all groups a few minutes to familiarise themselves with their packs. Direct the questioner to think about which of the challenges on the red cards most resonates with him or her as one of their leadership challenges. Direct the solution groups to just get a sense of what’s in their particular pack.
When the group is ready to start, the questioner selects the challenge they want to explore and presents it to the group. They are free to expand on the challenge from their own context if that is helpful.
In this case we can imagine the questioner chose this card
Adding, ‘I have a very established core team. We’re trying to expand but I’ve recruited three people in the last year, two of whom have left and I’m worried about the other one. I don’t think the core team mean to make the new people feel excluded but they say they feel overlooked and not ‘part of the team’. The problem is, due to this turnover, the core members feel it’s not worth investing in people who aren’t going to stay very long. It seems to be a vicious circle. What can I do?
Once the questioner has finished explaining the challenge, the solution groups get 30 minutes to select the two best solutions from their set of cards.
The questioner is free to wander around and listen to the ideas being discussed for presentation, but not to join in the discussions.
In this case, we can imagine the groups picked these cards
The groups present their proposed solutions, adding their own thoughts. For instance, regarding the 10/5 rule they might say, ‘I know this sounds a bit formulaic, but in my experience hard working people often do fail to acknowledge others, and while their established colleagues may not notice, newer team members can feel it very acutely. I think it would be worth a try, probably after a few weeks you wouldn’t need to remind people any more.’
Having listened to all the suggestions, the questioner selects one or two they are interested in and outlines how they are going to put the suggestion into practice. This can be firmed up by the facilitator into a SMART objective, which can be reviewed at the next development event.
Time permitting a new round, with a new questioner, can commence following the same pattern.
The Work-Up packs featured here are all available at the Positive Psychology Shop. A discount of 10% is available to new newsletter subscribers
If you have any queries about the exercises as described, please contact Sarahlewis@acukltd.com. We will publish any queries and answers in the next newsletter to the benefit of all.
Please feel free to share the link to this page with any colleagues you feel may be interested. Or, direct them to the newsletter subscription page where they can find out about the newsletter service and subscribe for free.
Please also feel free to add a link to this blog and/or our shop to your website if you think it might add value to your website visitors.
