exercise for assignment

100 Writing Practice Lessons & Exercises

by Joe Bunting | 50 comments

Want to become a better writer? How much time do you spend on your writing practice? Perhaps you want to write novels, or maybe you just want to get better grades in your essay writing assignments , or maybe you'd like to start a popular blog .

If you want to write better, you need practice. But what does a writing practice actually look like? In this post, I'm going to give you everything you need to kick off your writing practice and become a better writer faster.

100 Top Writing Practice Lessons and Exercises

What Is Writing Practice?

Writing practice is a method of becoming a better writer that usually involves reading lessons about the writing process, using writing prompts, doing creative writing exercises , or finishing writing pieces, like essays, short stories , novels , or books . The best writing practice is deliberate, timed, and involves feedback.

How Do You Practice Writing?

This was the question I had when I first started The Write Practice in 2011. I knew how to practice a sport and how to practice playing an instrument. But for some reason, even after studying it in college, I wasn't sure how to practice writing.

I set out to create the best writing practice I could. The Write Practice is the result.

I found that the best writing practice has three aspects:

Deliberate . Writing whatever you feel like may be cathartic, but it's not an effective way to become a better writer or build your writing skills. You'll get better faster by practicing a specific technique or aspect of the writing process each time you sit down to write.

This is why we have a new lesson about the writing process each day on The Write Practice, followed by a practice prompt at the end so you can put what you learned to use immediately.

Timed . It's no secret writers struggle with focus. There are just too many interesting distractions—Facebook, email, Kim Kardashian's Instagram feed (just kidding about that last one, sort of)—and writing is just too hard sometimes.

Setting a timer, even for just fifteen minutes, is an easy and effective way to stay focused on what's important.

This is why in our writing practice prompt at the end of each post we have a time limit, usually with a link to an online tool egg timer , so you can focus on deliberate practice without getting distracted.

Feedback . Getting feedback is one of the requirements to deliberately practice writing or any other craft. Feedback can look like listening to the reactions of your readers or asking for constructive criticism from editors and other writers.

This is why we ask you to post your writing practice after each lesson, so that you can get feedback from other writers in The Write Practice community. It's also why we set up The Write Practice Pro community , to provide critique groups for writers to get feedback on each finished piece of writing.

Our 100+ Best Creative Writing Practice Exercises and Lessons

Now that you know how we practice writing at The Write Practice, here are our best writing practice lessons to jumpstart your writing skills with some daily writing exercises, for beginner writers to even the most expert writers:

All-Time, Top 10 Writing Lessons and Exercises

These ten posts are our most viewed articles to boost your writing practice:

1. What is Plot? The 6 Elements of Plot and How to Use Them . Great stories use similar elements in wildly different ways to build page-turning stories. Click here to read what they are and learn how to start using them !

2. Top 100 Short Story Ideas . Here are over a hundred writing prompts in a variety of genres. If you need ideas for your next story, check this out!

3. How To Use Neither, Nor, Or, and Nor Correctly . Even good writers struggle figuring out when to use neither/nor and either/or. In this post, our copy-queen Liz Bureman settles the confusion once and for all. Click to continue to the writing exercise

4. Ten Secrets To Write Better Stories . How does Pixar manage to create such great stories, year after year? And how do you write a good story? In this post, I distill everything I've learned about how to write a good story into ten tips. Click to continue to the writing exercise

5. 35 Questions To Ask Your Characters From Marcel Proust . To get to know my characters better, I use a list of questions known as the Proust Questionnaire, made famous by French author, Marcel Proust. Click to continue to the writing exercise

6. How a Scene List Can Change Your Novel-Writing Life . Creating a scene list changed my novel-writing life, and doing the same will change yours too. Includes examples of the scene lists from famous authors. Click to continue to the writing exercise

7. Why You Need to be Using the Oxford Comma . Most people I've met have no idea what the Oxford comma is, but it's probably something that you have used frequently in your writing. Click to continue to the writing exercise

8. Six Surprising Ways to Write Better Interview Questions. The interview is the most-used tool in a journalist's bag. But that doesn't mean novelists, bloggers, and even students can't and don't interview people. Here's how to conduct a great interview. Click to continue to the writing exercise

9. Why You Should Try Writing in Second Person . You've probably used first person and third person point-of-view already. But what about second person? This post explains three reasons why you should try writing from this point-of-view. Click to continue to the writing exercise

10. The Secret to Show, Don't Tell . You've heard the classic writing rule, “Show. Don't Tell.” Every writing blog ever has talked about it, and for good reason. Showing, for some reason, is really difficult. Click to continue to the writing exercise.

12 Exercises and Lessons To Become a Better Writer

How do you become a better writer? These posts share our best advice:

Want to Be a Better Writer? Cut These 7 Words
What I Mean When I Say I Am A Writer
How to Become a Writer: 3 Simple Steps
72% of Writers Struggle With THIS
7 Lies About Becoming a Writer That You Probably Believe
10 Questions to Find Your Unique Writing Voice
The Best Writing Book I’ve Ever Read
The Best Way to Become a Better Writer
The Creative Writer’s Toolkit: 6 Tools You Can’t Write Without
Should You Write More or Write Better: Quantity vs Quality
How to Become a Better Writer in One, Simple Step
11 Writing Tips That Will Change Your Life

6 Lessons and Exercises from Great Writers

If you want to be a writer, learn from the great writers who have gone before you:

23 Essential Quotes from Ernest Hemingway About Writing
29 Quotes that Explain How to Become a Better Writer
10 Lessons Dr. Seuss Can Teach Writers
10 Writing Tips from Ursula Le Guin
Once Upon a Time: Pixar Prompt
All the Pretty Words: Writing In the Style of Cormac McCarthy

12 Genre and Format Specific Writing Lessons and Exercises

Here are our best writing lessons for specific types of writing, including essays, screenplays, memoir, short stories, children's books, and humor writing:

Writing an Essay? Here Are 10 Effective Tips
How To Write a Screenplay: The 5 Step Process
How to Write a Great Memoir: a Complete Guide
How to Write a Short Story from Start to Finish
How to Write a Thriller Novel
How to Write a Children's Book
How to Write a Love Story
How to Write a Coming of Age Story or Book
How to Write an Adventure Book
5 Key Elements for Successful Short Stories
4 Tips to Write a Novel That Will Be Adapted Into a Movie
Humor Writing for People Who Aren’t Funny

14 Characterization Lessons and Exercises

Good characters are the foundation of good fiction. Here are our best lessons to create better characters:

Character Development: How to Create Characters Audiences Will Love
Writing Villains: 9 Evil Examples of the Villain Archetype
How NOT to Introduce a New Character
The Strongest Form of Characterization
The Most Important Character Archetype
How Do You Build A Strong Character In Your Writing?
75+ Antihero Examples and How to Use Them
How to Explore Your Characters’ Motivations
8 Tips for Naming Characters
The Protagonist: How to Center Your Story
Heroes vs. Anti-Heroes: Which Is Right For Your Story?
The Weakest Form of Characterization
How to Write With an Accent
How To Create a Character Sketch Using Scrivener

15 Grammar Lessons and Exercises

I talk to so many writers, some of whom are published authors, who struggle with grammar. Here are our best writing lessons on grammar:

Is It Okay To End A Sentence With A Preposition?
Contractions List: When To Use and When To Avoid
Good vs. Well
Connotation vs. Denotation
Per Se vs. Per Say
When You SHOULD Use Passive Voice
When Do You Use “Quotation Marks”
Polysyndeton and Asyndeton: Definition and Examples
The Case Against Twilight
Affect Versus Effect
Stop Saying “Literally”
What Is a Comma Splice? And Why Do Editors Hate Them?
Intra vs. Inter: Why No One Plays Intermural Sports
Alright and Alot: Words That Are Not Words
The Poor, Misunderstood Semicolon

5 Journalism Lessons and Exercises

Want to be a journalist? Or even use techniques from journalism to improve your novel, essay, or screenplay? Here are our best writing lessons on journalism:

Six Ways to Ask Better Questions In Interviews
How to Conduct an Author Interview
Interview In Person or Via Email?
What If They Don’t Want to Talk to You?
Eleven Habits of a Highly Effective Interviewers

16 Plot and Structure Lessons and Exercises

Want to write a good story? Our top plot and structure lessons will help:

The Nine Types of Story and How to Master Them
Points of a Story: 6 Plot Points Every Story Needs
How to Shape a Story: The 6 Arcs
7 Keys To Write the Perfect First Line of a Novel
The Secret to Creating Conflict
4 Tips to Avoid Having Your Short Story Rejected by a Literary Magazine
7 Steps to Creating Suspense
5 Elements of Storytelling
3 Important Rules for Writing Endings
A Writer’s Cheatsheet to Plot and Structure
Overcoming the Monster
How to Satisfy Your Reader With a Great Ending
Pow! Boom! Ka-Pow! 5 Tips to Write Fight Scenes
The Dramatic Question and Suspense in Fiction
How to Write a Memorable Beginning and Ending
How to Write the Perfect First Page

6 Lessons and Exercises to Beat Writer's Block

Writer's block is real, and it can completely derail your writing. Here are six lessons to get writing again:

How To Write Whether You Feel Like it Or Not
This Fun Creative Writing Exercise Will Change Your Life
When You Should Be Writing But Can't…
What to do When Your Word Count is Too Low
7 Tricks to Write More with Less Willpower
When You Don’t Know What to Write, Write About Your Insecurities

7 Literary Technique Lessons and Exercises

These writing and storytelling techniques will teach you a few tricks of the trade you may not have discovered before:

3 Tips to “Show, Don’t Tell” Emotions and Moods
3 Reasons to Write Stream of Consciousness Narrative
16 Observations About Real Dialogue
Intertextuality As A Literary Device
Why You Should Use Symbolism In Your Writing
6 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Poetry and Prose
3 Tips To Write Modern Allegorical Novels
Symbol vs. Motif: What’s the Difference

3 Inspirational Writing Lessons and Exercises

Need some inspiration? Here are three of our most inspiring posts:

Why We Write: Four Reasons
You Must Remember Every Scar
17 Reasons to Write Something NOW

3 Publishing Blogging Lessons and Exercises

If you want to get published, these three lessons will help:

The Secret to Writing On Your Blog Every Day
How to Publish Your Book and Sell Your First 1,000 Copies
How to Submit a Short Story for Publication

11 Writing Prompts

Need inspiration or just a kick in the pants to write. Try one of our top writing prompts :

Grandfathers [writing prompt]
Out of Place [writing prompt]
Sleepless [writing prompt]
Longing [writing prompt]
Write About Yourself [writing prompt]
3 Reasons You Should Write Ghost Stories
Road Trip [writing prompt]
Morning [writing prompt]
The Beach [writing prompt]
Fall Writing Prompts
How to Use Six-Word Stories As Writing Prompts

Is It Time To Begin Your Writing Practice?

It's clear that if you want to become a writer, you need to practice writing. We've created a proven process to practice your writing at The Write Practice, but even if you don't join our community, I hope you'll start practicing in some way today.

Personally, I waited far too long to start practicing and it set my writing back years.

How about you? Do you think practicing writing is important? Let me know in the comments section .

Choose one of the writing practice posts above. Then, read the lesson and participate in the writing exercise, posting your work in the Pro Practice Workshop . And if you post, please give feedback to your fellow writers who also posted their practices.

Have fun and happy practicing!

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

Write About Yourself with blue hello name tag

Work with Joe Bunting?

WSJ Bestselling author, founder of The Write Practice, and book coach with 14+ years experience. Joe Bunting specializes in working with Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, How To, Literary Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Self Help books. Sound like a good fit for you?

50 Comments

You have THE BEST content for writing on this blog!!

Thank you, Kristen. This made my morning. 🙂

Thanks Mitch. 🙂

I can’t remember when I started following this website. I have to look in my notebooks because that’s where I did these practices. I didn’t have access to a computer when I did them, so I wrote them out, setting the time limit. But even when I do get to a computer, I have my reservations about putting my practices on the page. even though it’s practice, I want them to be the best, almost perfect. But I know it won’t be. I’ve gotten feedback before that says so. It still gets to me that I didn’t put something together that not everyone liked. I need to get over it. After all, that is what these practices are about: to learn and improve on our craft.

I don’t know either, George, but it’s been several years. Perfectionism is something so many of us face, and it’s made worse when you don’t have a critique community as warm and encouraging as ours is. I hope you and everyone here are always willing to try something new, even if it comes out a little messed up, because you know we’ll support you and try to make you better.

What a great share! Thanks so much!

You’re so welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you for commenting.

when I ran writing classes I wrote. when I am “a member of writing classes” the teacher/leader/facilitator is NOT MY AUDIENCE and so I don’t write as well/as much. I don’t get the feedback I need from fellow students because most of them have never run their own writing projects/workshops. So many people expect you to write their story for them. I’ve actually got quite a few stories of me own. I have finally decided I like owning them. 😉

It sounds like you need a new critique group, Patience! Hope you can find a place where you get the feedback you need.

Wow! Terrific round-up of resources. 🙂

Thanks Stephanie. 🙂

Practice is necessary, period. It doesn’t matter what you want to learn. If you want to improve, practice is vital.

It’s odd. I’ve known and applied that principle for years on a variety of things. Painting. Drawing. Blogging. Gardening. Laundry.

But never writing.

Like you, I had the notion that just writing every day was all it took to improve. Why not the same level of dedication to writing?

Perhaps it’s time to change that!

I can relate, Carrie. It’s easy to confuse the craft of writing with journaling, thinking that you can just write whatever you feel like and you’ll get better, write something worth reading. The truth is that writing interesting things to read is a skill, but the good news is that you can get better at it with practice. Thanks for practicing with us! 🙂

I love these suggestions , and have set Writing Practice as my homepage so the first 15 minutes of my day is spent writing, whether its a practice or exercise here or another that is sprinkled through out this site, Thank you for all you do everyone here at The Write Practice

This is great Debra. I want to write the first 15 minutes of my day too!

I agree with Joe, Do it. Could be your to do list… ( that could lead to something else story wse later)

I love that, Debra. Such a good way to start your day.

Thanks Joe!

The best! Thank you so much for this.

You’re very welcome!

I simply LOVE all the tips and suggestions given on this blog. They are super helpful!

THANK you. We love sharing them with you. 🙂

Hi! You forgot the link to How to Write a Story a Week: A Day-by-Day Guide.

Thanks a lot for your work! This post is amazing.

It’s a great post Thiago. Definitely one of our most shared. Thanks for mentioning it! BTW here’s the link:

https://thewritepractice.com/a-story-a-week/

Wow!! There are so many exercises…. I just love it..! I am gonna really enjoy it..!

Awesome! Thank you for reading and practicing with us. 🙂

I only read halfway , My tootie is jumping all over me, and typing this is a struggle when a 3yr old wants his Toy Story movie on Youtube in this computer. Thank you for this article, will come back later to finish reading.

I know the feeling! Good luck!

Can’t wait to get stuck in with this! 🙂

Very helpful! Thank you!

I’ve just bookmarked this page. Thanks for this wonderful list.

This is awesome! So many helpful tips. I will be coming back to this often. Thanks for posting this!

Wow, so many goodies! Thank you for always providing such amazing content!!

I have enjoyed all these articles. Thank you for the help an inspiration to get my writing on its way. My creativity is boosting with confidence. Tootle loo.

Amazing contents for beginners like me Joe. I am highly inspired by your commitment. Thank you.

Hey, thanks!

Although I have only read half of thisc article, the practice exercises are excellent. Some of them are exactly what a beginning writer like myself needs. I am committing to at least try ALL of them. Thanks Joe!!

very helpful! thank you..

Amazing articles! Thanks so much for sharing!

My god this article made me love this site . You know it’s kinda hard for a beginner writer, who don’t know where to start and fixing goals, even samll ones give us a direction . A place to go , an aim for our creativity so thanks you , this community and this site. Love you all . At your pens ! 😉

Wow. This is great. I find all your posts informative, but this one is the best for me to use as a guide to get my self starting to write….Thank you.

I’m an old lady who wants to publish one more book before I die — have published several, all non-fiction, and done two under contract to a major publisher (reference books). So help me, the BIGGEST problem I have all along, is keeping track of the damned paper work and research that goes into a book!!! Yet I never ever see articles on something as simple as “How to file” — Oh I know, there’s wonderful software these days so probably I will never find a way to get paper organized — everybody will use software and do it on the computer. I’m too old for that — just one look at the learning curve for software, even putting the damned stuff into computer files is even MORE frustrating than paper!! Oh well, somehow I managed in the past to get books published, I may be able to do it one more time.

you enjoy writing more than anything else and you do indeed care to help others write. I love writing but translation from Arabic into English and English into Arabic is taking all of my time from the early hours of the morning till the evening. I will soon get all of your books in order to read them as soon as possible. One thing I am sure of. You know what you are doing very well. Hamzah

Excellent! Many useful tips. Many thanks!

Liz and Joe, I have only looked at a few exercises. Already, I am convinced that your site is one of the best sites out there. Thank your for sharing your wisdom.

Wow, these are the best lessons and exercises for writing. Actually i’m participating in a compitition this wendsday. so, i’m quite nervous and exited. this helped me a lot

Magnificent post ever I have read. This article will help me a lot to write a right way. Thank you.

i need your help to improve to become a better writer please. i think i usually commit moist of these errors and i don;t pay attention to many advices too.

