Group Exercises

This is a list of exercises that I run through in my team meetings. Each exercise takes about 15-20 minutes. The goal is to make managers and leaders think deeper about a certain aspect, and also for me to understand them better.

1. Purpose and Enjoyment: Action Identification Theory
   In marketing research, “action identification” is used to understand underlying motivations of people performing an action. For instance, if you interrupted 100 shoppers in the midst of purchasing jeans and ask them, “Why are you buying these jeans?”, the responses would be likely to vary considerably, ranging from “trying to stay in fashion” to “trying to save money by buying during a sale” to “buying it because jeans are comfortable”. The same action may represent different underlying motivations for each one of us.
   
   There is no pre-read for this exercise, although the exercise is adapted from this article on Harvard Business Review: 5 Questions to Help your Employees find their Inner Purpose.
   
   I go through a set of questions that I ask each EM in the room to answer and share with the rest of the group. The questions are available here.
   
   
2. The Four Drives that Underlie Motivation
   The purpose of the exercise is for managers to introspect if EMs are doing everything to motivate and energize employees. I typically do this exercise around the time organizational health surveys are done, to drive home the fact that every person is motivated by different things.
   
   The short pre-read for this exercise is here: (longer read is on Harvard Business Review: “Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model“)
   
   Once the pre-read is done, I ask each manager to list out the sort-order (from most important to least important) for themselves (I do the same exercise for them, and we compare notes to see if I got that correct). As a stretch exercise, I ask them to do the same exercise for each of the folks they support.
   
   
3. Situational Leadership
   As managers, it’s easy to fall into the trap that everyone should have as much initiative and drive as they have, and managers often do not recognize the times when team-members need their active support and help to master a situation or scenario they aren’t good at handling. Situational Leadership is a good way to sensitize people on what part of the growth journey their team-members are in.
   
   The short pre-read for this exercise is a blog post: The Four Styles of Situational Leadership.
   
   Once the pre-read is done, I ask each manager to write out each of their team-members current style and how think about how they plan to support team members through that style.
   
   
4. Begin with Trust
   This exercise is based on a large study done by a few Harvard Business School professors at Uber. The thesis is that each of us have a “trust wobble” – i.e., when we get into a position of low trust with another individual, it is usually because of a particular reason (reason is different for different people) – it’s either perceived inauthenticity, lack of empathy, or lack of data/logic. The exercise aims to identify your trust wobble dimension.
   
   The short pre-read for this exercise is here. The longer Harvard Business Review article is: “Begin with Trust“.
   
   Once you are done with the pre-read, go through a few low-trust situations you have had in the past, and think of what you could have done to make it better. Imagine how the other person may have perceived you, and categorize their perception into lack of authenticity, lack of empathy, or lack of data/logic.
   
   
5. Learning Questions
   This exercise is from a famous book by John C. Maxwell called “Good Leaders ask Great Questions: Your Foundation for Successful Leadership“. There is no pre-read for this exercise (the book is certainly not the pre-read), but the questions are from a list the author asks every new person he meets (so he can learn from them).
   
   I ask each EM to go through this list and answer as many of them that they feel comfortable sharing with me (or even the rest of the group). This only works when there is high trust between the individuals.
   
   The questions are:
   1. What is the greatest lesson you have learned?
   2. What are you learning now?
   3. How has failure shaped your life?
   4. Who do you know whom I should know?
   5. What have you read that I should read?
   6. What have you done that I should do?