Lead me

November 15, 2011 1:00 PM

Looking for group exercises aimed at professionals that can demonstrate how leadership works, or games the group can play where they have to organize themselves and perhaps undertake an activity or complete a task. Basically any ideas that are fun, gets the group laughing and thinking- and they leave believing I'm awesome.
posted by the noob to human relations (7 answers total)

I've always had fun with these "survival" type tasks, where you are made part of a group that must choose, from a list, a limited number of items to take with you on a deserted island/lifeboat/bomb shelter/moonbase.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:10 PM on November 15, 2011

A fun, easy warm-up to do is have everyone arrange themselves by birthday without talking.
posted by kinetic at 1:15 PM on November 15, 2011

I did a leadership training thing once where most of the activities were crap. But one thing that was fun was called "Tangled."

Divide into groups of ~10. Stand in a circle with shoulders barely touching. Everyone extends their right hand to one other person across the circle (grasping either their right or left hands). With the left hand, grab a different person. Then ask them to untangle themselves without releasing anyone’s hand (twisting hand positions is acceptable, but no releasing).

It takes a bit of persistence, teamwork, and lots of communications/negotiations, but I thought it was a fun and simple thing with some RL implications.
posted by gemmy at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2011

You'll find some overlap here. The two I posted relate directly.

http://ask.metafilter.com/199852/Help-Me-Inspire-Innovation
posted by R2WeTwo at 1:23 PM on November 15, 2011

Check out Tom Wujek's Ted Talk: Build a [marshmallow] tower, build a team
posted by smirkette at 1:33 PM on November 15, 2011

A teambuilding activity that I have used successfully is The Star. I also second the marshmallow tower activity.
posted by Stewriffic at 1:47 PM on November 15, 2011

Improv Encyclopedia is very useful to me. and for a good place to ask the same question try the Applied Improv Network.
posted by salishsea at 10:41 PM on November 15, 2011