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Reading Comprehension Worksheets

Inferences Worksheets

Context Clues Worksheets
Theme Worksheets

Main Idea Worksheets

Reading Games
Summary Worksheets
Online Tests
Figurative Language Worksheets
Short Stories with Questions
Nonfiction Passages
Genre Worksheets

BECOME A MEMBER!

Reading worksheets.

Ereading Worksheets has the best reading worksheets on the internet, and they're all free. These worksheets are skill focused and aligned to Common Core State Standards. You are free to save, edit, and print these worksheets for personal or classroom use. Many of these assignments can now be completed online. You're going to like this.

This page features a sampling of the reading worksheets on this website, organized by skills. You can find more activity by browsing the pages that are dedicated to each reading skill.

Fiction Reading Passages

Nonfiction reading passages.

Author's Purpose Worksheets
Characterization Worksheets
Fact and Opinion Worksheets
Irony Worksheets
Story Structure Worksheets

Types of Conflict Worksheets

This is a preview image of "That Spot". Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

Looking for More Fiction Passages?

This is a preview image of Chess. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

Looking for More Nonfiction Passages?

This is a preview image of Author's Purpose Worksheet 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Resources on Author's Purpose?

This is a preview image of Characterization Lesson 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Resources on Characterizations

This is a preview image of Fact and Opinion Lesson. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Resources on Fact and Opinion

This is a preview image of Inferences Worksheet 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Resources on Inferences

This is a preview image of Irony Lesson 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Irony Worksheets

This is a preview image of Main Idea Lesson 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Main Idea Resources

This is a preview image of "The Breakaway". Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Story Structure Resources

This is a preview image of Theme Worksheet 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Resources on Theme

This is a preview image of Types of Conflict Worksheet 1. Click on it to enlarge it or view the source file.

More Resources on Conflict

This is a picture of a female teacher helping a male student with his reading assignment. They appear to be finding success at this assignment.

104 Comments

great website! it made my work easier.. love it. thank you

This is one of the best websites I ever came across! It’s just simply the best website for English, apart from the web dictionaries 😉

I’ve been using this website for getting great grades (alliteration is one of those things that your games inspired me to do; not that yours are bad though) at my examinations for atleast 2 years.

I will be forever grateful to Mr. Morton for his wonderful website!

Maybe-Your-Most-Favourite-Viewer

Thank you for visiting and the kind words!

English is my second language.

It is with great pleasure that I found your web site. Over the summer 2020, I printed almost all your reading comprehension materials for my grade 7 and 9 kids to read. I myself read each of them too and answered each of the questions. Your web sites rekindled my interest in reading as an adult.

I am bit selfish to hope there are more reading comprehension materials for my kids and myself.

Thank you for your great work! The world becomes more beautiful because of your altruistic contribution.

Thank you for taking the time to comment. I am always trying to create more content as well as improve the existing content. Best wishes, friend!

Tina Torres

This will help my child alot with her homework,i like this app

Laura Stapel

Hi, Thanks so much for these reading worksheets. They are original and unique and perfect for my tuition of gifted and talented sudents. Just wondering if you have an answer key for the following sheets:

The Authors Purpose 3 Figurative Language Worksheet 3 Non Fiction Reading Test Garbage

Thanks so much and well done on an excellent resource!

its good but i think u should add more games

this is great.

Zainab Ali Asghar

Hello Mr Morton, WOW!! these worksheets, games and activities are simply outstanding!! I am a teacher from Pakistan and these worksheets have helped me immensely in my learning as well as in the school when I share them with my students!! Thank you SOOOO much! I came across figurative language activities which was just the thing I was looking for but I would really appreciate if you could put up activities related to other grammar content; for example, characterization, inferential, fact and opinion, and all other content which we can integrate in our classroom activities.

Forever grateful, Zainab

That’s awesome. I actually have all of that content posted already. I’ve got to figure out some way to make the content more visible. Thanks for visiting!

it helped me in my exams

Hello Mr. Morton,

Thank you for using this great website for my daughter and me. It helps me and my daughter a lot. Do you have answers below***** those tests? If you have can I have it?

***** Jacob the Great Comprehension Test Nutrition Facts Comprehension Worksheet Pain Reliever Comprehension Worksheet

Here are those keys.

https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/reading-comprehension-worksheets/jacob-the-great-answers.html

https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/reading-comprehension-worksheets/medicine-comprehension-worksheet-answers.html

https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/reading-comprehension-worksheets/nutrition-facts-comprehension-activity-answers.htm

Thanks for using the website!

well,these storys are…AWSOME

Michael Holson

Would I be able to post your Power points and worksheets on my webpage? I’ll leave all of them the same and i’ll also put your name on them.

I’m ok with that. Links back to my website as attribution are appreciated.

Samira El-Sabban

Such an outstanding work; i do appreciate the effort and i find it quite useful thanks a million Samira El-Sabban Head of English Department Rajac Schools Egypt

Sarah Madden

Thank you THank you!!!! This site is amazing! I cannot be more happy with it!

hello great passages but is there answers to these passages.

Answers are posted where available, typically under a link that says “View Answers.”

great website!!!!!! I am using your materials for my home school kids

steward Pheirim

This is brilliant, Thank you so much. Absolutely a treasure!!!

My tutor absolutely LOVES this website(so do I) but I was just wondering where the answer key for Jacob the Great? Awesome stories too. I love how detailed they are!

You make teaching easier! Thank you!

Just amazing thanks a lot really

very helpful, exercises are enriching.

I’ve read three of the passages you have here.

The first one was about metal detectors, was amusing, I like it and it’s good to know some of this facts.

The second one was a persuasive text about seat belts, how them keep us safe and the author keeps telling us to use them.

And the third one, my favourite, was about the pony express and how they carry the mail and how hard was and the complications, it’s interesting because they had a problem and they sorted it out in a clever way.

I like your website, thank you very much.

I’m so happy that you do. Best wishes!

hello my name is gabby i like this app it is really fun

It was very good and it is also enriching

Options Exercise, Assignment, and More: A Beginner's Guide

So your trading account has gotten options approval, and you recently made that first trade—say, a long call in XYZ with a strike price of $105. Then expiration day approaches and, at the time, XYZ is trading at $105.30.

Wait. The stock's above the strike. Is that in the money 1 (ITM) or out of the money 2 (OTM)? Do I need to do something? Do I have enough money in my account? Help!

Don't be that trader. The time to learn the mechanics of options expiration is before you make your first trade.

Here's a guide to help you navigate options exercise 3 and assignment 4 —along with a few other basics.

In the money or out of the money?

The buyer ("owner") of an option has the right, but not the obligation, to exercise the option on or before expiration. A call option 5 gives the owner the right to buy the underlying security; a put option 6 gives the owner the right to sell the underlying security.

Conversely, when you sell an option, you may be assigned—at any time regardless of the ITM amount—if the option owner chooses to exercise. The option seller has no control over assignment and no certainty as to when it could happen. Once the assignment notice is delivered, it's too late to close the position and the option seller must fulfill the terms of the options contract:

A long call exercise results in buying the underlying stock at the strike price.
A short call assignment results in selling the underlying stock at the strike price.
A long put exercise results in selling the underlying stock at the strike price.
A short put assignment results in buying the underlying stock at the strike price.

An option will likely be exercised if it's in the option owner's best interest to do so, meaning it's optimal to take or to close a position in the underlying security at the strike price rather than at the current market price. After the market close on expiration day, ITM options may be automatically exercised, whereas OTM options are not and typically expire worthless (often referred to as being "abandoned"). The table below spells it out.

If the underlying stock price is...
...higher than the strike price
...lower than the strike price
If the underlying stock price is... A long call is... -->
...higher than the strike price ...ITM and typically exercised -->
...lower than the strike price ...OTM and typically abandoned -->
If the underlying stock price is... A short call is... -->
...higher than the strike price ...ITM and typically assigned -->
If the underlying stock price is... A long put is... -->
...higher than the strike price ...OTM and typically abandoned -->
...lower than the strike price ...ITM and typically exercised -->
If the underlying stock price is... A short put is... -->
...lower than the strike price ...ITM and typically assigned -->

The guidelines in the table assume a position is held all the way through expiration. Of course, you typically don't need to do that. And in many cases, the usual strategy is to close out a position ahead of the expiration date. We'll revisit the close-or-hold decision in the next section and look at ways to do that. But assuming you do carry the options position until the end, there are a few things you need to consider:

Know your specs . Each standard equity options contract controls 100 shares of the underlying stock. That's pretty straightforward. Non-standard options may have different deliverables. Non-standard options can represent a different number of shares, shares of more than one company stock, or underlying shares and cash. Other products—such as index options or options on futures—have different contract specs.
Stock and options positions will match and close . Suppose you're long 300 shares of XYZ and short one ITM call that's assigned. Because the call is deliverable into 100 shares, you'll be left with 200 shares of XYZ if the option is assigned, plus the cash from selling 100 shares at the strike price.
It's automatic, for the most part . If an option is ITM by as little as $0.01 at expiration, it will automatically be exercised for the buyer and assigned to a seller. However, there's something called a do not exercise (DNE) request that a long option holder can submit if they want to abandon an option. In such a case, it's possible that a short ITM position might not be assigned. For more, see the note below on pin risk 7 ?
You'd better have enough cash . If an option on XYZ is exercised or assigned and you are "uncovered" (you don't have an existing long or short position in the underlying security), a long or short position in the underlying stock will replace the options. A long call or short put will result in a long position in XYZ; a short call or long put will result in a short position in XYZ. For long stock positions, you need to have enough cash to cover the purchase or else you'll be issued a margin 8 call, which you must meet by adding funds to your account. But that timeline may be short, and the broker, at its discretion, has the right to liquidate positions in your account to meet a margin call 9 . If exercise or assignment involves taking a short stock position, you need a margin account and sufficient funds in the account to cover the margin requirement.
Short equity positions are risky business . An uncovered short call or long put, if assigned or exercised, will result in a short stock position. If you're short a stock, you have potentially unlimited risk because there's theoretically no limit to the potential price increase of the underlying stock. There's also no guarantee the brokerage firm can continue to maintain that short position for an unlimited time period. So, if you're a newbie, it's generally inadvisable to carry an options position into expiration if there's a chance you might end up with a short stock position.

A note on pin risk : It's not common, but occasionally a stock settles right on a strike price at expiration. So, if you were short the 105-strike calls and XYZ settled at exactly $105, there would be no automatic assignment, but depending on the actions taken by the option holder, you may or may not be assigned—and you may not be able to trade out of any unwanted positions until the next business day.

But it goes beyond the exact price issue. What if an option is ITM as of the market close, but news comes out after the close (but before the exercise decision deadline) that sends the stock price up or down through the strike price? Remember: The owner of the option could submit a DNE request.

The uncertainty and potential exposure when a stock price and the strike price are the same at expiration is called pin risk. The best way to avoid it is to close the position before expiration.

The decision tree: How to approach expiration

As expiration approaches, you have three choices. Depending on the circumstances—and your objectives and risk tolerance—any of these might be the best decision for you.

1. Let the chips fall where they may. Some positions may not require as much maintenance. An options position that's deeply OTM will likely go away on its own, but occasionally an option that's been left for dead springs back to life. If it's a long option, the unexpected turn of events might feel like a windfall; if it's a short option that could've been closed out for a penny or two, you might be kicking yourself for not doing so.

Conversely, you might have a covered call (a short call against long stock), and the strike price was your exit target. For example, if you bought XYZ at $100 and sold the 110-strike call against it, and XYZ rallies to $113, you might be content selling the stock at the $110 strike price to monetize the $10 profit (plus the premium you took in when you sold the call but minus any transaction fees). In that case, you can let assignment happen. But remember, assignment is likely in this scenario, but it is not guaranteed.

2. Close it out . If you've met your objectives for a trade, then it might be time to close it out. Otherwise, you might be exposed to risks that aren't commensurate with any added return potential (like the short option that could've been closed out for next to nothing, then suddenly came back into play). Keep in mind, there is no guarantee that there will be an active market for an options contract, so it is possible to end up stuck and unable to close an options position.

The close-it-out category also includes ITM options that could result in an unwanted long or short stock position or the calling away of a stock you didn't want to part with. And remember to watch the dividend calendar. If you're short a call option near the ex-dividend date of a stock, the position might be a candidate for early exercise. If so, you may want to consider getting out of the option position well in advance—perhaps a week or more.

3. Roll it to something else . Rolling, which is essentially two trades executed as a spread, is the third choice. One leg closes out the existing option; the other leg initiates a new position. For example, suppose you're short a covered call on XYZ at the July 105 strike, the stock is at $103, and the call's about to expire. You could attempt to roll it to the August 105 strike. Or, if your strategy is to sell a call that's $5 OTM, you might roll to the August 108 call. Keep in mind that rolling strategies include multiple contract fees, which may impact any potential return.

The bottom line on options expiration

You don't enter an intersection and then check to see if it's clear. You don't jump out of an airplane and then test the rip cord. So do yourself a favor. Get comfortable with the mechanics of options expiration before making your first trade.

1 Describes an option with intrinsic value (not just time value). A call option is in the money (ITM) if the stock price is above the strike price. A put option is ITM if the stock price is below the strike price. For calls, it's any strike lower than the price of the underlying equity. For puts, it's any strike that's higher.

2 Describes an option with no intrinsic value. A call option is out of the money (OTM) if its strike price is above the price of the underlying stock. A put option is OTM if its strike price is below the price of the underlying stock.

3 An options contract gives the owner the right but not the obligation to buy (in the case of a call) or sell (in the case of a put) the underlying security at the strike price, on or before the option's expiration date. When the owner claims the right (i.e. takes a long or short position in the underlying security) that's known as exercising the option.

4 Assignment happens when someone who is short a call or put is forced to sell (in the case of the call) or buy (in the case of a put) the underlying stock. For every option trade there is a buyer and a seller; in other words, for anyone short an option, there is someone out there on the long side who could exercise.

5 A call option gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares of stock or other underlying asset at the options contract's strike price within a specific time period. The seller of the call is obligated to deliver, or sell, the underlying stock at the strike price if the owner of the call exercises the option.

6 Gives the owner the right, but not the obligation, to sell shares of stock or other underlying assets at the options contract's strike price within a specific time period. The put seller is obligated to purchase the underlying security at the strike price if the owner of the put exercises the option.

7 When the stock settles right at the strike price at expiration.

8 Margin is borrowed money that's used to buy stocks or other securities. In margin trading, a brokerage firm lends an account owner a portion of the purchase price (typically 30% to 50% of the total price). The loan in the margin account is collateralized by the stock, and if the value of the stock drops below a certain level, the owner will be asked to deposit marginable securities and/or cash into the account or to sell/close out security positions in the account.

9 A margin call is issued when your account value drops below the maintenance requirements on a security or securities due to a drop in the market value of a security or when a customer exceeds their buying power. Margin calls may be met by depositing funds, selling stock, or depositing securities. Charles Schwab may forcibly liquidate all or part of your account without prior notice, regardless of your intent to satisfy a margin call, in the interests of both parties.

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Writing practice worksheets terms of use, finish the story writing worksheets.

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Critical Thinking Exercises

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Critical thinking is a skill that students develop gradually as they progress in school. While the skill becomes more important in higher grades, some students find it difficult to understand the concept of critical thinking .

The reason critical thinking can be difficult to grasp is because it requires students to set aside assumptions and beliefs to learn to think without bias or judgment.

Critical thinking involves suspending your beliefs to explore and question topics from a "blank page" point of view. It also involves the ability to distinguish fact from opinion when exploring a topic.

These exercises are designed to help develop critical thinking skills.

Critical Thinking Exercise 1: Tour Guide for an Alien

This exercise provides an opportunity to think outside your normal way of thinking.

Pretend that you have been assigned the task of conducting a tour for aliens who are visiting the earth and observing human life. You're riding along in a blimp, viewing the landscape below, and you float over a professional baseball stadium. One of the aliens looks down and is very confused by what he sees. You explain that there is a game going on and he asks several important questions.

What is a game?
Why are there no female players?
Why do people get so excited about watching other people play games?
What is a team?
Why can't the people in the seats go down on the field and join in?

If you try to answer these questions fully, it will quickly become apparent that we carry around certain assumptions and values. We support a certain team, for instance, because it makes us feel like we're a part of a community. This sense of community is a value that matters to some people more than others.

Furthermore, when trying to explain team sports to an alien, you have to explain the value we place on winning and losing.

When you think like an alien tour guide, you are forced to take a deeper look at the things we do and things we value. Sometimes they don't sound logical from the outside looking in.

Critical Thinking Exercise 2: Fact or Opinion

Do you think you know the difference between fact and opinion? It's not always easy to discern. When you visit websites, do you believe everything you read? The abundance of available information makes it more important than ever for students to develop critical thinking skills. Additionally, it's an important reminder that you must use trustworthy sources in your school work.

If you don't learn the difference between fact and opinion, you may end up reading and watching things that continue to reinforce beliefs and assumptions you already own.

For this exercise, read each statement and try to determine whether it sounds like a fact or an opinion. This can be completed alone or with a study partner .

My mom is the best mom on earth.
My dad is taller than your dad.
My telephone number is difficult to memorize.
The deepest part of the ocean is 35,813 feet deep.
Dogs make better pets than turtles.
Smoking is bad for your health.
Eighty-five percent of all cases of lung cancer in the U.S. are caused by smoking.
If you flatten and stretch out a Slinky toy it will be 87 feet long.
Slinky toys are fun.
One out of every one hundred American citizens is color blind.
Two out of ten American citizens are boring.

