Experiential Leadership Development – The Outbound Way

Visionary companies believe that long-term success requires a pipeline of emerging leaders who can help build and secure a competitive edge. A leadership development program equips upcoming managers with a broader understanding of the global marketplace and a more integrated view of the organization. A well-designed leadership program built for leaders of managers revolves around 6 factors: communication, thinking and acting systematically, influence, self-awareness, resilience and learning agility.

This is where outbound leadership development delivers high impact as its based on experiential learning. Leaders participate in simulated real time environment and are able to see immediate consequences of their decisions and actions. They reflect on their experience and adopt better ways of leadership.

An effective leadership development program based on experiential learning improves the decision-making and leadership skills by deepening the understanding of participants about their core business operations. Having broader business knowledge, global perspectives, and leadership insights, managers will be ready to identify problems, craft effective solutions, and adapt to global market shifts.

The various benefits of a an outbound leadership development program are:

Leading and developing high-performing global teams
Driving change and innovation through proper coping strategies
Formulating a detailed action plan to address an organization’s strategic and leadership challenges
Generating growth by leading cross-functional initiatives
Solving complicated problems & take wise action in complex, rapidly changing conditions
Building resiliency, managing stress & leverage multiple life roles
Learning the art of collaboration\

Corporate are looking for leadership program which are either at the entry levels or at the advance levels.

Experiential Learning at the Entry Level
At the entry level, leadership programs are focused on developing a base for successful leadership. Activities include understanding future colleagues better, through ice –breakers, cooperative game sequence, team building, goal setting, taking ownership and accountability, displaying leadership skills followed by certain psychometric assessments.

Feedback sessions are conducted through effective debriefing at the end of each activity. An evaluation is done both by the participants and their peers. An effective feedback prompts leader to assess their strengths and areas of improvement.

This form of experiential learning helps participants recognize their loopholes and improve over the course of time. As a result of this, participants become aware of their natural style of leadership through self-awareness exercises.

Guiding questions for Experiential Leadership Program

The four guiding questions that can be explored during any experiential leadership development program are as follows:

How does a leader respond in the face of complex challenges?
Which are the most important social disparities leaders want to remedy? What are the sources of these disparities?
What are the core values, that drives a leader to struggle for social change?
How do leaders create their vision for a better future, considering their unique leadership brand, their values and their perceptions of injustice?

Answering the above questions, leadership awareness in individuals can be developed through experiential learning, using simulations as an experiential learning activity. Apart from that, other activities might be used within an experiential learning laboratory environment.

Prior to designing an experiential leadership development program, we must remember what is required in an experiential learning environment. When designing an experiential leadership development session the following things should be kept in mind:

Skills of an experiential facilitator

The ‘Learner’ is the key focus, not the facilitator
Facilitation should be subtle and light
Facilitator should act as a guide and not a teacher
Group settings are crucial
Mentoring and coaching should be mutual
Asking questions while leading them to learning opportunity
Creating or finding experiential learning opportunities
Share knowledge, ideas and thoughts with each other

Understanding on the environment and the activities

Participants should be provided a safe space to learn and apply
The programs are on developing people and not selecting them
A single learning objectives caters to multiple desired outcomes

For example, coordination often pops up in group activities as a secondary objective.

All activities needs to be engaging
Relation of the learning objectives to desired outcomes

Relevance of learning objectives and transfer of learning

Giving participants time for reflection to think on their learning
Sharing those learning on the platform
Asking questions that stimulates their thoughts
Understanding how they will apply those skills learnt at workplace

Keeping the above framework in mind, some learning activities that can be used within an experiential leadership development program are as follows:

Leaderless discussions through Case Studies

A relevant and real time case study is chosen
The case study is divided amongst the team members
Individuals share what they took from their portion of the case study
A brainstorming session is held to identify the questions that senior leaders asks about the information presented in the case study
It is kept leaderless to see emerging leaders in a collaborative work environment
Groups observe and discuss how their company is managing those challenges

Role-plays

Realistic scenarios are presented to the participants
Leaders identify their roles in the team
Roles are rotated within the scenario to experience alternative points of view
Role Play Experiences

Gamification

It is used for repetitive behaviors and action
Specific scenarios are used for developing skills
Meant for short duration
Business board games
Don’t rule out games you know and love for non-business objectives
Helps teams to compete against other teams to work on strategic thinking skills
Associating game lessons back to their real-world roles

Simulations

Business based simulations: Business and financial acumen, Strategic know-how
Task-based simulations
Functional Based Simulations: Operations and project management

Problem-based project

Organizations identify a problem or a challenge
Employees bring forth their own functional problem/challenge as ideas. The teams can vote on which problem to solve
Mix teams up by functional background to help look at the solution from different perspectives
Groups present the challenge they worked on and the proposed solution
Groups select the best solution
Groups present their findings to Senior Functional leads

An important aspect of experiential learning activities is that they allow for learning by teaching, doing and mentoring others in specific groups. Facilitators are used as guides in a classroom setting to apply relevancy.

All aspects of the 70-20-10 model for learning are represented in experiential learning programs. One should always remember that we are building leaders in a safe environment which would drive them to be more open to learning.

Outlife is a specialist experiential learning and outbound training provider that conducts Experiential Leadership Training, behavioral skills training, team building and management development programs using experiential education methodology.

The OBT training and team building programs are hands on, engaging, fun, exciting and use adult learning methodology. Outlife conducts employee engagement programs based on three broad categories such as recreational, educational and developmental.

Recreational - Focus is on the team experiencing fun and feel good factor.

Educational - Focus is on the team learning specific learning objectives to bring a change in the way they behave, think or perceive. Mostly employed for team building sessions, behavioral skills training, outbound training.

Developmental - Focus is on learning and knowledge to bring a change in habits, motives, behaviors and attitude. Mostly Employed in Outdoor Management Development and Leadership Development Programs.

While there are many ideas and activities around employee engagement, Outlife can help create motivation and belongingness in your organization through the following employee engagement ideas and activities. These include

Team building
Adventure day out
Work life balance
Health and Wellness
Cooperative play activities
Sports and fitness
Theme based engagement
Hobby clubs
CSR and charity work