The Myers-Briggs Company Blog Central

Leadership Activities


Different leadership activities involve different levels of complexity, time demands, and often costs. While training and educating leaders or future leaders for success is rightly viewed as essential for their development, training that includes leadership activities to help build required skills adds another dimension.

Before diving into leadership activity examples, it’s beneficial to discuss the types of leadership activities that can be found through paid programs as well as for free in your industry and on the Internet.

When choosing a leadership activity, it is important to consider the nature of the group receiving training and these lead to different types of leadership activities. While groups can be configured in a range of ways, here are two basic formations:

  • Individuals who are already working together in a leadership or management position
  • Individuals who may become leaders in the future but who are not yet in that position

The appropriate activity for each group will likely be determined by members’ capacity for complexity and their ability and level of experience to relate to various situations, as we`ll the ultimate goal of the activity. Activities for the second group are sometimes intended to elicit characteristics or actions that would define individuals in the group as leaders.

It’s also helpful to distinguish between leadership activities used for educational purposes and those for training purposes. While they may seem similar, generally education activities involve passive learning, while training activities tend to be more participatory and often include feedback based on the behaviors exhibited by the trainees.

If you’re teaching leadership skills and concepts to a younger or less experienced group of individuals or leaders, “10 Minute Leadership Lessons” from University of Minnesota Extension provided for youth development is a great place to start. It outlines the ideal process for implementing each of the activities described, as well as desired outcomes and applicable learnings. Click here to download the PDF.

On the other hand, if you’re working with a group of individuals who are already in a management position, you may find that leadership activities that incorporate more quantitative and qualitative data from an assessment , such as those from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® or Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI®) will be much more valuable to your audience. The Leadership Report Using the FIRO-B® and MBTI® Instruments, for example, helps leaders explore and expand their understanding of the leadership style they use in their organization and how others might perceive and react to it (view the sample report here). This 16-page report takes into account both behavior-based interpersonal needs and wants in additional to basic Myers-Briggs® personality type to give the reader an in-depth, reliable, and research-based foundation about themselves and how their leadership style differs from that of others.

From there, trainers or coaches may choose to implement activities such as creating a basic type table of leaders in the room (click here to see a video introduction to type tables), or move to more complex leadership activities, such as the “Mapping Your Leadership Landscape” section that includes a few “exercises” described in the Introduction to Type® and Leadership booklet.

If you’d like your leaders to focus more on conflict management, the TKI assessment focuses on the five basic conflict-handling modes, scores individuals on how often they use each of these five modes, and outlines the best situations in which to use each one. While the MBTI assessment must be administered by an MBTI® Certified Practitioner or taken individually at www.mbtionline.com, the TKI assessment is an entry-level assessment with no certification requirements. One engaging and physically active leadership activity using the TKI assessment can be found here on the CPP blog.



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