The most effective executive training we've run doesn't involve slides. It involves games, discomfort and unexpected laughter. Here's what it teaches that no lecture can.
Somewhere in their career, most executives learned to perform leadership: the confident voice, the prepared answer, the controlled room. It works, until it doesn't. The moment that calls for genuine presence, adaptive thinking or the kind of trust that makes a team follow you through something hard, the performance doesn't quite reach.
When we run play-based leadership workshops for senior teams, the first thing that happens is discomfort. Executives are used to being competent. Games make them beginners again. And being a beginner, in front of peers, is precisely the condition that reveals how someone actually leads.
We watch how they respond to losing. We watch how they treat the person on their team who isn't "getting it". We watch who takes the risk of looking foolish in service of the group's success. These behaviours are directly predictive of leadership effectiveness, and no slide deck, no 360 assessment, captures them like ten minutes of an unfamiliar game.
Every workshop has one. The arms-crossed, 'I can't believe I'm here for this' executive in the back row. We have learned not to worry. By hour two, they are almost always the loudest in the room, because once the armour comes off and they discover they're actually good at the social intelligence parts of the game, they don't want to stop. The resistance was a performance too.
Explore play-based leadership programsA printable 2-page summary with the key takeaways. Perfect for staffroom walls, fridge doors, or the back of a planner.
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