You will probably find some of the statements easy to judge but other statements difficult. If you can effectively debate the truthfulness of a statement with your partner, then it's most likely an opinion.

Research Note Cards
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The Introductory Paragraph: Start Your Paper Off Right
Understanding the Progressive Era
What Is a Senior Thesis?
How to Write a News Article That's Effective
How Long Should My Paper Be?
Tips for Typing an Academic Paper on a Computer
When to Cite a Source in a Paper
How to Narrow the Research Topic for Your Paper
Unreliable Sources for Your Research Project
Creating a Table of Contents
Finding Sources for Death Penalty Research
How to Write a 10-Page Research Paper
What Is an Autobiography?
Your Personal Essay Thesis Sentence

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Option Exercise and Assignment Explained w/ Visuals

Last updated on February 11th, 2022 , 06:38 am

Buyers of options have the right to exercise their option at or before the option’s expiration. When an option is exercised, the option holder will buy (for exercised calls) or sell (for exercised puts) 100 shares of stock per contract at the option’s strike price.

Conversely, when an option is exercised, a trader who is short the option will be assigned 100 long (for short puts) or short (for short calls) shares per contract.

Long American style options can exercise their contract at any time.
Long calls transfer to +100 shares of stock
Long puts transfer to -100 shares of stock
Short calls are assigned -100 shares of stock.
Short puts are assigned +100 shares of stock.
Options are typically only exercised and thus assigned when extrinsic value is very low.
Approximately only 7% of options are exercised.

The following sequences summarize exercise and assignment for calls and puts (assuming one option contract ):

Call Buyer Exercises Option ➜ Purchases 100 shares at the call’s strike price.

Call Seller Assigned ➜ Sells/shorts 100 shares at the call’s strike price.

Put Buyer Exercises Option ➜ Sells/shorts 100 shares at the put’s strike price.

Put Seller Assigned ➜ Purchases 100 shares at the put’s strike price.

Let’s look at some specific examples to drill down on this concept.

Exercise and Assignment Examples

In the following table, we’ll examine how various options convert to stock positions for the option buyer and seller:

As you can see, exercise and assignment is pretty straightforward: when an option buyer exercises their option, they purchase (calls) or sell (puts) 100 shares of stock at the strike price . A trader who is short the assigned option is obligated to fulfill the opposite position as the option exerciser.

Automatic Exercise at Expiration

Another important thing to know about exercise and assignment is that standard in-the-money equity options are automatically exercised at expiration. So, traders may end up with stock positions by letting their options expire in-the-money.

An in-the-money option is defined as any option with at least $0.01 of intrinsic value at expiration . For example, a standard equity call option with a strike price of 100 would be automatically exercised into 100 shares of stock if the stock price is at $100.01 or higher at expiration.

What if You Don't Have Enough Available Capital?

Even if you don’t have enough capital in your account, you can still be assigned or automatically exercised into a stock position. For example, if you only have $10,000 in your account but you let one 500 call expire in-the-money, you’ll be long 100 shares of a $500 stock, which is a $50,000 position. Clearly, the $10,000 in your account isn’t enough to buy $50,000 worth of stock, even on 4:1 margin.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, your brokerage firm will come knocking almost instantaneously. In fact, your brokerage firm will close the position for you if you don’t close the position quickly enough.

Why Options are Rarely Exercised

At this point, you understand the basics of exercise and assignment. Now, let’s dive a little deeper and discuss what an option buyer forfeits when they exercise their option.

When an option is exercised, the option is converted into long or short shares of stock. However, it’s important to note that the option buyer will lose the extrinsic value of the option when they exercise the option. Because of this, options with lots of extrinsic value remaining are unlikely to be exercised. Conversely, options consisting of all intrinsic value and very little extrinsic value are more likely to be exercised.

The following table demonstrates the losses from exercising an option with various amounts of extrinsic value:

As we can see here, exercising options with lots of extrinsic value is not favorable.

Why? Consider the 95 call trading for $7. Exercising the call would result in an effective purchase price of $102 because shares are bought at $95, but $7 was paid for the right to buy shares at $95.

With an effective purchase price of $102 and the stock trading for $100, exercising the option results in a loss of $2 per share, or $200 on 100 shares.

Even if the 95 call was previously purchased for less than $7, exercising an option with $2 of extrinsic value will always result in a P/L that’s $200 lower (per contract) than the current P/L. F

or example, if the trader initially purchased the 95 call for $2, their P/L with the option at $7 would be $500 per contract. However, if the trader decided to exercise the 95 call with $2 of extrinsic value, their P/L would drop to +$300 because they just gave up $200 by exercising.

7% Of Options Are Exercised

Because of the fact that traders give up money by exercising an option with extrinsic value, most options are not exercised. In fact, according to the Options Clearing Corporation, only 7% of options were exercised in 2017 . Of course, this may not factor in all brokerage firms and customer accounts, but it still demonstrates a low exercise rate from a large sample size of trading accounts.

So, in almost all cases, it’s more beneficial to sell the long option and buy or sell shares instead of exercising. We like to call this approach a “synthetic exercise.”

Congrats! You’ve learned the basics of exercise and assignment. If you’d like to know how the exercise and assignment process actually works, continue to the next section!

Who Gets Assigned When an Option is Exercised?

With thousands of traders long and short options in the market, who actually gets assigned when one of the traders exercises their option?

In this section, we’ll run through the exercise and assignment process for options so you know how the assignment decision occurs.

If a trader is short a single option, how do they get assigned if one of a thousand other traders exercises that option?

The short answer is that the process is random. For example, if there are 5,000 traders who are long a call option and 5,000 traders who are short that call option, an account with the short option will be randomly assigned the exercise notice. The random process ensures that the option assignment system is fair

Visualizing Assignment and Exercise

The following visual describes the general process of exercise and assignment:

If you’d like, you can read the OCC’s detailed assignment procedure here (warning: it’s intense!).

Now you know how the assignment procedure works. In the final section, we’ll discuss how to quickly gauge the likelihood of early assignment on short options.

Assessing Early Option Assignment Risk

The final piece of understanding exercise and assignment is gauging the risk of early assignment on a short option.

As mentioned early, only 7% of options were exercised in 2017 (according to the OCC). So, being assigned on short options is rare, but it does happen. While a specific probability of getting assigned early can’t be determined, there are scenarios in which assignment is more or less likely.

The following scenarios summarize broad generalizations of early assignment probabilities in various scenarios:

In regards to the dividend scenario, early assignment on in-the-money short calls with less extrinsic value than the dividend is more likely because the dividend payment covers the loss from the extrinsic value when exercising the option.

All in all, the risk of being assigned early on a short option is typically very low for the reasons discussed in this guide. However, it’s likely that you will be assigned on a short option at some point while trading options (unless you don’t sell options!), but at least now you’ll be prepared!

Next Lesson

Options Trading for Beginners

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Value in Options Trading Explained

Option Greeks Explained: Delta, Gamma, Theta & Vega

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Exercise and Assignment

Options buyers exercise their options.

Options sellers are assigned when an option is exercised.

Exercising your right

A call option is the right to buy the underlying future at the strike price. The process for activating that “right”, is called “exercising the right” or simply to “exercise” the option. For a call option, that activity is also referred to as “calling the underlying” away from the option seller.

Options buyers (either put or call buyers) are the only ones that control whether an option can be exercised. Option sellers have the obligation if assigned and thus have no control over the exercise procedure.

A put option gives the owner of the option, the right to “put” the underlying future, to the seller of the option. Imagine if a store offers a “30 day no questions asked return policy”, that is like a “put”. You can “put” the item back on the store’s shelf and get a refund. If you return the item to the store, you have “exercised your right” to sell the item back to the store.

Option buyers are the only options traders who can “exercise” the right. Call owners, those who are “long the call”, can exercise their right to buy the underlying at the strike price. And put owners, those who are “long the put”, can exercise their right to sell the underlying at the strike price.

Being assigned

Sellers of call options are obligated to sell you that future, at a specific price. They were paid a premium to take on the risk of having to sell you something at a lower price than the current market.

Similarly, the writers of put options are obligated to buy that future at the specific price, that is higher than the current market price.

When an option owner exercises the right embedded in the contract, someone has to be assigned the duty of fulfilling the obligation, and it may not be the original person who sold the option.

The process of assigning options is performed by the central clearing house. CME Clearing using an algorithm to randomize the assignment to the options sellers.

Options owners exercise their contracts when markets move in their favor. Sellers of options accept premium and could be assigned when markets benefit the buyers.

Long call option upon exercise results in long futures

Short call option upon assignment results in short futures position (futures called away)

Long put option upon exercise results in short futures position

Short put option upon assignment results in long futures position (long futures put into their account)

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The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In-Class Writing Exercises

If you find yourself wishing your students would write more thoughtful papers or think more deeply about the issues in your course, this handout may help you. At the Writing Center, we work one-on-one with thousands of student writers and find that giving them targeted writing tasks or exercises encourages them to problem-solve, generate, and communicate more fully on the page. You’ll find targeted exercises here and ways to adapt them for use in your course or with particular students.

Writing requires making choices. We can help students most by teaching them how to see and make choices when working with ideas. We can introduce students to a process of generating and sorting ideas by teaching them how to use exercises to build ideas. With an understanding of how to discover and arrange ideas, they will have more success in getting their ideas onto the page in clear prose.

Through critical thinking exercises, students move from a vague or felt sense about course material to a place where they can make explicit the choices about how words represent their ideas and how they might best arrange them. While some students may not recognize some of these activities as “writing,” they may see that doing this work will help them do the thinking that leads to easier, stronger papers.

Brainstorming

In order to write a paper for a class, students need ways to move from the received knowledge of the course material to some separate, more synthesized or analyzed understanding of the course material. For some students this begins to happen internally or through what we call “thinking,” unvoiced mulling, sorting, comparing, speculating, applying, etc. that leads them to new perspectives, understanding, questions, reactions about the course material. This thinking is often furthered through class discussion and some students automatically, internally move from these initial sortings of ideas into complex, logical interpretations of material at this point. But, for more students, their thinking will remain an unorganized, vague set of ideas referring to the subject. Many will have trouble moving beyond this vague sense or simple reaction toward ideas that are more processed, complex, or what we often call “deep.” We can foster that move to a deeper understanding by providing opportunities to externalize and fix their ideas on paper so that they may both see their ideas and then begin to see the relationships between them. The following activities will help students both generate and clarify initial responses to course material:

Free-writing. Find a clock, watch, or timer to help you keep track of time. Choose a topic, idea, question you would like to consider. It can be a specific detail or a broad concept-whatever you are interested in exploring at the moment. Write (on paper or on a computer) for 7-10 minutes non-stop on that topic. If you get stuck and don’t know what to say next, write “I’m stuck and don’t know what to say next…” or try asking yourself “what else?” until another idea comes to you. Do not concern yourself with spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Your goal is to generate as much as you can about the topic in a short period of time and to get used to the feeling of articulating ideas on the page. It’s ok if it’s messy or makes sense only to you. You can repeat this exercise several times, using the same or a variety of topics connecting to your subject. Read what you have written to see if you have discovered anything about your subject or found a line of questioning you’d like to pursue.
Clustering/Webbing. Find a clock, watch, or timer to help you keep track of time. Put a word you’d like to explore in the center of a piece of paper and put a circle around it. As fast as you can, free-associate or jot down anywhere on the page as many words as you can think of associated with your center word. If you get stuck, go back to the center word and launch again. Speed is important and quantity is your goal. Don’t discount any word or phrase that comes to you, just put it down on the page. Jot words for between 5-10 minutes. When you are finished you will have a page filled with seemingly random words. Read around on the page and see if you have discovered anything or can see connections between any ideas.
Listing. On a piece of paper list all the ideas you can think of connected to subjects you are considering exploring. Consider any idea or observation as valid and worthy of listing. List quickly and then set your list aside for a few minutes. Come back and read your list and do the exercise again.
Cubing. This technique helps you look at your subject from six different points of view (imagine the 6 sides of a cube and you get the idea). Take your topic or idea and 1) describe it, 2) compare it, 3) associate it with something else you know, 4) analyze it (meaning break it into parts), 5) apply it to a situation you are familiar with, 6) argue for or against it. Write at a paragraph, page, or more about each of the six points of view on your subject.
Journalistic questions. Write these questions down the left hand margin of a piece of paper: Who? What? Where? When? How? And Why? Think about your topic in terms of each question.
What? So What? Now what? To begin to explore an idea first ask yourself, “What do I want to explore?” and write about that topic for a page or more. Then read what you have written and ask “So what?” of the ideas expressed so far. Again, write for a page or more. Finally ask yourself, “Now what?” to begin to think about what else you might consider or where you might go next with an idea.
Defining terms. Although this suggestion is simple and may seem obvious, it is often overlooked. Write definitions for key terms or concepts in your own words. Find others’ articulations of the terms in your course readings, the dictionary, or in conversations, and compare these definitions to your own. Seek input from your instructor if you can’t get a working definition of a term for yourself.
Summarizing positions. Sometimes it’s helpful to simply describe what you know as a way to solidify your own understanding of something before you try to analyze or synthesize new ideas. You can summarize readings by individual articles or you can combine what you think are like perspectives into a summary of a position. Try to be brief in your description of the readings. Write a paragraph or up to a page describing a reading or a position.
Metaphor writing. Metaphors or similes are comparisons sometimes using the words “like” or “as.” For example, “writing is like swimming” or the “sky is as blue as map water” or “the keyboard wrinkled with ideas.” When you create a metaphor, you put one idea in terms of another and thereby create a new vision of the original idea. Sometimes it may be easier to create a metaphor or simile may help you understand your view of an idea before you can put it fully into sentences or paragraphs. Write a metaphor or simile and then explain to someone why your metaphor works or what it means to you.
Applying ideas to personal circumstance or known situations. Sometimes ideas come clearest when you can put them in a frame that is meaningful to you. Take a concept from your reading assignments and apply it so a situation in your own life or to a current event with which you are familiar. You may not end up using this application in your final draft, but applying it to something you know will help you to understand it better and prepare you to analyze the idea as your instructor directs.

Once students have something on the page to work with, they can begin the decision-making process crucial to developing a coherent idea or argument. At this point, students will choose which ideas most appeal to them, which ideas seem to fit together, which ideas need to be set aside, and which ideas need further exploration. The following activities will help students make decisions as they shape ideas:

Drawing diagrams. Sometimes it helps to look for the shape your ideas seem to be taking as you develop them. Jot down your main ideas on the page and then see if you can connect them in some way. Do they form a square? A circle? An umbrella with spokes coming down? A pyramid? Does one idea seem to sit on a shelf above another idea? Would equal signs, greater or less signs help you express the relationships you see between your idea? Can you make a flow chart depicting the relationships between your ideas?
Making charts or piles. Try sorting your ideas into separate piles. You can do this literally by putting ideas on note cards or scraps of paper and physically moving them into different piles. You can do this on the page by cutting and pasting ideas into a variety of groups on the computer screen. You can also make charts that illustrate the relationships between ideas. Common charts include timelines, authors sitting around a dinner table, and comparison/contrast charts.
Scrap pile. Be prepared to keep a scrap pile of ideas somewhere as you work. Some people keep this pile as a separate document as they work; others keep notes at the bottom of a page where they store scrap sentences or thoughts for potential use later on. Remember that it is sometimes important to throw out ideas as a way to clarify and improve the ones you are trying to develop along the way.
Shifting viewpoints (role-playing). When you begin to feel you have some understanding of your idea, it sometimes helps to look at it from another person’s point of view. You can do this by role-playing someone who disagrees with your conclusions or who has a different set of assumptions about your subject. Make a list or write a dialogue to begin to reveal the other perspective.
Applying an idea to a new situation. If you have developed a working thesis, test it out by applying it to another event or situation. If you idea is clear, it will probably work again or you will find other supporting instances of your theory.
Problem/Solution writing. Sometimes it helps to look at your ideas through a problem-solving lens. To do so, first briefly outline the problem as you see it or define it. Make sure you are through in listing all the elements that contribute to the creation of the problem. Next, make a list of potential solutions. Remember there is likely to be more than one solution.
Theory/application writing. If your assignment asks you to develop a theory or an argument, abstract it from the situation at hand. Does your theory hold through the text? Would it apply to a new situation or can you think of a similar situation that works in the same way? Explain your ideas to a friend.
Defining critical questions. You may have lots of evidence or information and still feel uncertain what you should do with it or how you should write about it. Look at your evidence and see if you can find repeated information or a repeated missing piece. See if you can write a question or a series of questions that summarize the most important ideas in your paper. Once you have the critical questions, you can begin to organize your ideas around potential answers to the question.
Explaining/teaching idea to someone else. Sometimes the most efficient way to clarify your ideas is to explain them to someone else. The other person need not be knowledgeable about your subject-in fact it sometimes helps if they aren’t familiar with your topic-but should be willing to listen and interrupt you when he or she doesn’t follow you. As you teach your ideas to someone else, you may begin to have more confidence in the shape of your ideas or you may be able to identify the holes in your argument and be more able to fix them.
Lining up evidence. If you think you have a good idea of how something works, find evidence in your course material, through research in the library or on the web that supports your thinking. If your ideas are strong, you should find supporting evidence to corroborate your ideas.
Rewriting idea. Sometimes what helps most is rewriting an idea over the course of several days. Take the central idea and briefly explain it in a paragraph or two. The next day, without looking at the previous day’s writing, write a new paragraph explaining your ideas. Try it again the next day. Over the course of three days, you may find your ideas clarifying, complicating, or developing holes. In all cases, you will have a better idea of what you need to do next in writing your draft.

