Show that your organisation recognises the important role played by your supervisors and team leaders. Help them to become effective leaders and communicators and equip them with the supervisory skills they need to manage their teams.
Motivate your supervisors to want to achieve their full potential and encourage them to take responsibility for developing their own people too.
- Provide core management skills to team leaders
- Enable team leaders to effectively manage their team
- Boost the confidence of newly-promoted team leaders
- Develop their leadership skills
- Enable them to bridge the gap between the team and management
List of Activities:
1. The role and position of the team leader
An activity to explore the position of the team leader in the organisation; to introduce the concept of the team leader being the ‘link’ between the team and the rest of the organisation, and to identify ways in which the team leader can bring these two sides closer together.
2. An introduction to leadership
This activity examines how people become leaders, and what skills and qualities an individual needs to have in order to be a good leader. It also asks participants to question the old saying ‘You are either a born leader or you are not’, and to assess how much of what a leader does is nature and how much can actually be learned.
3. The task and the team
Two parallel aspects of leadership, the task to be done and the team with which you will achieve it, are identified as being equally important considerations for a team leader. This activity examines what happens when leaders concentrate too much on one or the other, and shows participants how to identify for themselves where they operate predominantly on the ‘task/team graph’.
4. Leadership style
Leadership style should be needs led, not personality driven. This activity introduces a wide range of different styles a leader can use – each having its own place, depending upon the circumstances and the effect the leader needs to create.
5. Motivation
This activity concentrates on three areas of positive motivation, that is those motivators which are most effective at getting people to want to do something rather than having to. Participants look closely at the three areas of positive motivation and then relate the technique to the people in their own teams.
6. Time management
This activity comprises a number of short exercises in managing your time more effectively, and includes the use of the timemanagement grid to identify how all the tasks we do fall into one of four zones. If they are not undertaken in the right zone, they become crises. The activity also examines how tasks arrive in our ‘crisis zone’ and how we can move some of them out.
7. Delegation
New team leaders can find delegation the most difficult skill to get right.They often ask ‘What should I delegate?’. This activity shows that it is not a case of ‘what’, but ‘why’. Participants are shown how to consider delegation in terms of ‘expanded’ or ‘contracted’ delegation, and to assess the reasons for and effects of doing each.
8. Giving clear instructions
Orders, requests and indications are used as three different categories of instruction, and the participants consider the effects of using each one, as well as having a go at producing written instructions themselves.
9. Dealing with conflict
Both grievance and discipline feature in the two-part case study in this activity.The participants work with their own grievance and discipline procedures to decide how to deal with a case which moves from conflict to a formal complaint of harassment.
10. Managing team development – the leader’s role
This activity outlines the techniques a team leader will need in order to assess the development needs of the team, and then to organise and plan for that development to be undertaken. The participants also assess a range of possible ways in which development needs can be met other than by simply ‘training’.
11. The team leader as trainer
This is an introduction to group-training techniques and outlines the four essential areas of control needed in order to run an effective training session. The activity introduces participants to the idea of managing their material, their group, their equipment and themselves.
12. Assertiveness
In this activity, the participants develop assertive behaviour in a series of group exercises which look at assertive language, assertive vocal information and assertive body language. In a role-play exercise, they experience how these three all contribute to ‘assertive behaviour’.
13. The Christmas Party – a team-skills exercise
A team is a group of individuals who all have a different contribution to make to the team effort. In this activity, each person has a unique piece of information on their briefing sheet without which the activity cannot be completed. The only problem is, no one knows that the briefing sheets are different. So this activity clearly demonstrates how information needs to be shared within a team and how difficult that can be.
14. Problem solving and creative thinking
We all use a formula for solving problems and taking decisions, even if it is only subconsciously. The participants are introduced to this formula, and then think about how one stage of the formula – identifying all our options – is the opportunity to think creatively if they can get themselves ‘outside the box’.
15. Verbal and vocal communication
It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. This activity examines the use and limitations of the words we use in communicating to other people, and identifies the barriers that prevent information being received in the same way it was transmitted.
16. Body language
Body language is by far the most important channel of personal communication. This activity sets out to demonstrate the power of body language and the different messages we can send through eye contact, posture, gesture and facial expression.
17. Wine suspension – a team challenge
This activity is designed to demonstrate to the participants the need for careful planning and problem solving by the team leader, as well as demonstrating how team leaders need to involve others in that process. It essentially demonstrates the crucial role of the team leader.
18. The newcomers
It is important that team leaders learn how easy it is for new members of a team to feel alienated and how best to include them fully in team events. This activity demonstrates how full incorporation of new team members can be achieved.
334 pages, with 137 OK to copy pages.
