Team Building with Leadership Theories

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What leadership theories have you used (practiced) during team building programs? 

Leadership outcomes are very common in team building programs - we provide amazing opportunities to practice leadership behaviors. Most of my leadership programming has  included activities that give participants practice with leading (e.g., a "leader" is assigned as part of the activity). After a group conversation about what leadership looks and sounds like, we get into activities to practice (or not) these behaviors. In most cases, for me,  theoretical conversations do not take place. 

My favorite process for exploring leadership is to provide feedback to the leader(s). Knowing the group understands how to provide feedback (this skill development might take place as part of the program), we include leader feedback as part of the processing session. Then, the group moves into another activity with a new leader (or leaders). More leader feedback after the activity and then another activity. The facilitated objective of this continual (formative evaluation) leader feedback is to collect "data" about leadership and (hopefully) to learn, in the moment, and use this knowledge to inform leadership behaviors that are on the way (i.e., if the near-future leaders are listening, they might remember to use the behaviors that are important to the members of the group - like, using names when interacting with each other). 

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, Kouzes & Posner

More recently I've had the opportunity to work (program) with the five practices of leadership promoted by Kouzes & Posner. Through a particular program, participants were learning about these practices and studying, The Leadership Challenge (the extended research-based book by Kouzes & Posner). Through personal exploration and learning from the participants about the practices, I slowly built up a repertoire of activities that brought out behaviors related to each practice. (HERE is a nice PDF article with more details about the five practices.)

Five Practices in Summary: 

• Model the Way - After discussing desirable leadership behaviors (mostly derived from what Kouzes & Posner observed as good behaviors), we moved through activities and processed how the leaders (ones perceived as being leaders) were modeling best practices and how leaders perceived they were modeling good practice. 
• Inspire a Shared Vision - This practice was the most difficult to experience through activities. When it did surface, someone in the group could see a solution to the task, would get very excited about it and then verbally inspire (maybe push) others to join in the thinking and doing. It was not a long-term vision, but a short inspirational (or not) moment that brought in some good processing conversations.
• Challenge the Process - This has been my favorite practice to experience. This came up (mostly) as "sharing voice" and having the courage to speak up when there is something to be said. It might be as simply as (or not so simply) asking to create a norm where everyone has a turn to speak if needed. Or, it could be stepping in and asking for leadership change or leadership sharing. I like and used this question a lot: How could you challenge the process right now? (It was often necessary to discuss the types of challenges possible.) 
• Enable Others to Act - This practice, for me, assumed there is "power" to give away in order to enable others - but this is my take (I struggled with this one the most). So, I did like to dive into this practice with some emotional intelligence focus. "If you are all in this together, how do you make space for everyone to contribute to your success - we all want to be a part, how do we/you make this happen?" The most powerful revelation that turns up is, "I don't have to do everything myself." Every team building activity has the potential to work on sharing space, work and success. 
• Encourage the Heart - "Leaders encourage the heart by recognizing contributions and celebrating values and victories" (from the PDF). As team builders, we love to "encourage" and experience this practice. Everyone knows how this contributes to the engagement of a group - as long as the encouragement is authentic (a really good talking point - what is and isn't authentic). 

When I began learning about, The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, someone shared this acronym, M.I.C.E.E. (Micky) to remember the practices. 

How about you? What Leadership Theories have you worked with (programmed) in your team building experiences? Please leave us a Comment so we can explore them and learn from you. 

Here's to learning together! 

Chris Cavert, Ed.D. 
FUNdoing.com (Activity resources for Team Builders)
TeamBuilderPowerUps (An online school for Team Builders)
YoungTeamBuilders (The voices of young Team Builders) ​

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