As students have been working with their ideas, they have been making a series of choices about their ideas that will lead them to feel “ready” to put them in a more complete, coherent form; they will feel “ready to write” their ideas in something closer to the assignment or paper form. But for most, the tough moments of really “writing” begin at this point. They may still feel that they “have ideas” but have trouble “getting them on the page.” Some will suddenly be thrust into “writing a paper” mode and be both constrained and guided by their assumptions about what an assignment asks them to do, what academic writing is, and what prior experience has taught them about writing for teachers. These exercises may ease their entry into shaping their ideas for an assignment:

Clarify all questions about the assignment. Before you begin writing a draft, make sure you have a thorough understanding of what the assignment requires. You can do this by summarizing your understanding of the assignment and emailing your summary to your TA or instructor. If you have questions about points to emphasize, the amount of evidence needed, etc. get clarification early. You might try writing something like, “I’ve summarized what I think I’m supposed to do in this paper, am I on the right track?
Write a letter describing what the paper is going to be about. One of the simplest, most efficient exercises you can do to sort through ideas is to write a letter to yourself about what you are planning to write in your paper. You might start out, “My paper is going to be about….” And go on to articulate what evidence you have to back up your ideas, what parts still feel rough to you about your ideas. In about 20 minutes, you can easily have a good sense of what you are ready to write and the problems you still need to solve in your paper.
Write a full draft. Sometimes you don’t know what you think until you see what you’ve said. Writing a full draft, even if you think the draft has problems, is sometimes important. You may find your thesis appears in your conclusion paragraph.
Turn your ideas into a five-minute speech. Pretend you have to give a 5 minute speech to your classmates. How would you begin the speech? What’s your main point? What key information would you include? How much detail do you need to give the listener? What evidence will be most convincing or compelling for your audience?
Make a sketch of the paper. Sometimes it helps to literally line up or order you evidence before you write. You can do so quickly by making a numbered list of your points. Your goal is something like a sketch outline—first I am going to say this; next I need to include this point; third I need to mention this idea. The ideas should flow logically from one point to the next. If they don’t-meaning if you have to backtrack, go on a tangent, or otherwise make the reader wait to see the relationship between ideas, then you need to continue tinkering with the list.
Make an outline. If you have successfully used formal outlines in the past, use one to structure your paper. If you haven’t successfully used outlines, don’t worry. Try some of the other techniques listed here to get your ideas on the page
Start with the easiest part. If you have trouble getting started on a draft, write what feels to you like the easiest part first. There’s nothing magic about starting at the beginning-unless that’s the easiest part for you. Write what you know for sure and a beginning will probably emerge as you write.
Write the body of the paper first. Sometimes it’s helpful NOT to write the beginning or introductory paragraph first. See what you have to say in the bulk of your draft and then go back to craft a suitable beginning.
Write about feelings about writing. Sometimes it’s helpful to begin a writing session by spending 5-10 minutes writing to yourself about your feelings about the assignment. Doing so can help you set aside uncertainty and frustration and help you get motivated to write your draft.
Write with the screen turned off. If you are really stuck getting starting or in the middle of a draft, turn the monitor off and type your ideas. Doing so will prevent you from editing and critiquing your writing as you first produce it. You may be amazed at the quantity and quality of ideas you can produce in a short time. You’ll have to do some cleanup on the typos, but it may be well worth it if it allows you to bang out a draft.
Write in alternatives (postpone decision-making). You may need to test out more than one idea before you settle into a particular direction for a paper. It’s actually more efficient to spend time writing in several directions i.e. trying out one idea for awhile, then trying out another idea, than it is to try to fit all of your ideas into one less coherent draft. Your writing may take the form of brief overviews that begin, “If I were going to write about XYZ idea, I would…” until you are able to see which option suits the assignment and your needs.
Write with a timer. Sometimes what you need most is to get all of your ideas out on paper in a single sitting. To do so, pretend you are taking an essay exam. Set a timer for an appropriate amount of time (1 hour? 3 hours?) depending on the length of your draft. Assume that it will take you approximately 1 hour per page of text you produce. Set a goal for the portion of your draft you must complete during the allotted time and don’t get up from your seat until the timer goes off.

As students use language to shape ideas, they begin to feel the need to test their ideas or move beyond their own perspectives. Sometimes we have ideas that make good sense to us, but seem to lose or confuse readers as we voice them in conversation or on the page. Once students have a complete draft of a paper, they need ways to share their ideas to learn points where their ideas need further development. With feedback from an audience, students are better able to see the final decisions they still need to make in order for their ideas to reach someone. These decisions may be ones of word choice, organization, logic, evidence, and tone. Keep in mind that this juncture can be unsettling for some students. Having made lots of major decisions in getting their ideas down on the page, they may be reluctant to tackle another round of decision-making required for revising or clarifying ideas or sentences. Remind students that ideas don’t exist apart from words, but in the words themselves. They will need to be able to sell their ideas through the words and arrangement of words on the page for a specific audience.

Talk your paper. Tell a friend what your paper is about. Pay attention to your explanation. Are all of the ideas you describe actually in the paper? Where did you start explaining your ideas? Does your paper match your description? Can the listener easily find all of the ideas you mention in your description?
Ask someone to read your paper out loud to you. Ask a friend to read your draft out loud to you. What do you hear? Where does your reader stumble? Sound confused? Have questions? Did your reader ever get lost in your text? Did ideas flow in the order the reader expected them to? Was anything missing for the reader? Did the reader need more information at any point?
Share your draft with your instructor. If you give them enough notice, most instructors will be willing to read a draft of a paper. It sometimes helps to include your own assessment of the draft when you share it with a teacher. Give them your assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the draft, as you see it, to begin a conversation.
Share your draft with a classmate. Arrange to exchange papers with a classmate several days before the due date. You can do so via email and make comments for revision using Word’s comment function.
Look at your sentences. Often you will need to analyze your draft of the sentence level. To do so, break your paper into a series of discrete sentences by putting a return after each period or end punctuation. Once you have your paper as a list of sentences, you can more easily see and solve sentence level problems. Try reading the sentences starting with the last sentence of the draft and moving up. Doing so will take them out of context and force you to see them as individual bits of communication rather than familiar points.
Discuss key terms in your paper with someone else. After you have completed a draft, it’s sometimes helpful to look back at the key terms you are using to convey your ideas. It’s easy, in the midst of thinking about an idea, to write in loaded language or code in which certain key words come to have special meaning for you that isn’t necessarily shared by a reader. If you suspect this is the case, talk about your key terms with a friend, and ask them to read your draft to see if the idea is adequately explained for the reader.
Outline your draft. After you have a complete draft, go back and outline what you have said. Next to each paragraph write a word or phrase that summarizes the content of that paragraph. You might also look to see if you have topic sentences that convey the ideas of individual paragraphs. If you can’t summarize the content of a paragraph, you probably have multiple ideas in play in that paragraph that may need revising. Once you have summarized each paragraph, turn your summary words into a list. How does the list flow? Is it clear how one idea connects to the next?
Underline your main point. Highlight the main point of your paper. It should probably be (although it will depend on the assignment) in one sentence somewhere on the first page. If it’s not, the reader will likely be lost and wondering what you paper is about as he or she reads through it. Your draft should not read like a mystery novel in which the reader has to wait until the end to have all the pieces fit together.
Ask someone without knowledge of the course to read your paper. You can tell if your draft works by sharing it with someone outside of the context. If they can follow your ideas, someone inside the class will be able to as well.
Ask a reader to judge specific elements of your paper. Share your draft with someone and ask them to read for something specific i.e. organization, punctuation, transitions. A reader will give more specific feedback to you if you give them some specific direction.

Implementing exercises

Many of these exercises can be used in short in-class writing assignments, as part of group work, or as incremental steps in producing a paper. If you’ve assigned an end-of-semester term paper, you may want to assign one or two activities from each of the four stages-brainstorming, organizing, drafting, editing-at strategic points throughout the semester. You could also give the students the list of exercises for each stage and ask them to choose one or two activities to complete at each point as they produce a draft.

If you’d like to discuss how these exercises might work in your course, talk about other aspects of student writing, contact Kimberly Abels [email protected] at the Writing Center.

Python Programming

Practice Python Exercises and Challenges with Solutions

Free Coding Exercises for Python Developers. Exercises cover Python Basics , Data structure , to Data analytics . As of now, this page contains 18 Exercises.

What included in these Python Exercises?

Each exercise contains specific Python topic questions you need to practice and solve. These free exercises are nothing but Python assignments for the practice where you need to solve different programs and challenges.

All exercises are tested on Python 3.
Each exercise has 10-20 Questions.
The solution is provided for every question.
Practice each Exercise in Online Code Editor

These Python programming exercises are suitable for all Python developers. If you are a beginner, you will have a better understanding of Python after solving these exercises. Below is the list of exercises.

Select the exercise you want to solve .

Basic Exercise for Beginners

Practice and Quickly learn Python’s necessary skills by solving simple questions and problems.

Topics : Variables, Operators, Loops, String, Numbers, List

Python Input and Output Exercise

Solve input and output operations in Python. Also, we practice file handling.

Topics : print() and input() , File I/O

Python Loop Exercise

This Python loop exercise aims to help developers to practice branching and Looping techniques in Python.

Topics : If-else statements, loop, and while loop.

Python Functions Exercise

Practice how to create a function, nested functions, and use the function arguments effectively in Python by solving different questions.

Topics : Functions arguments, built-in functions.

Python String Exercise

Solve Python String exercise to learn and practice String operations and manipulations.

Python Data Structure Exercise

Practice widely used Python types such as List, Set, Dictionary, and Tuple operations in Python

Python List Exercise

This Python list exercise aims to help Python developers to learn and practice list operations.

Python Dictionary Exercise

This Python dictionary exercise aims to help Python developers to learn and practice dictionary operations.

Python Set Exercise

This exercise aims to help Python developers to learn and practice set operations.

Python Tuple Exercise

This exercise aims to help Python developers to learn and practice tuple operations.

Python Date and Time Exercise

This exercise aims to help Python developers to learn and practice DateTime and timestamp questions and problems.

Topics : Date, time, DateTime, Calendar.

Python OOP Exercise

This Python Object-oriented programming (OOP) exercise aims to help Python developers to learn and practice OOP concepts.

Topics : Object, Classes, Inheritance

Python JSON Exercise

Practice and Learn JSON creation, manipulation, Encoding, Decoding, and parsing using Python

Python NumPy Exercise

Practice NumPy questions such as Array manipulations, numeric ranges, Slicing, indexing, Searching, Sorting, and splitting, and more.

Python Pandas Exercise

Practice Data Analysis using Python Pandas. Practice Data-frame, Data selection, group-by, Series, sorting, searching, and statistics.

Python Matplotlib Exercise

Practice Data visualization using Python Matplotlib. Line plot, Style properties, multi-line plot, scatter plot, bar chart, histogram, Pie chart, Subplot, stack plot.

Random Data Generation Exercise

Practice and Learn the various techniques to generate random data in Python.

Topics : random module, secrets module, UUID module

Python Database Exercise

Practice Python database programming skills by solving the questions step by step.

Use any of the MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite to solve the exercise

Exercises for Intermediate developers

The following practice questions are for intermediate Python developers.

If you have not solved the above exercises, please complete them to understand and practice each topic in detail. After that, you can solve the below questions quickly.

Exercise 1: Reverse each word of a string

Expected Output

Use the split() method to split a string into a list of words.
Reverse each word from a list
finally, use the join() function to convert a list into a string

Steps to solve this question :

Split the given string into a list of words using the split() method
Use a list comprehension to create a new list by reversing each word from a list.
Use the join() function to convert the new list into a string
Display the resultant string

Exercise 2: Read text file into a variable and replace all newlines with space

Given : Assume you have a following text file (sample.txt).

Expected Output :

First, read a text file.
Next, use string replace() function to replace all newlines ( \n ) with space ( ' ' ).

Steps to solve this question : -

First, open the file in a read mode
Next, read all content from a file using the read() function and assign it to a variable.
Display final string

Exercise 3: Remove items from a list while iterating

Description :

In this question, You need to remove items from a list while iterating but without creating a different copy of a list.

Remove numbers greater than 50

Expected Output : -

Get the list's size
Iterate list using while loop
Check if the number is greater than 50
If yes, delete the item using a del keyword
Reduce the list size

Solution 1: Using while loop

Solution 2: Using for loop and range()

Exercise 4: Reverse Dictionary mapping

Exercise 5: display all duplicate items from a list.

Use the counter() method of the collection module.
Create a dictionary that will maintain the count of each item of a list. Next, Fetch all keys whose value is greater than 2

Solution 1 : - Using collections.Counter()

Solution 2 : -

Exercise 6: Filter dictionary to contain keys present in the given list

Exercise 7: print the following number pattern.

Refer to Print patterns in Python to solve this question.

Use two for loops
The outer loop is reverse for loop from 5 to 0
Increment value of x by 1 in each iteration of an outer loop
The inner loop will iterate from 0 to the value of i of the outer loop
Print value of x in each iteration of an inner loop
Print newline at the end of each outer loop

Exercise 8: Create an inner function

Question description : -

Create an outer function that will accept two strings, x and y . ( x= 'Emma' and y = 'Kelly' .
Create an inner function inside an outer function that will concatenate x and y.
At last, an outer function will join the word 'developer' to it.

Exercise 9: Modify the element of a nested list inside the following list

Change the element 35 to 3500

Exercise 10: Access the nested key increment from the following dictionary

Under Exercises: -

Python Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Exercise: Classes and Objects Exercises

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 52 Comments

Python Date and Time Exercise with Solutions

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 10 Comments

Python Dictionary Exercise with Solutions

Updated on: May 6, 2023 | 56 Comments

Python Tuple Exercise with Solutions

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 96 Comments

Python Set Exercise with Solutions

Updated on: October 20, 2022 | 28 Comments

Python if else, for loop, and range() Exercises with Solutions

Updated on: September 3, 2024 | 301 Comments

Updated on: August 2, 2022 | 157 Comments

Updated on: September 6, 2021 | 109 Comments

Python List Exercise with Solutions

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 203 Comments

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 7 Comments

Python Data Structure Exercise for Beginners

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 116 Comments

Python String Exercise with Solutions

Updated on: October 6, 2021 | 221 Comments

Updated on: March 9, 2021 | 24 Comments

Updated on: March 9, 2021 | 52 Comments

Updated on: July 20, 2021 | 29 Comments

Python Basic Exercise for Beginners

Updated on: August 29, 2024 | 501 Comments

Useful Python Tips and Tricks Every Programmer Should Know

Updated on: May 17, 2021 | 23 Comments

Python random Data generation Exercise

Updated on: December 8, 2021 | 13 Comments

Python Database Programming Exercise

Updated on: March 9, 2021 | 17 Comments

Online Python Code Editor

Updated on: June 1, 2022 |

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39 best leadership activities and games

Good leaders can make or break a team. While more and more people are being asked to step into leadership roles, the path to becoming a good leader is long and not always straightforward . This is where leadership activities come in.

Leadership activities are a great way of developing the skills and competencies needed to be an effective leader . It's not easy to learn these skills, especially when so many leaders don't receive effective training or support. In this article, we'll explore the leadership activities you should master in order to lead a high-performing team and become a better leader!

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Join the 150,000+ facilitators  using SessionLab.

What are leadership activities?

Leadership activities are exercises designed to help develop leadership skills and enable leaders to be more effective in their roles. They can include activities that help train new leaders and improve core leadership skills like problem-solving, active listening, or effective group management.

You’ll also find that the best leadership development activities give leaders tools and techniques they can use on the job. It’s one thing to know that leaders need to be good listeners, but quite another to be given a framework and toolkit that means you are a great listener who always helps their team feel heard and understood.

The exercises below are not only great to use when training leaders, but they are practical techniques leaders can use with every team member immediately, whatever their leadership style.

What are leadership activities used for?

While managers might approach tasks differently based on their leadership style, there are skills and competencies that all leaders should learn in order to best service their team. Learning how to be a good leader can be difficult, so using exercises and activities to improve leadership skills in a safe, experiential environment can help leaders be more effective in their role.

If you’re running a leadership development program, you might use these activities during the training program. For example, after conducting a self-assessment and deciding how they want to develop as a leader, participants might work on improving their leadership skills with these activities.

Whether you’re running such a program and developing managers internally with workshops or simply want to brush up on your own leadership skills, these exercises are a great place to begin.

A bespoke leadership development workshop (like the one featured in this leadership template! ) is also a natural place to include these activities.

In SessionLab, it’s quick and easy to design a leadership workshop fit for your needs. Start by dragging and dropping blocks to design your outline. Add minute-perfect timing and instructions to each activity to refine your agenda.

When you’re ready to share with collaborators or participants, export your workshop agenda in PDF, Word, Powerpoint or invite them directly to the session.

A screenshot of a leadership development workshop designed and built in SessionLab.

Leadership training activities for building a positive work climate

Leaders are role models to their colleagues and organization. Their leadership styles, principles, and values determine the culture that drives their organization’s behavior.

That is why a competitive, paranoid leader can easily create an organization where team members are similarly competitive and less open to collaboration. While a leader who is open and inclusive will create a climate of openness and inclusiveness. How they behave, and what they consider the norm, also affects which kinds of behaviors are enforced and celebrated and which behaviors are punished.

