Leadership Game: A pair coaching experiment

Presenters: Ignace Hanoulle & Yves Hanoulle
Type: Game
Duration: 180 minutes
Audience: This workshop is for everybody who wants to learn how leadership can influence his projects or life. Even those who aren't leaders in the game will learn how they can feel about different kinds of leadership. It can be useful to users, project managers, developers, testers: anyone on the project.

Abstract

What do you at expect from a leader?

That he goes away?
That she takes you strong and firmly by the hand?
That he enforces the team spirit?

In this three-hour game, together with you, we try to find an answer to these questions. By experiencing this situation on our playground, we hope to give you a better insight in:

The differences in result.
Personal taste
Group dynamic effects

We will give special attention to the link between these three themes and the daily practice of project teams. For this, after the game, we will explain three models,linking them to books, for those who want to learn more.

Mini website about the game: http://www.hanoulle.be/leiderschap You can find a dutch article on the website that we will distribute to the players of the game. This might also explain more about how we think about the subject.

Expected benefits of participating

This session lets you see what influence the leaderships style has on your team. It lets you reflect on the leadership style you wish to use or/and wants to get.

What does the session organizer hope to learn?

For us reorganizing this session, will bring us one session closer in the integration between the two worlds we both live in.

Process and timetable

Introduction 20 min
First round: strong visionary leader 30 min
The team gets the order to make a project. The leader directs strongly and takes all the decisions.
Feedback: 10 min
break: 10 min
second round: without a leader 20 min
In this assignment the (same) group has to build another project, but no leader is appointed. The organizers make sure no-one will take leadership.
Feedback: 10 min
Third round: process leader 30 min
Again a (detailed) project has to be made. This time we have a leader who will guide the process, not the product. The leader will get a cheat sheet with tips to look for. The organizers help him, when he would go for the product.
Feedback: 10 min
General feedback: 40 min.
First we ask the leaders to share their experiences.
After that we ask the observers to tell us what they have seen.
And finally the other participants can take the word.

At the end we finish with a little bit of theory about the exercises. At this point in time we distribute three texts.

1st about the three leadership types we experienced in the exercise, with pointing out the advantages for each one In this text, you will find typical pro's and con's of the type. + the typical situations where you can use this leadership type.

2nd text about the rose of Axen.

3rd text - list of books we think could be an interesting read for people who want to learn more about leadership.

4th and 5th texts with extra info about these examples.

You can find the first two articles on the leaderships game website (http://www.hanoulle.be/leiderschap )

We selected these 3 kinds of leaderships because these are the most extreme cases. A real situational leader would use the 2 leadership styles in different situations. By playing it so extremely it becomes a lot clearer for the participants.

History

We have both followed and given different workshops, trainings about Team building in all kinds of environments.

We have already played this game once for freelanceforum, an organization with IT freelancers, and this was well received and we have been giving a lot of positive feedback. Not only the "leaders" learned a lot but also the other players learned alot about "their prefered way of being led" and how they look at a leader.

We hope to play this game also in the Belgium XP group in September as well.

Language

We do this session in dutch. Although we both speak English and French, we prefer to play this game in Dutch. We think that for a optimal simulation, we want to be as close to the inner world of participants. We are convinced that for explaining what we see happening it is best that we do this in our mother tongue.