The following leadership activities can help you in recognising important leadership behaviors that result in a productive workplace. They can also be used by leaders to set the stage for team bonding and a great workplace environment with their team. A must for all leaders!


30 – 90	6 – 30	Low
20 – 45	6 – 50	Medium
30 +	2 – 20	Low
15 – 30	6 – 30	Low
35 – 45	4 +	Low

Leadership Envelopes

Leadership games like this help groups translate abstract leadership principles into practical on-the-job behaviors. Participants work in groups to come up with real-life applications of different leadership principles.

The groups conduct multiple rounds of discussion to build upon each others’ ideas, and in the end, evaluate the best ideas to identify the most useful behaviors. This is also a great activity to run with all your team members. Seeing how they consider and respond to different leadership styles can help you focus on the right approach as a leader!

Leadership Envelopes #leadership #issue analysis #thiagi Leadership exercise in groups, working with practical leadership principles. This activity helps groups to translate abstract leadership principles into practical on-the-job behaviours. Participants work in groups to come up with real-life application of leadership principles. The groups take multiple rounds to build upon the ideas of each other, and in the end, evaluate the best ideas to identify the most useful behaviours.

Your Favourite Manager

In this activity, participants take on three different employee personas and list the behaviors of a positive leader or manager and a negative one from the perspectives of those employees. After some individual reflection, participants compare their lists, first in pairs and then in groups. Finally, they collect the ultimate do’s and don’ts for managers and leaders.

Any activity that encourages deep reflection on your own leadership style and those of your role models is a wonderful way to grow. I’ve been especially inspired by how some of my old bosses approach problem solving while I was a team member working beneath them.

My Favourite Manager #management #leadership #thiagi #teamwork #remote-friendly Participants work individually, assuming the roles of three different people and brainstorming their perceptions of three most favourite managers and three least favourite managers. Later, they work with a partner (and still later, in teams) to prepare a list of dos and don’t-s for improving employees’ perception of a manager’s style.

Leadership Pizza

This leadership development activity offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify the skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development in these areas. This framework is also a great tool to set individual leadership development goals in a coaching process.

We love activities that allow team members to reflect on different leadership styles and assess their own skills and preferences. The visual format makes it easy to share and reflect on leadership styles later too!

Leadership Pizza #leadership #team #remote-friendly This leadership development activity offers a self-assessment framework for people to first identify what skills, attributes and attitudes they find important for effective leadership, and then assess their own development and initiate goal setting.

Playing with Status

The best leadership training activities often allow managers to work on their leadership skills while also providing an opportunity to reflect on their leadership style and how it might affect other employees.

Playing with Status is a role playing game where pairs enact a job interview or coaching session and enact different versions of the conversation based on whether each person has high or low status. By experiencing the effect of status on the relationship, would-be leaders can consider how they interact with other members of their team and create a more positive workplace culture.

Playing with Status #teambuilding #communication #team #thiagi Participants are given a short script of 8-10 lines of neutral dialogue. The scene may depict a job interview (see the sample below) or a coaching session. Pairs take turns enacting the scene, playing with the status relationships through non-verbal behaviours.

Heard Seen Respected

Standing in the shoes of others, practicing empathy and ensuring that everyone on a team is able to be heard is a necessity for great leaders and your team in general. In this activity, participants shift between telling stories where they were not heard, seen or respected and then being listeners who do not pass judgment.

Remember that leadership training should often start with the fundamentals of respect and empathy. If you can’t respect and empathize with your team members, how can you expect them to do the same for you? Keeping things simple with an activity like Heard Seen Respected can be an especially effective option whether you’re working online or offline.

Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR) #issue analysis #empathy #communication #liberating structures #remote-friendly You can foster the empathetic capacity of participants to “walk in the shoes” of others. Many situations do not have immediate answers or clear resolutions. Recognizing these situations and responding with empathy can improve the “cultural climate” and build trust among group members. HSR helps individuals learn to respond in ways that do not overpromise or overcontrol. It helps members of a group notice unwanted patterns and work together on shifting to more productive interactions. Participants experience the practice of more compassion and the benefits it engenders.

Team building leadership activities

Every leader has an integral role in the formation of the teams they work with. Whether you are consciously working on it or not, your attitude and actions as a leader will significantly influence team cohesion, communication and the team spirit of the people you work with.

This comes through in small everyday actions, the way you share responsibilities, the way you empower colleagues, and the way you foster a cooperative work environment as opposed to a competitive one.

Sometimes, it can also be effective to run team building activities with your company that are expressly focused on helping teams come together and bond. Try using the following leadership team building activities with new teams, or groups that need to spend a little time getting to know each other better.


45 – 60	6 – 100	Medium
40 – 45	4 – 20	Low
20 – 60	6 – 24	Medium
15 – 30	4 +	Low
60 – 120	10 – 40	Medium
15 – 30	7 – 20	Low
10 +	4 +	Low

Marshmallow challenge

The Marshmallow Challenge is a team-building activity in which teams compete to build the tallest free-standing structure out of spaghetti sticks, tape, string, and the marshmallow that needs to be on the top. This leadership activity emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, collaboration, and innovation and problem-solving.

It’s a wonderful game that allows participants’s natural leadership qualities to shine through, and it helps teams have a lot of fun too!

Marshmallow challenge with debriefing #teamwork #team #leadership #collaboration In eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. The Marshmallow Challenge was developed by Tom Wujec, who has done the activity with hundreds of groups around the world. Visit the Marshmallow Challenge website for more information. This version has an extra debriefing question added with sample questions focusing on roles within the team.

Blind Square Rope Game

This activity is a tried and tested game that asks teams to communicate well and solve a problem as a team. Not only is this a fun team building activity, but it’s a great way for potential leaders to step up and help their team win! Start by tying a length of rope into a circle and then instruct participants they will have 20 minutes to turn it into a square, with fifteen minutes to plan their actions and five minutes to implement. Here’s the catch – no one may touch the rope until you begin, and every team member is blindfolded during implementation. This is an effective leadership game that is great with both small groups and larger teams separated into breakouts.

Blind Square – Rope game #teamwork #communication #teambuilding #team #energiser #thiagi #outdoor This is an activity that I use in almost every teambuilding session I run–because it delivers results every time. I can take no credit for its invention since it has existed from long before my time, in various forms and with a variety of names (such as Blind Polygon). The activity can be frontloaded to focus on particular issues by changing a few parameters or altering the instructions.

Tower of Power

All leaders need to work closely with other members of their organization in order to succeed. This leadership game encourages groups to work together in order to build a tower with specific (and sometimes tricky!) rules before than reflecting on what worked, what didn’t and what they would do next time.

It’s a wonderful activity for leadership training, as it provides an experiential way to explore leadership concepts, all wrapped in a fun game!

Tower of Power #team #teamwork #communication #leadership #teambuilding #skills This teamwork activity requires participants to work closely together to build a tower from a set of building blocks. The players need to coordinate their actions in order to be able to move the wooden blocks with the crane they have, and this can only be solved by precise planning, good communication and well-organised teamwork. You may use this exercise to emphasise the following themes and outcomes: In Leadership training : identifying interdependencies in systems, leadership communication, dealing with risk, giving feedback In Team building : communicating effectively, cooperating, being an active listener, maintaining the balance, working with values In Project management : simulating strategic planning, working under time pressure In Communication training : meta communication, facilitating, dealing with different perspectives

When teams work together well, something magic happens. But what elements constitute a high performing team? As a leader, how can you help ensure those conditions are met? In this leadership game, participants must work together to get every team member across an obstacle while blindfolded.

It’s a simple concept that creates a perfect space for exploring how teams operate and the role leaders have within them. Bring plenty of fun obstacles (squeaky toys are best) and encourage groups to think strategically for best results!

Minefield #teampedia #teamwork #action #team #icebreaker A fun activity that helps participants working together as a team while teaching the importance of communication, strategy and trust.

Crocodile River

The Crocodile River is a team-building activity in which group members need to support each other in a task to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.

Crocodile River #hyperisland #team #outdoor A team-building activity in which a group is challenged to physically support one another in an endeavour to move from one end of a space to another. It requires working together creatively and strategically in order to solve a practical, physical problem. It tends to emphasize group communication, cooperation, leadership and membership, patience and problem-solving.

This is a simple game to help team members learn how to work together (better). It can also focus on the group’s understanding of communication, leadership, problem-solving, trust or persistence. Participants stand in a circle, close their eyes and put their hands into the circle to find two other hands to hold. Then they open their eyes and the group has to try to get back into a circle without letting go, though they can change their grip, of course.

Human Knot A physical-participation disentanglement puzzle that helps a group learn how to work together (self-organize) and can be used to illustrate the difference between self-organization and command-control management or simply as a get-to-know-you icebreaker. Standing in a circle, group members reach across to connect hands with different people. The group then tries to unravel the “human knot” by unthreading their bodies without letting go of each other people’s hands. As a management-awareness game to illustrate required change in behavior and leadership on a management level (e.g., illustrate the change from ‘task-oriented’ management towards ‘goal/value-oriented’ management).

Who are you? The pirate ship exercise

Every member of a group occupies a different position in the team. An effective team leader is one who considers their role and is aware of where employees also stand.

This leadership training activity is an effective method of getting a group to consider their roles with the metaphor of a pirate ship. Start by sharing the image and invite each person to consider which person on the deck they most identify with. Is it the captain, or perhaps is it the person repairing damage to the hull? What follows is an effective conversation on roles within a team.

Who are you? The pirate ship exercise (dinámica del barco pirata) #team alignment #team #remote-friendly #teamwork #warm up #icebreaker This an easy but powerful exercise to open a meeting or session and get participants to reflect on their attitudes or feelings about a topic, in the organization, team, or in the project.

Collaborative leadership activities

Whether you’re leading a small group or working across a massive organization, part of your role of a leader is to help their team work together more effectively. Removing obstacles to effective collaboration and creating frameworks for better teamwork is something you’ll be doing as a leader.

Use the activities below to develop the skills necessary to facilitate better collaboration and working habits between team members.


30 – 120	2 – 40	Medium
20 +	2 +	Medium
55 – 70	10 +	Low
20 – 25	5 +	Medium
90 – 150	2 – 8	Medium

Circles of Influence

Effective teamwork is often about identifying where each member of a team can have the most impact and use their skills best. Leaders often need to find ways to identify where to direct their team and consider how different skills and working styles fit together to make a cohesive team. This activity makes it easy to facilitate this process and encourage employees to reflect and be proactive too!

We love that this leadership exercise encourages every team member to take responsibility and action. When looking for leadership qualities in a group and considering who you might want to develop into a future leader, this is also a great place to start!

Circles of Influence #hyperisland #team #team effectiveness A workshop to review team priorities and made choices about what to focus on individually and collectively. The workshop challenges members to reflect on where they can have the most impact and influence. Use this workshop to refine priorities and empower ownership among team members.

Team of Two

Whether you’re leading a team of just a few people or hundreds, the reality is that many of your discussions and interactions with the people you will lead will be interpersonal and one-on-one in nature. Developing the skillset you need to solve issues in your team when they arise and finding ways to ensure these conversations are productive is one of the most important things you can do as a leader.

Use Team of Two whether working online or as part of an in-person session to help your working pairs and interpersonal relationships go from strength to strength. By articulating needs and consequences clearly, this leadership exercise helps people communicate efficiently and see the results they need – a must for anyone in a leadership role!

Team of Two #communication #active listening #issue analysis #conflict resolution #issue resolution #remote-friendly #team Much of the business of an organisation takes place between pairs of people. These interactions can be positive and developing or frustrating and destructive. You can improve them using simple methods, providing people are willing to listen to each other. “Team of two” will work between secretaries and managers, managers and directors, consultants and clients or engineers working on a job together. It will even work between life partners.

What I Need From You

One of the most important leadership skills to cultivate is clarity: being clear in what you expect and need from others in your organisation or group is an integral component of high-functioning teams. With What I Need From You, each team member involved in the exchange is given the chance to articulate their core needs to others and respond in a structured way.

This kind of clear, direct action is great at unblocking conversational roadblocks in both large and small groups, and is something all leaders should have in their toolkit.

What I Need From You (WINFY) #issue analysis #liberating structures #team #communication #remote-friendly People working in different functions and disciplines can quickly improve how they ask each other for what they need to be successful. You can mend misunderstandings or dissolve prejudices developed over time by demystifying what group members need in order to achieve common goals. Since participants articulate core needs to others and each person involved in the exchange is given the chance to respond, you boost clarity, integrity, and transparency while promoting cohesion and coordination across silos: you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again!

Generative Relationships STAR

The relationships between the members of a team can make or break the work you do together. In this leadership training activity, leaders learn how to help a group understand their current working patterns and identify possible changes.

Each participant will individually rate the current performance of the group on the 4 points of the STAR compass tool included. Next, small groups will discuss their choices and find points of alignment and disagreement. Finally, the whole team will discuss the first steps they can take to improve relationships and performance for the group.

Generative Relationships STAR #team #liberating structures #teamwork You can help a group of people understand how they work together and identify changes that they can make to improve group performance. All members of the group diagnose current relationship patterns and decide how to follow up with action steps together, without intermediaries. The STAR compass tool helps group members understand what makes their relationships more or less generative. The compass used in the initial diagnosis can also be used later to evaluate progress in developing relationships that are more generative.

Team Canvas

When it comes to enabling true collaboration throughout your organization, it pays to involve your team members in helping shape the way you want to work together. Different leadership styles may call for a different approach to this process, but it’s always helpful to see a complete example of how you might define your team culture and working processes.

In this workshop template, you can see a complete agenda for a team canvas workshop. This will take a team through a process of co-creating and defining everything from your goals, values, assets, and rules. Effective leadership often means tapping into group intelligence and enabling your team to take shared ownership of their success. Team Canvas great way of achieving this!

Team Canvas Session #team alignment #teamwork #conflict resolution #feedback #teambuilding #team #issue resolution #remote-friendly The Team Canvas is Business Model Canvas for teamwork. It is an effective technique to facilitate getting teams aligned about their goals, values and purposes, and help team members find their role on the team.

Inspirational leadership activities

Great leaders inspire others. However, there are many different reasons why someone will find a leader inspirational. Developing the skills to inspire team members and lead with this energy is important, whatever your leadership style.

In order to grasp what facilitates inspiring leadership, try the following exercises. You’ll be surprised at how thinking more deeply about your own role models or what your values can help you in all of your leadership interactions!


20 – 45	5 – 30	Medium
30 +	2 +	Medium
30 – 45	8 – 20	Low
60 – 120	6 – 30	Low

Leadership Advice from your Role Model

Everyone is asked to think of a role model they look up to and ask themselves: If a young person would ask these role models for leadership advice and what kind of advice that would be.

Facilitate a group conversation where these pieces of advice are shared and contradicting points are discussed and reconciled. Given diverse enough responses, this structured sharing activity might be a good introduction to the concept of situational leadership.

Leadership Advice from Your Role Model #skills #leadership #thiagi #role playing This structured sharing activity provides a faster, cheaper, and better alternative to buying and reading a lot of books: You tap into the wisdom of the group—and of their role models.

Living Core Values

The core values of your organization are a great place to look when you want to inspire your team members. Leaders should be involved in defining and exemplifying their core values and also helping create space for the team to share how they’re living those values. The result is an inspiring leadership exercise that allows a leader to help the group celebrate their wins and also suggest places for improvement.

Start by choosing one of your core values and asking activity participants to share a story of how they have been practicing this core value. After sharing, ask the team to reflect on what inspired them from the story. As with any leadership development game, be the first one to share a story to help guide the discussion. Running this exercise will not only help inspire a team to greater heights but also surface any areas that need improvement – it’s a great method to have in your leadership toolbox!

Living Core Values #culture #values #core values, #connection #inspiration #virtual_friendly #team #team alignment #energizer #remote-friendly For use with a team, organization or any peer group forum. Can be done in person or virtual This is designed to create a conversation that brings Core Values alive. This is great for a team that knows what values they stand for. Through this exercise they will celebrate their values in action and therefore be energized to magnify them further. It will also help bring along anyone that is new so they can understand that the group really walks the talk

Throughout human history, stories have been a consistent source of inspiration. Whatever your leadership style, finding time to share more about your own story and create space for others to share theirs can be massively useful as a leader.

In Campfire, start by creating a selection of 10-20 sticky notes relating to a concept you wish to explore with the group. Put these on the wall and then invite your group to review them and consider stories they might tell related to one of those words. Start the storytelling session yourself and think about how you might inspire and elicit further stories from the rest of the team before passing the torch to the next person around the campfire!

This is a great activity to run during leadership training or when team building. Creating safe spaces for people to share their experiences is a leadership skill you absolutely want to cultivate and practice!

Campfire #gamestorming #team #remote-friendly #storytelling Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

Letter from the Future

Leaders are often called upon to inspire their team members about the future of their product or organization. Employees who are excited about where you’re going are more likely to work together well and be energized to see results. This activity is useful for helping inspire a team, or even just to inspire yourself as a leader and get your vision for the future down on paper!

Begin by asking your team to speculate on what the world will look like in five years. Next, ask them to write a letter from the future detailing what the group has accomplished in that time and how they overcame any challenges.

Share the results to inspire the group for what you might accomplish and also start creating plans for how you’ll create your desired future. You might even find that running this activity solo is effective when thinking about how you want to develop as a team leader!

Letter from the Future #strategy #vision #thiagi #team #teamwork Teams that fail to develop a shared vision of what they are all about and what they need to do suffer later on when team members start implementing the common mandate based on individual assumptions. To help teams get started on the right foot, here is a process for creating a shared vision.

Leadership activities for personal development

A good leader is one who helps uplift and upskill the members of their team. These leadership activities are designed to help you encourage participants to be more autonomous, take initiative and work on their personal development.

If you’re new to a leadership role or trying on various leadership styles, these can also be great activities to practice on the road to leading a team. Growth and development is a vital aspect of employee happiness and fulfilment – be sure to bring ideas for enabling others to your leadership role.


15 – 30	4 – 30	Medium
60 – 120	2 – 40	High
20 – 30	2 +	Low
60 – 120	2 +	Low

Roles in a meeting

Learning by doing is an important aspect of effective leadership. Sometimes, you have to try something new and approach the task with an open mind while working to the best of your ability. This simple method is a great way of encouraging participants to take an important role during a meeting and also take part in developing and refining those roles.

If you’re running a leadership development program and want to start upskilling participants, this is a great way of delegating some simple leadership roles. Plus, it helps encourage the group to contribute and engage with how a successful meeting is put together too!

Roles in a meeting #meeting facilitation #remote-friendly #hybrid-friendly #skills Organize the day’s meeting by co-creating and assigning roles among participants.

Alignment & Autonomy

One of the most impactful things a leader can do is get out of a team’s way and allow them to perform more autonomously. Doing so effectively means people can take ownership of their work, be more invested, and develop their skills too. But how can you do this without creating chaos or misalignment?

In this activity, you first help every team member align on your goals and then reflect on where they can take more ownership and be more autonomous in their work while still contributing to the goals of the team. Not only is this a great way to help your team develop, but it also takes work off your plate as a leader and can enable you to get out of the trenches if necessary.

Alignment & Autonomy #team #team alignment #team effectiveness #hyperisland A workshop to support teams to reflect on and ultimately increase their alignment with purpose/goals and team member autonomy. Inspired by Peter Smith’s model of personal responsibility. Use this workshop to strengthen a culture of personal responsibility and build your team’s ability to adapt quickly and navigate change.

15% Solutions

One of the biggest barriers to personal development is being overwhelmed by what you need to do to achieve your goals. As a leader, you can help your team by enabling them to take the small, important actions that are within their control.

Start by asking participants to reflect on where they have the discretion and freedom to act and how they might make a small step towards a goal without needing outside help. By flipping the conversation to what 15% of a solution looks like, rather than 100%, employees can begin to make changes without fear of being overwhelmed.

15% Solutions #action #liberating structures #remote-friendly You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference. 15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change. With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

The GROW Coaching Model

The best leaders are often great coaches, helping individual team members achieve their potential and grow. This tried and test method is a wonderful way to help activate the development of everyone from a new start to an established leader.

Begin by teaching your mentee or group the GROW acronym (Goal, Reality, Obstacles/Options, and Will.) and guide them through a process of defining each section and collectively agreeing on how you’ll make progress. This is an effective leadership activity that is great for leadership training and is equally useful when it comes to help any team member grow.

The GROW Coaching Model #hyperisland #coaching #growth #goal setting The GROW Model is a coaching framework used in conversations, meetings, and everyday leadership to unlock potential and possibilities. It’s a simple & effective framework for structuring your coaching & mentoring sessions and great coaching conversations. Easy to use for both face-to-face and online meetings. GROW is an acronym that stands for Goal, Reality, Obstacles/Options, and Will.

Decision-making leadership activities

An important aspect of leadership development is learning how to make informed and intelligent decisions while also ensuring you listen to your team. A leader who bulldozes their team into a decision without first listening to their expertise is not going to make their team feel valued.

The outcomes of uninformed decisions are often poor or frustrating for those involved too. While leaders are justifiably responsible for making final decisions, it’s integral to find methods to do so in a well-reasoned way.

These leadership activities are useful when it comes to making good decisions while involving your team members in the process and developing a leadership style that creates space for others.


5 – 30	2 +	Low
30 – 60	3 – 15	Low
30 – 60	12 – 30	Medium
180 +	6 – 15	Medium

When solving problems as a team, it’s common to have various options for moving forward. As a leader, it often falls to you to make the decision for which solution or direction to pursue. But how can you do that while also creating space for the opinions of your team to be heard?

Dotmocracy is a tried and tested facilitation method for making informed decisions with the help of your team. After presenting the available options, give everyone on your team a number of dots to indicate which option they prefer. You’ll want to adjust the number of votes based on the number of options there are to choose from. A good rule of thumb is to have fewer dots than there are options, giving just a few for every team member.

Leaders want to be on hand to break any ties and to facilitate discussion around what is chosen, but when it comes to making decisions with your team, this method is hard to beat.

Dotmocracy #action #decision making #group prioritization #hyperisland #remote-friendly Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making. It is not an activity on its own, but a method to use in processes where prioritization or decision-making is the aim. The method supports a group to quickly see which options are most popular or relevant. The options or ideas are written on post-its and stuck up on a wall for the whole group to see. Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision.

Impact and Effort Matrix

The hallmark of a good decision making process is transparency. Leaders should know why a decision is made and should be able to clearly explain their thinking to team members. As such, the best decision making activities make the process open and easy to understand.

Start this activity by creating a 2×2 matrix and then place possible options on the matrix based on the expected impact and effort it would take to achieve them. This makes it easy to prioritize and compare possible decisions while also including team members in the process.

An inclusive leadership style means bringing your own knowledge to the table while also listening to the opinions of the team. When running this activity, be sure to combine these aspects to ensure items are placed in the appropriate place on the matrix.

Impact and Effort Matrix #gamestorming #decision making #action #remote-friendly In this decision-making exercise, possible actions are mapped based on two factors: effort required to implement and potential impact. Categorizing ideas along these lines is a useful technique in decision making, as it obliges contributors to balance and evaluate suggested actions before committing to them.

Level of influence

Making the right decision is often a process of weighing up various factors and prioritizing accordingly. While there are many methods for doing this, being an effective leader often means making this as simple as possible.

We love this decision making activity because it asks the group (and its leader!) some simple questions to narrow down possible options and makes it easy to prioritize too. Start by asking the level of influence a team has to make possible actions happen and ranking them accordingly.

Next, choose those items that you have the most influence on and then prioritize the ones you really want to happen. This simple, two-step process is a great activity for leadership development as it is something any leader can use with ease!

Level of Influence #prioritization #implementation #decision making #planning #online facilitation This is a simple method to prioritize actions as part of an action planning workshop, after a list of actions has been generated.

Fishbone Analysis

Making good decisions requires a complete knowledge of the problem at hand. For leaders who may no longer be on the frontlines of their department, it’s important to surface insights from their team and understand the root cause of any problem before making a decision.

In this leadership activity, start by choosing a problem area and adding it to the head of the fish. Next, brainstorm ideas that might cause the problem and add these as categories to the skeleton. Brainstorm on each of these categories and ask why is this happening in order to dive deeper and fully understand the issue at hand before making an informed decision as a group.

Fishbone Analysis #problem solving ##root cause analysis #decision making #online facilitation A process to help identify and understand the origins of problems, issues or observations.

Leadership exercises for setting team values

Usually, the values of a leader are mirrored in the organization. If shortcuts are common practice for the leader, then she will see shortcuts made by her team members all across their projects. But if learning and self-improvement are important to the leader, then this will be a good foundation for these values in the whole organization, too.

To be more aware of your own values as a leader and then bring these ideas to your team, try these leadership exercises!


60 – 120	2 – 40	Medium
25 +	1 +	Low
60 – 240	2 – 10	Medium

Explore Your Values

Explore your Values is a group exercise for thinking on what your own and your team’s most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitions rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values.

It’s a good leadership game to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values and consider how various leadership styles might chime with some values more than others.

Explore your Values #hyperisland #skills #values #remote-friendly Your Values is an exercise for participants to explore what their most important values are. It’s done in an intuitive and rapid way to encourage participants to follow their intuitive feeling rather than over-thinking and finding the “correct” values. It is a good exercise to use to initiate reflection and dialogue around personal values.

Your Leadership Coat of Arms

In this leadership development activity, participants are asked to draw their own coat of arms symbolising the most important elements of their leadership philosophy. The coat of arms drawings are then debriefed and discussed together with the group.

This activity works well with equally well with leadership and team members. Creating a visual representation of what you stand for in the form of a coat of arms can help create a memorable asset you can refer to and rally behind in the future.

Your Leadership Coat of Arms #leadership #leadership development #skills #remote-friendly #values In this leadership development activity, participants are asked to draw their own coat of arms symbolising the most important elements of their leadership philosophy. The coat of arms drawings are then debriefed and discussed together with the group. After the exercise you may prepare a coat of arms gallery, exhibiting the leadership approach and philosophy of group members

Team Purpose & Culture

Ensuring all group participants are aligned when it comes to purpose and cultural values is one of the jobs of a leader. Teams and organizations that have a shared and cohesive vision are often happier and more productive and by helping a group arrive at these conclusions, a good leader can help empower everyone to succeed. Even with multi-discipline teams and organizations with different leadership styles, this method is an effective way of getting everyone on the same page. This is a framework you’ll likely use again and again with different teams throughout your career.

Team Purpose & Culture #team #hyperisland #culture #remote-friendly This is an essential process designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to codify the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team’s work space.

Leadership communication activities

Leaders are usually viewed as the parents of the organization. It is expected from them that they take care of their people and make sure that proper norms and rules are followed. One of the key areas where a leader has a large influence is the style and amount of communication between people.

Active Listening and giving effective feedback are critical skills to have as a leader but are also crucial for your team members. In fact, the issue that leaders rank as one of the biggest barriers to successful leadership is avoiding tough conversations, including giving honest, constructive feedback .

Develop good communication practices with the following leadership games and activities.


60 – 120	2 – 40	Medium
15 – 45	3 +	Low
60 – 120	2 – 40	High
60 – 120	2 – 40	Medium

Active Listening

This activity supports participants in reflecting on a question and generating their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with this activity. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being “the subject” who will explore a question, “the listener” who is supposed to be totally focused on the subject, and “the observer” who will watch the dynamic between the other two.

Active Listening #hyperisland #skills #active listening #remote-friendly This activity supports participants to reflect on a question and generate their own solutions using simple principles of active listening and peer coaching. It’s an excellent introduction to active listening but can also be used with groups that are already familiar with it. Participants work in groups of three and take turns being: “the subject”, the listener, and the observer.

Trust battery

Every time you work together with someone, your trust battery – the trust you have towards a certain person, or the ‘emotional credit’ that person has in your eyes – either charges or depletes based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise and the social interaction you exhibit. A low trust battery is the core of many personal issues at the workplace.

This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries. It also works great when promoting virtual leadership and working with online teams!

Trust Battery #leadership #teamwork #team #remote-friendly This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team, and encourages focus on actions that can charge the depleted trust batteries.

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue

Regular and constructive feedback is one of the most important ingredients for effective teams. Openness creates trust, and trust creates more openness. This is an activity for teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. The objective of Start, Stop, Continue is to examine aspects of a situation or develop next steps by polling people on what to start, what to stop and what to continue doing.

For those in charge of online leadership, it’s vital to find ways of having difficult conversations in constructive ways virtually – try this method when working to resolve issues with your distributed team!

Feedback: Start, Stop, Continue #hyperisland #skills #feedback #remote-friendly Regular, effective feedback is one of the most important ingredients in building constructive relationships and thriving teams. Openness creates trust and trust creates more openness. Feedback exercises aim to support groups to build trust and openness and for individuals to gain self-awareness and insight. Feedback exercises should always be conducted with thoughtfulness and high awareness of group dynamics. This is an exercise for groups or teams that have worked together for some time and are familiar with giving and receiving feedback. It uses the words “stop”, “start” and “continue” to guide the feedback messages.

Reflection: Team

All leaders know the value of structured and considered reflection. Teams that take the time to reflect and improve are those that can grow and by creating an environment of reflection, team leaders and managers can help their group move forward together. This method is effective for both offline and virtual leadership development. It helps a group progress from individual reflection through to full group discussion in a way that encourages constructive thought and minimizes potential frustration or antagonistic conversation.

Reflection: Team #hyperisland #team #remote-friendly The purpose of reflecting as a team is for members to express thoughts, feelings and opinions about a shared experience, to build openness and trust in the team, and to draw out key learnings and insights to take forward into subsequent experiences. Team members generally sit in a circle, reflecting first as individuals, sharing those reflections with the group, then discussing the insights and potential actions to take out of the session. Use this session one or more times throughout a project or program.

Leadership conflict resolution activities

One of the most important leadership skills you’ll want to develop is the ability to mediate and resolve team conflicts. Even the most connected and effective teams can run into conflict and it will fall to managers and team leaders to help get things back on track.

Even for established leaders, navigating conflict can be difficult! These leadership development activities are designed to help groups manage and resolve conflicts more effectively.

Giving leaders a framework they can trust and use with their team right away is always a good use of time, and we’d recommend teaching these methods to all new leaders!


30 – 60	4 +	Medium
60 – 120	2 – 40	Medium
60 – 120	5 – 100	High

What, So What, Now What?

It’s easy to get lost in the woods when it comes to managing conflict. Helping a group see what happened objectively and without judgment is an important leadership skill, and this framework helps make this process easy.

Start by working with the group to collect facts about what happened before moving towards making sense of them. Once everywhere has been heard and given space to process these facts, you can then move towards suggesting practical actions. By following this kind of framework, you can manage a conflict in a pragmatic way that also ensures everyone in a group can contribute.

W³ – What, So What, Now What? #issue analysis #innovation #liberating structures You can help groups reflect on a shared experience in a way that builds understanding and spurs coordinated action while avoiding unproductive conflict. It is possible for every voice to be heard while simultaneously sifting for insights and shaping new direction. Progressing in stages makes this practical—from collecting facts about What Happened to making sense of these facts with So What and finally to what actions logically follow with Now What . The shared progression eliminates most of the misunderstandings that otherwise fuel disagreements about what to do. Voila!

Conflict Responses

All of us can be guilty of handling conflicts in a less than ideal manner. Part of developing as a leader is identifying when something didn’t go well before finding ways to do things better next time.

In this leadership activity, ask the group to provide examples of previous conflicts and then reflect on how they handled them. Next, ask everyone to reflect on how they might change their behavior for a better outcome in the future. As a leader, use this opportunity to lead the way and be honest and vulnerable. It’s your role to provide a model for interaction and its always worthwhile to see how you can do better as a people manager dealing with conflict too!

Conflict Responses #hyperisland #team #issue resolution A workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts, and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict handling. The workshop uses the Thomas-Killman model of conflict responses to frame a reflective discussion. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.

Bright Blurry Blind

Finding opportunities to reframe conflict as an opportunity to solve problems and create clarity is a very useful leadership quality. Often, conflict is a signifier of a deeper problem and so finding ways to surface and work on these issues as a team is a great way to move forward and bring a group together too.

In this leadership activity, start by asking the group to reflect on the central metaphor of bright to blind issues or topics, based on whether the problem is out in the open or unknown. Next, invite small groups to ideate on what issues facing the team are bright, blurry, or blind and then discuss them as a group. By working together to illuminate what is blurry or blind, you can create a one-team mentality and start resolving problems that can lead to conflict too.

Bright Blurry Blind #communication #collaboration #problem identification #issue analysis This is an exercise for creating a sense of community, support intra and inter departmental communication and breakdown of “Silos” within organizations. It allows participants to openly speak about current issues within the team and organization.

The Art of Effective Feedback Workshop

All leaders will need to give effective feedback in order to help their team develop and do great work. The best leaders also solicit feedback from their direct reports and use this is an opportunity to grow. But how can you teach these feedback skills and help leaders develop this important skill?

Check out our Effective Feedback Workshop template for a complete agenda you can use to develop this leadership skill. You’ll find a ready-to-go workshop with a guide and PowerPoint presentation you can use to help anyone in a leadership role give and receive better feedback.

Workshop design made easy

Designing and running effective workshops and meetings is an important leadership skill; whether it’s staying organized and on time during your daily stand-ups or planning more involved sessions.

With SessionLab, it’s easy to create engaging workshops that create impact while engaging every member of your team. Drag, drop and reorder blocks to build your agenda. When you make changes or update your agenda, your session timing adjusts automatically , saving you time on manual adjustments.

Collaborating with stakeholders or clients? Share your agenda with a single click and collaborate in real-time. No more sending documents back and forth over email.

Explore how you and your team might use SessionLab to design more effective sessions or watch this five minute video to see the planner in action!

Now over to you…

I hope you have found some useful tips for leadership development workshops above. Now we’d love to hear from you!

What are your favorite leadership workshop ideas and training exercises for leadership development? Did you incorporate any of them into your facilitation practice?

Have you tried any of the activities above? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.

Robert took his first facilitation training in 2009, and since then immersed himself in designing and delivering experiential learning experiences, group workshop, and train-the-trainer/facilitator programs. His passion for facilitation led him to co-found SessionLab, the online platform that helps people design and facilitate better workshops.

23 Comments

Thank you for sharing such great activity ideas. It is greatly appreciated and a perfect example of how the internet can and does serve the greater good!

Thank you, Jeanne! Great to see that you have found some useful ideas here!

Thank you this is very helpful in building new activities and revitalising teaching.

You’re welcome, Christine! Great to see that you’ve found the post helpful!

Thank you for the magnanimity of sharing these activities. We will choose and run and I am sure they will be very effective.

You are welcome, Roofi – enjoy using these activities at your sessions!

Thank you for sharing such great activity ideas. I will use in my leadership training programme

You are welcome man, happy to see that you’ve found some useful inspiration in this post!

Awesome resources for leadership coaching. Thank you so much! Cheers Marion (From Australia)

You’re welcome, Marion! I’m happy to hear you’ve found interesting the techniques above :-)

Thank you so much . I am really having a hard time thinking about what activities to include for my leadership training talk . This is of great help .

That’s nice to hear – I hope your training talk with go great! :-)

These exercises sound great. Does anyone have any feedback as to how these exercises have worked with their teams? Thanks!

Thank you for the question, Jennifer. We’ve used some of these activities at our own team meetings at SessionLab, and I’ve used other ones earlier on at different training workshops. Which one would you be interested to hear more about?

Thank you for these activities, I have used some of them already in my classes when teaching about leadership and leadership styles. Köszönöm!

That’s great to hear, you’re welcome, Réka! If you have any suggestion on how to tweak or run better these activities, we’d love to hear your thoughts :-)

Thank you for these activities. I was struggling to find activities to work on with groups as small as 1-5, but this should work well.

You’re welcome, Albert – Indeed, most of these activities do work well in small groups as well. Wishing best with your next sessions!

wow! this great! very helpful for trainers like me…. thanks you for sharing …

You’re welcome, I’m happy you’ve found these activities useful!

Hi I am trying to find an online simulation for a course I am designing for a college in Ontario, Canada. I am hoping to find something like your Leadership Envelope but in a virtual format or game. The ’rounds’ aspect is particularly interesting as I would like the students to work with one team over 14 weeks and then submit assigned work based on their experiences related to the course concepts.

Please let me know if you provide something like this or can help in any way.

Hey Rick! Thanks for your comment :)

Leadership Envelope is a great method! Sadly, there’s nothing quite like it in our remote-friendly section of the library currently, though there are a heap of virtual team building activities that could be adapted to go for multiple rounds.

We did have some thoughts on how you might perform the Leadership Envelope in a remote format, which I hope will help!

– Use breakout groups in Zoom for each group. – Have each team pass their virtual “envelope” with responses to the facilitator, either over Slack, PM or email – The facilitator then “passes” the leadership principle to the next team, though keeps the responses back – Play continues, with the facilitator collecting the responses under each leadership principle for later distribution – we’d recommend setting these up in an online whiteboard such as Mural or a Google Doc so teams can review them during the evaluation round – In the evaluation round, share the online whiteboard/Google Doc with the teams – they can then score them in the shared online space and present back to the group from there :) – For the final round, everyone returns to a single Zoom session, each team reclaims their cards (or the facilitator can distribute them back) and then you can debrief :)

Hope that helps, Rick! Using a shared online space such as Mural is also a great shout for an ongoing course, as you can collect and display artifacts generated by the teams throughout :)

Let us know how you get on!

Thank you for having the time and effort on sharing this amazing blog with us! I’ll probably read more of your articles.

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Usf hurricane helene faqs.

September 25, 2024

University News

Updated Thursday, Sept. 26 at 2 p.m. –

GENERAL INFORMATION:

Is USF closed due to Hurricane Helene?

Based on the latest weather information, all classes are canceled beginning on Wednesday, Sept. 25, and will not resume until Monday, Sept. 30. All USF campuses will be closed beginning on Wednesday, Sept. 25, and will remain closed through at least Friday, Sept. 27. As of now, we expect to reopen campuses and return to normal business operations (without classes) on Saturday, Sept. 28. A final decision on the operating status for Saturday, Sept. 28, will be announced on Friday, Sept. 27.

When campus reopens/classes resume, what happens if I can’t get back to class or work?

Students who left the region, or who have difficulty traveling to campus due to storm-related issues, and won’t be able to return in time for Monday's classes should notify their instructors as soon as possible. Employees who left the region, or who have difficulty traveling to campus due to storm-related issues, and won’t be able to return by Monday should notify supervisors as soon as possible. Faculty members and supervisors are asked to be patient and understanding with their students and staff during these unique circumstances.  Students, faculty and staff are urged to use caution when traveling back to campus.

FOR STUDENTS AND PARENTS:

What about scheduled exams and assignments .

Instructors may not conduct class, require assignments or administer exams until at least Monday, Sept. 30. This policy applies to in-person and online classes. Please keep in mind there may be considerable displacement and stress after the storm passes; we expect that instructors will be flexible. Students will receive additional information from their instructors once campus has reopened. This is the same for online courses as well.

Are events on campus canceled?

All events are cancelled when USF's campuses are closed. The USF volleyball match vs. Charlotte, originally scheduled for Friday, Sept. 27, has been moved to 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28. The Blues is Alright concert scheduled for the Yuengling Center on Friday, Sept. 27, has been rescheduled for Friday, Dec. 6. The open house scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 28 on the Tampa campus has been canceled. Anyone who was registered has been notified directly.

As of now, the Kehlani concert on Saturday, Sept. 28 in the Yuengling Center remains on as scheduled.

Please check with the event organizer regarding updates for specific events.

A decision on the operating status of each campus for Saturday, Sept. 28, will be announced on Friday, Sept. 27.

Are residence halls open?

Residence halls on the Tampa and Sarasota-Manatee campuses remain open. Residence halls in St. Petersburg will close beginning on Wednesday, Sept. 25.

Normal hours and locations for USF Dining may be altered due to the storm. Dining will be open through Wednesday evening and students should be prepared for dining to be closed on Thursday. Dining hopes to reopen sometime on Friday once the storm passes. Please check USF Dining’s website and social media pages for updates.

Is the Bull Runner in operation?

Service for the Bull Runner will resume when the university reopens.

Is Feed-a-Bull food pantry open?

Feed-a-Bull food pantry is closed whenever USF campuses are closed. A list of community food pantries can be found here.

For international students:

International students and parents may send questions to [email protected] or call 813-974-5102.

FOR FACULTY AND STAFF:

Can i teach my classes remotely before monday, september 30  .

Instructors may not conduct class, require assignments or administer exams prior to Monday, Sept. 30. This policy applies to in-person and online classes. Please keep in mind there may be considerable displacement and stress after the storm passes; we expect that instructors will be flexible.

Only USF employees who are 1) classified as essential personnel or 2) identified by their supervisors as critical to campus operations should report to work, come to campus or work remotely while campuses are closed. Non-essential staff or those not deemed critical to campus operations by their supervisor are not expected to work, remotely or otherwise, while campuses are closed. Please contact your supervisor if you are unsure of your status. Please do not return to campus until notified that it is safe to do so.  Supervisors are asked to be patient and understanding with their employees under the circumstances.

Do I need to make up class time?

At this time, we do not know if additional instructional time will be required. However, you will need to adjust your semester plans to meet the primary Student Learning Outcomes for your course within the remaining semester. The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning offers suggestions for supporting learning following such a disruption .

Only USF employees who are classified as essential personnel and/or those identified by their supervisors as critical to campus operations should report to campus while buildings are closed. Please contact your supervisor if you are unsure of your status.

When can faculty members and graduate students return to their labs?

Faculty members and graduate students are encouraged to return to their labs once campus has reopened.

Who should be on a USF campus during the emergency closure?

Only employees who have been identified as essential personnel should report to work when the campus and its business operations are officially closed. For safety and accountability, the university must know who is on campus and their locations during an emergency closing. It is critical that all non-essential personnel (even those deemed critical) stay away from the campus when it is officially closed. However, if non-essential personnel work during an emergency closing, they will be paid regular time for the hours worked.

During an emergency situation, such as a hurricane, supervisors are asked to be patient and understanding with their employees and provide flexible work options if necessary and available.

Per Policy 6-037 , essential personnel may include the following: An employee who is essential to the operation of the university, whose absence would adversely affect the health and safety of the campus community or the viability of campus facilities and/or critical infrastructure, as determined by the employee’s department.

How do I know if I’m considered Essential Personnel?

The vice president, deans, and directors or their designees of the college, division or department will identify essential personnel. Your supervisor will notify you if you are part of this group and must come to work during the emergency closure.

Will I be required to work if I’m not considered Essential Personnel?

The vice president, dean, and director or their designees of the college, division or department may identify additional critical roles necessary to continue university operations. Your supervisor will notify you if you are part of this group and must work during the emergency closure.

If the university has closed for an emergency, will I get paid?

The following guidelines will determine if you are paid for an emergency closure:

Exempt employees are not eligible to earn special compensatory leave during the closure.
Special compensatory leave is provided to staff employees required to perform essential duties for hours worked outside of their regular work schedule to prepare for or respond to a declared university emergency, as determined by the SVP, Chief Administration Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer or designee.
Employees who are eligible for Administrative Leave and who are not required to work during an emergency closure are granted administrative leave in an amount equal to the number of hours scheduled to work during the closure or in an amount necessary to bring them up to their regular hours for the work week.
Salaried Temporary employees will receive their regular pay. Employees who are on a previously approved leave of absence that began before (and includes) the administrative closure day, shall not have the leave of absence changed for such administrative closure time. Administrative leave for closures shall not apply during a leave of absence (ie: Sick leave, Annual Leave, Medical Leave of Absence, FMLA, Parental Leave, Leave without Pay, etc). Any university-wide exceptions to this must be approved by the SVP, Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer based upon business needs.
Hourly Temporary employees will not receive administrative leave during an emergency closure, but if the workload permits it, a supervisor may adjust an employee’s schedule during the affected pay period to allow the employee to work additional hours in the work week.

What happens if USF is open but I can’t come to work because I live in an evacuation zone or have to stay home with my children whose school was closed? 

The university understands that circumstances like an evacuation or school closing may impact your ability to come to work during a storm situation. Although the university monitors school closings, we cannot guarantee that USF will close its business operations, even if other schools close. For extenuating circumstances such as these, you may request to use your annual leave to cover your absence.

When should I return to work, and what time should I arrive?  

Please check www.usf.edu, USF’s official social media channels, MyUSF or email for updates on how long the university will be closed. On the day the university reopens, you should report to work at the time you would normally start your shift. If the university opens later than the start of your scheduled start time, you should report to work as soon as the university reopens.

If I am an exempt employee and I work during the closure, am I eligible to earn special compensatory leave?

No. Administration, Faculty, and Staff Exempt employees are expected to work the number of hours necessary to accomplish their assigned responsibilities.

I work a four-day work week, 10 hours each day. How many hours of administrative leave do I get for an emergency closing, eight hours or 10 hours? 

You may be eligible to receive up to 10 hours of administrative leave, which is equal to the number of hours in your regular workday, not to exceed your normal hours in a workweek.

I am designated to be on-call. Will I continue to receive on-call pay during the closing?  

Yes, unless your supervisor advised you in writing prior to the emergency closure that you were not on-call during the closure.

When I am on-call during an emergency closing, which rate do I receive?  

If the closure is on a regular workday, then your on-call rate is the one for the workday. However, if the closure is on a holiday or the weekend, your on-call rate would be the one specified for holiday/weekend.

Additional information for employees can be found here .

FOR PATIENTS:

I have an appointment at the Morsani Health Center, can you help me?

USF Health clinical facilities will be open on Wednesday, Sept. 25, and will be closed on Thursday, Sept. 26.  A decision about Friday, Sept. 27, has not been made at this time. USF Health patients may call 813-821-8038 to reschedule their appointments.

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13 Emotional Intelligence Activities, Exercises & PDFs

Emotional Intelligence Activities and Exercises

This isn’t an accident—our focus on the subject reflects its importance in the positive psychology literature and the value of a culture of emotional intelligence (EI).

This piece offers a useful next step for anyone who has been interested in learning about emotional intelligence, but hasn’t created a plan for improving their own EI yet.

Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free . These science-based exercises will not only enhance your ability to understand and work with your emotions but will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students or employees.

This Article Contains

What are emotional intelligence activities and exercises, tips for using emotional intelligence tools, 7 emotional intelligence activities, 5 eq worksheets, emotional intelligence workbooks (pdfs), powerpoint presentations on ei (ppts and images), 5 emotional intelligence programs, workshops, and webinars, 5 online courses for ei, useful emotional intelligence movies, tedx talks, and youtube videos, building an eq toolkit – discussion questions and notes, a take-home message.

As the name suggests, emotional intelligence activities and exercises are attempts to build, develop, and maintain one’s emotional intelligence, often called EI or EQ for Emotional Quotient .

Many people are interested in improving their EI, for a variety of reasons.

Some of the most common reasons to work on your EI include:

Wanting to succeed in a leadership role;
Trying to fit in with a new organization or new team;
Attempting to branch out of your network and make new friends or contacts;
Starting a new business and wanting to improve your customer service.

And, of course, many people want to enhance their EI simply to understand themselves and the people they interact with on a deeper level. There is no downside to becoming more emotionally intelligent and the benefits can be numerous.

If you’re interested in enhancing your EI, rest assured that you are not alone in your goal! Read on to learn how to go about meeting your goal.

Whether you’re looking to build your own emotional intelligence, encourage its development in your children or students, or trying to boost your team’s or organization’s EQ, there are many activities, tools, and resources you can use.

You can find a few of them below.

Tips for Enhancing Your Own Emotional Intelligence

If your goal is to boost your own emotional intelligence or help your clients boost their emotional intelligence (e.g., any EI work on an individual level), keep these seven tips in mind:

Reflect on your own emotions;
Ask others for perspective;
Be observant (of your own emotions);
Use “the pause” (e.g., taking a moment to think before speaking);
Explore the “why” (bridge the gap by taking someone else’s perspective);
When criticized, don’t take offense. Instead, ask: What can I learn?
Practice, practice, practice (Bariso, 2016).

Learn more about these important tips .

Tips for Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Teams

If you’re looking to enhance your team’s emotional intelligence, keep these 7 tips in mind:

Have a ring leader;
Identify team members’ strengths and weaknesses;
Spark passion;
Build team norms;
Develop creative ways to manage stress;
Allow team members to have a voice;
Encourage employees to work and play together (Rampton, n.d.).

Read more about how to implement these tips .

EQ experts Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff tell us that three factors are absolutely essential to the success of a workgroup:

Trust among members;
A sense of group identity;
A sense of group efficacy (2001).

If it sounds to you like these three factors are strongly associated with emotional intelligence, you’re right! You can’t have an emotionally intelligent team with emotionally intelligent members, but it takes more than that⁠⁠—you need emotionally intelligent norms and values, the right team atmosphere, and willingness to build team EQ.

To do that, you’ll need:

Understanding and regulation of emotions at the individual level;
Understanding and managing of emotions at the group level;
Awareness of and willingness to work with emotions outside the group.

Make sure to keep these three levels in mind as you work on building your emotionally intelligent team; remember that it’s not all about the individuals on the team, but about how they interact with each other and with those outside the group (Druskat & Wolff, 2001).

Download 3 Free Emotional Intelligence Exercises (PDF)

These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients understand and use emotions advantageously.

Download 3 Free Emotional Intelligence Tools Pack (PDF)

By filling out your name and email address below.

It can be daunting to think about how to improve your emotional intelligence ⁠— where do you even begin?

Not to worry! There are many activities and exercises that are designed to do just that. Some are intended for individuals and others for groups, but you’re sure to find something that will meet your needs.

3 Exercises for Developing and Improving EI

These three exercises are meant to help individuals build their emotional intelligence and they are particularly helpful for leaders who want to boost their EI/EQ.

1. Emotional Intelligence Assessment for Leaders

Leaders have a big job to do in any organization: they need to shape, communicate, and contribute to the organizational vision. Naturally, emotional intelligence helps immensely in this role.

This is an activity that leaders can do to assess their own emotional intelligence, which is the first step towards improving it. Find more emotional intelligence assessments here .

This activity consists of 10 descriptions of vision-killing behaviors that a leader may engage in, and a scale upon which to rate your own engagement in each behavior from ‘very seldom’ to ‘very often.’

The vision-killing behaviors include:

Treating people badly⁠—such as not showing people they care, forgetting to say thank you, not respecting people, not making people feel valued;
Living by the adage “Do as I say, not as I do,” and not setting good examples;
Focusing on too many things at once;
Pushing too hard on the task and forgetting the people;
Not giving clear direction;
Giving inconsistent direction;
Not taking responsibility for failure;
Focusing on the detail and forgetting to tell the “whys” or the big picture;
Showing little or no personal commitment to the vision;
Allowing people who aren’t performing the job to remain.

If you find yourself frequently engaging in these behaviors, that’s a good indication that your leader EQ is low. Pay close attention to the three behaviors you engage in the most often and commit to working on reducing or removing those behaviors entirely.

2. Temperament Analysis

Another good assessment activity is the temperament analysis. It was designed to help participants learn about temperament, understand their own temperament, and learn how to work with it.

To get started, keep in mind that our temperament is made up of tendencies and feelings that are influenced by four factors or parameters:

Genetic Inheritance
Physical Attributes
Life Experiences
Environmental Conditions

To give this activity a try, get started with the temperament questionnaire:

Describe your temperament with three adjectives. Choose the ones that describe you best.
Suggest three adjectives that others use to describe your temperament.
Go through each of the adjectives identified in the above two questions and see if each one is because of (or how much each one is driven by) Genetic Inheritance , Physical Attributes , Life Experiences , or Environmental Conditions.
How does each of the temperamental factors affect you on a personal level?
How does each of the temperamental factors affect you on a leadership role level?
Which of these factors do you want to change and why?

Think about each of the questions in detail and try discussing with a friend to maximize the learning opportunity.

See this exercise in more detail.

3. Be the Fog (Regulate Your Emotions)

It can be very difficult for many of us to accept criticism, especially if receiving criticism provokes strong emotions . This simple exercise will help you “be the fog” and learn how to regulate and modulate your emotions in a difficult situation.

Here’s what to do:

“Act like a fog! Imagine you are a fog. When someone throws a stone at you, you absorb that stone without throwing the stone back. This is a very easy and effective technique to use against people who keep criticizing you repeatedly.”

(Skills Converged website)

For example, if someone tells you something like:

“You just don’t understand.”
“You are lazy.”
“You are always late.”
“You don’t feel responsible.”

Respond with:

“Yes, I just don’t understand.”
“Yes, I am lazy sometimes.”
“Yes, I was late.”
“Yes, I just don’t take responsibility.”

When you accept the criticism that is thrown your way (without actually taking it to heart), you will find that you disarm the person criticizing you. To practice, ask someone you know well to criticize you at rapid speed, one after the other, and employ the fogging technique to counter it.

Emotional Intelligence Group Activities

There are tons of group activities focused on developing, enhancing, and maintaining your emotional intelligence.

Check out the four examples below.

4. Accepting Your Emotions

This exercise can help you work on one of the most fundamental skills related to emotional intelligence: understanding and accepting your own emotions.

You’ll need a group of people for this activity, but you could also modify it to work with just one pair. Here’s how to do it:

Divide your group into pairs and have them sit far enough away from the other pairs to get a sense of privacy.
Have each pair decide who will go first.
Tell the group members that they will each have a chance to share an experience where they felt like a victim. Once one partner has explained the experience, they should explain how they felt as a result of their experience in as much detail as possible, thinking about their specific feelings at the moment and how it impacted them afterward.
Allow 15 minutes or so for the first partner to share and for the pair to discuss, have them switch roles.
What did you think first when you were told to share a difficult experience with another person?
How did you manage to share it? How did you feel when you shared it with someone else?
How did you feel after acknowledging and accepting your emotions?
Does this exercise help with accepting how certain experiences make us feel and that it is okay to feel a certain way after negative experiences?
Did you feel more at peace after accepting your emotions generated by your experience?
Would you consider using this exercise to evaluate and acknowledge your emotions after negative experiences?

Read about this activity at the source .

5. Making Eye Contact

As the name of this exercise suggests, it involves using eye contact to better understand our own emotions and how we connect emotionally with others.

Gather some index cards and distribute them to your participants, then ask them to spread out within the room. Tell them to imagine themselves in an art gallery or a museum.

Next, have them move through the three stages:

Ask your participants to roam around the room as if they are in a public space while not making eye contact with anyone else. They should improvise and act the role. Allow one minute for this part.
Stop everyone and ask the participants to make a note of their feelings on their cards.
For this round, ask your participants to seek out eye contact as they go about the room. However, as soon as they have made eye contact, they should break it and look away. Allow two minutes for this part.
Stop everyone and ask them to record their feelings on their cards.
In this round, ask your participants to seek out eye contact and as soon as they have made eye contact with anyone they should pair up with that person. They should stand side by side and do not establish eye contact with anyone else. Allocate two minutes for this part.
Bring everyone back together and follow with a discussion.

Allot 10 minutes or so for the group discussion. Here are a few questions to guide your discussion:

While going through various stages of the exercise how did you feel?
How did it feel when you were making eye contact and you had to break it straight away?
How did it feel when you made eye contact and you could approach the person to pair up?
If you were slow to pair up with someone, how did it feel to go about finding someone you could make eye contact with?
How easy was it to make eye contact with someone?
How close do you feel with people that you maintained eye contact with?
What pre-conditioning dictates our behavior in making eye contact or maintaining eye contact?
How does this compare between different societies?

This exercise will help you and your group see just how vital eye contact is to emotional connection.

Here is a full description of this exercise.

6. If You Knew…

This activity is an excellent choice for new teams or as an icebreaker at small events. It will encourage participants to share information about themselves with others in a way that encourages intimacy and group cohesion.

Start with a flip chart or a whiteboard with these questions on it:

What was the happiest moment in your life?
What was your unhappiest experience in life?
What motivates you to get up in the morning?
What do you use your money for?
Who is the most important person in your life?
Describe your best friend.

Once everyone is ready to get started, ask them all to sit in a semi-circle facing a flipchart or whiteboard. Randomly select one participant to answer the questions on the board, and tell them they have 10 minutes to go into as much detail as possible. Instruct the other participants not to ask questions or interrupt during those 10 minutes, then move on to the next participant.

At the end, pose these questions to get a good discussion started:

Did this activity help you to know your team members better?
Did it help explain certain behaviors and actions of co-workers?
Would it be helpful to share some personal information with those that we work closely with?
Did this session help clear up some of the misunderstandings between team members?

Completing this exercise will likely result in you feeling more connected and comfortable with the other participants, and help you learn how to read emotions in others and listen attentively.

You can find this activity at its source and find more EQ framework, charts and diagrams here .

What would it actually look like, to live in a culture where empathy and EQ were part of our vision? Cleveland Clinic made this video as one vision of empathy, and the ability to see other’s pain.

If you watched the video, what parts did you find most insightful? We would love to hear from you in our comments section below.

7. Exercise to Increase Your Self-Awareness

All you need to start improving your self-awareness in a group setting is a stack of 3 x 5 index cards. Oh, and a group of people!

Here are the instructions:

Ask the participants “How do you feel?” Ask each participant individually instead of in the larger group, if possible.
Most people will probably say they feel fine, so prepare to start the exercise with this: “Why do we almost always say we are fine, even when we are not?”
“Do you find it easy to talk about your feelings?”
“What makes it hard to talk about your feelings?”
“Can you consciously shift your feelings from one to another?”
Discuss how important it is to understand the wide range of human emotions so you can better understand yourself and others, and give yourself the opportunity to regulate your feelings.
Instruct the group to think of as many emotions as they can and write one on each card.
Spread the cards around on a table so you can help the group avoid creating duplicates.

Part Three:

Collect all cards and put them upside down on the table.
Ask each participant to pick two cards at random.
Take turns asking each participant to reveal their cards and explain what it would take to get from one emotion to the other.
After the participant provides their explanation, allow other participants to share their own explanations.
Do you think you came up with many emotions?
Was it easy?
Are you surprised there are so many emotions?
Was it easy to switch from one emotion to another?

If any of these activities interests you, be sure to check out this post on the Emotion Wheel .

If you like circling, underlining, and filling in the blanks to work on improving your emotional intelligence, you might find these 6 EQ worksheets helpful.

1. Giving Feedback: Improving Your Self-Awareness

With this worksheet , you’ll boost your self-awareness and, in turn, your emotional intelligence.

Here are all the questions it poses:

How did you feel?
How do you think others felt?
How did your boss feel?

If you complete this worksheet and want to continue the self-exploration and EQ-boosting, go through these discussion questions:

How useful were the questions?
Did you discover something about yourself that you were not aware of before?

If you completed this worksheet in a group setting, you can also use these two questions to spark a useful discussion:

Did you get inspired by what others found about themselves?
Did their thoughts make you feel more comfortable about yourself?

2. Self-Awareness Activity

Another good worksheet for enhancing your self-awareness comes from Florida State University.

It begins with a great point: it’s hard to make changes to yourself when you aren’t sure where to start! Enhancing your self-awareness will help you figure out what your strengths are, where your EQ competency levels lie, and where you should focus your self-improvement efforts.

The worksheet lists 30 strengths or character traits that you might feel are strengths or areas for you to improve. This list includes traits like:

Imaginative
Hard-working

On one side, there is space to identify three strengths you have and on the other, there is space to identify three traits you would like to work on.

If you think of any strength or an area you’d like to improve that is not included on the list, add it in any way. Your list should be personalized to you, so add and edit what you need!

3. Social Awareness Activity

If you feel comfortable with your self-awareness but are less comfortable with your social awareness, this worksheet is the one for you!

Social awareness is all about how well we understand others, how we recognize and identify emotions in others, and how we manage emotions in social situations.

The worksheet includes five pictures of faces with various expressions and a list of emotions on the other side, like:

Disappointed

The instructions state that you should feel free to match more than one emotion with each picture and that you’re free to add more emotions if you’d like. The point of the worksheet is not to create a one-to-one match or to get them “right.” Instead, the point is to be more aware of the emotions of those around you and to be more attentive and responsive in your interactions with others.

4. Self-Management Activity

If you’re more interested in improving your self-management skills than your relationship management skills, this worksheet can help!

It opens with this description:

“Self-management builds on the basis of self-awareness and is the ability to control your emotions so that they don’t control you. Self-management means you’re able to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, manage your emotions in healthy ways, take initiative, follow through on commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances.”

The worksheet lists some positive and negative emotions for reference.

Positive emotions include:

The negative emotions include:

Disappointment
Frustration

This activity can be focused on any emotion, but the worksheet targets anger. Here are the instructions:

Think of a time when you were angry and how you handled it.
Describe your reaction and behaviors in the lines provided below.
Fill in the blanks: “The last time I was angry I…”

Once you have filled in the blanks above, move on to planning for how you will handle future episodes of anger:

Think about how you would like to process anger in the future.
Breathe deeply
Take a break
Go for a walk
Take a shower
Distract yourself
Think before speaking
Write about it

Keep these planned future coping skills in mind and make sure to pull them out the next time you get angry.

5. Name Game

The worksheet includes two spaces to write out two names: the teen or pre-teen’s own name, and the name of a friend or family member who has influenced their life.

In the first space, the user should write out each letter of their name in a vertical format. Next, they will note an adjective that describes one of their positive traits for each letter of their name.

For example, if your name is Jane Doe, you might write:

J – Joyful A – Assertive N – Nice E – Energetic D – Delightful O – Optimistic E – Even-tempered

The user should complete their own name, then do the same for the person who has influenced their lives.

Completing this worksheet will help the user to start thinking about themselves, their personality, and the traits and characteristics of others. This will help them stay open-minded and attentive to emotions – both their own emotions and the emotions of others.

World’s Largest Positive Psychology Resource

The Positive Psychology Toolkit© is a groundbreaking practitioner resource containing over 500 science-based exercises , activities, interventions, questionnaires, and assessments created by experts using the latest positive psychology research.

Updated monthly. 100% Science-based.

“The best positive psychology resource out there!” — Emiliya Zhivotovskaya , Flourishing Center CEO

If you’re looking for a workbook to guide you through improving your emotional intelligence, you have several options. Here are just a few of the workbooks available (some paid, some free):

Mini Emotional Intelligence Test and Workbook (Access here )
Emotional Intelligence Workbook (Access here )
The Emotional Intelligence Workbook (Access here )
Enhancing Emotional Intelligence Workbook (Access here )
Emotional Intelligence EQ Workbook (Access here )
26 Best Emotional Intelligence Books

Workbooks aren’t your style? Are you more of a visual learner? No problem!

For more information on emotional intelligence, check out these slideshows and presentations on the subject:

Emotional Intelligence: How Your Emotions Influence Your Life at Work and at Home by Rebecca Gulliford from The University of Buffalo School of Management (Access here )
Emotional Intelligence at Work by Sanchita Singh on SlideShare (Access here )

Enhancing the Emotional Awareness of teams is easier when using tools, and this handy checklist is a helpful guide.

By labeling emotional experiences, known as emotional awareness, individuals improve their own EI.

Emotional awareness is a building block of Emotional Intelligence, and a useful skill to have for individual team members.

As a collective, the team can perform better, operate more cohesively and have greater tolerance during challenges.

To get more involved with what’s happening in EI/EQ research and boost your own understanding of how to apply it, you might want to check out a training program, workshop, or webinar. These are just a few of your many options:

Team Bonding Workshop: Emotional Intelligence for Teams (Access here )
Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Program (Access here )
The Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Coaching and Training Programs (Access here )
The Science of Emotional Intelligence Program from the Institute for Health and Human Potential (Access here )
Emotional Intelligence Training from TalentSmart (Access here )

To get even deeper into understanding the concept of emotional intelligence and learning how to build and continue to develop your own EI, there are several courses that you might find useful:

Udemy’s Course on Emotional Intelligence (Access here )
Class Central’s Free Online Emotional Intelligence Courses (Access here )
Coursera’s Courses on Emotional Intelligence (Access here )
The Emotional Intelligence Network’s Free EQ Courses (Access here )
Future Learn’s Emotional Intelligence at Work Course (Access here )

Here is a master list of some of the best and most popular emotional intelligence training opportunities .

For those who want a less intensive crash course in emotional intelligence, there are some excellent videos and Emotional Intelligence TED Talks you can check out, like:

Rachel Lyons, from Fitch Learning, lists these award-winning movies where you can see emotional intelligence on display:

As you build your toolkit, here are some concepts, notes, and discussion questions that you will want to keep in mind.

There are five key characteristics of EQ:

Self-awareness
Self-regulation
Social skills (Akers & Porter, 2018)

Those who are high in emotional intelligence are more likely to be successful in their career, in their social relationships, in their intimate and romantic relationships, and healthier both mentally and physically (Grewal & Salovey, 2006).

A popular item to include in your toolkit is the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 , which can help readers improve their understanding of emotional intelligence and assess their own EQ level. If you decide to add the book to your toolkit, here are some excellent discussion questions for those who read the book:

How many members in the group were familiar with the term “emotional intelligence” before reading Emotional Intelligence 2.0 ?
What’s the most important thing you discovered after reading Emotional Intelligence 2.0 ?
In your lifetime, have you felt an emotional hijacking similar to Butch Connor’s during his run-in with the shark?
What are the physical symptoms you experience with emotion? An example might be your face turns red when you’re angry.
How did you learn to recognize or manage your emotions? What about learning to recognize what other people are feeling and going through? (TalentSmart, 2013).

For quick, in-the-moment opportunities to enhance your EQ, there are three vital questions you can ask yourself:

Does this need to be said?
Does this need to be said by me?
Does this need to be said now?

For example, if you just noticed an employee doing something great at work but remember that they made a mistake a couple of weeks ago that you never addressed…

“No! Stop! Ask yourself: Does this need to be said? Does it need to be said by me ? Does it need to be said by me now ?” (Bariso, 2015)

If you follow through with these three questions in this situation, you will likely find yourself making one of these conclusions:

You know, the criticism I wanted to share wasn’t so important after all. My opinion may even be changing on this;
It might be better if I speak to their team leader first. Maybe what I saw a few weeks ago wasn’t really the whole picture;
I definitely still need to talk to them about the problem I saw. But now’s not the right time. Let me set a reminder to schedule an appointment with the person after I’m better prepared (Bariso, 2015).

Relevant: How to Improve Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace

17 Exercises To Develop Emotional Intelligence

These 17 Emotional Intelligence Exercises [PDF] will help others strengthen their relationships, lower stress, and enhance their wellbeing through improved EQ.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

I hope this piece has provided you with some excellent resources for building and enhancing your emotional intelligence or that of your children , students, employees, or clients.

Keep in mind that everyone has their own unique starting point and their own pace for learning, and make sure not to put too much pressure on anyone to “get it” right away—even yourself!

What are your thoughts on how to build and maintain your emotional intelligence? Do these tools seem helpful?

What other tools and exercises have you found that can help boost EQ? Let us know in the comments!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free .

Akers, M., & Porter, G. (2018). What is emotional intelligence (EQ)? PsychCentral . Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-emotional-intelligence-eq/
Bariso, J. (2015). These 3 questions will immediately increase your emotional intelligence. Inc . Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/these-3-questions-will-immediately-increase-your-emotional-intelligence.html
Bariso, J. (2016). How to increase your emotional intelligence. Inc . Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/how-to-increase-your-emotional-intelligence.html
Druskat, V. U., & Wolff, S. B. (2001). Building the emotional intelligence of groups. Harvard Business Review . Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2001/03/building-the-emotional-intelligence-of-groups
Grewal, D., & Salovey, P. (2006). Benefits of emotional intelligence. In M. Csikszentmihalyi & I. S. Csikszentmihalyi (Eds.), A life worth living: Contributions to positive psychology (pp. 104-119). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
http://www.livesinprogress.net/2014/01/improvisation-games-exercises-for.html
Lynn, A. B. (2000). 50 activities for developing emotional intelligence. HRD Press . Retrieved from http://www.hrdtrainingsolutions.com/v/vspfiles/pdf/50%20Activities%20for%20Developing%20Emotional%20Intelligence%20-%202%20Activities.pdf
Lyons, R. (n.d.). Emotional intelligence on display in Oscar winning films. Fitch Learning . Retrieved from https://www.fitchlearning.com/emotional-intelligence-display-oscar-winning-films
Rampton, J. (n.d.). 7 ways to create emotionally intelligent teams. The Economist . Retrieved from https://execed.economist.com/blog/guest-post/7-ways-create-emotionally-intelligent-teams
https://www.skillsconverged.com/
TalentSmart. (2013). Discussion questions for reading groups. TalentSmart: The Premier Provider of Emotional Intelligence . Retrieved from http://www.talentsmart.com/media/uploads/pdfs/Emotional%20Intelligence%202.0%20Discussion%20Questions.pdf

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Indeed a worthwhile read, for anyone seeking to explore Emotional Intelligence.

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