No matter your leadership level, taking the time to reflect on your past experiences, future goals, and leadership qualities opens up room for improvement, making you a more confident and effective individual and leader.

When individuals discuss their leadership skills, it provides clear guidance and direction, helping teams and organizations achieve their goals. These discussions also help identify and nurture potential leaders, ensuring a strong leadership pipeline for the future. By sharing insights and strategies, leaders can drive adaptability and innovation, navigate challenges, and resolve conflicts. Use the Be a Leader Thumball in your next leadership training to guide these conversations and see how your leaders can step into their roles.

Questions include:

1. “I'd be a better leader if I spent more time on...”
2. “When my workers disagree with me, I...”
3. "The #1 leadership trait is..."
4. "I get honest feedback from workers when..."

Open up your leadership training by highlighting the importance of leadership. Explain how awareness of your current leadership state is the first step in self-improvement, and discuss the value of the Be a Leader Thumball in getting this process started.

Tip 1: Keep the Conversation Going

Because some of the questions on this Thumball require introspection, some players may find a prompt to be difficult to answer. In this instance, invite the player to pass, ask a fired, or request a discussion about why that prompt matters. This allows the discussion to keep going, and it can invite deeper conversations.

Tip 2: Relate the Prompts to Everyone

One way you can use this Thumball is by having every player in that round answer the same prompt. This allows everyone to share their opinions and provides opportunities for players to look at the same thing through a different lens.

Tip 3: Pair it with What's My Leadership Style

If you've used What's My Leadership Style in a previous leadership training, players will already have an understanding of their unique leadership style, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Approaching the Be a Leader Thumball activity with this knowledge provides players with the opportunity to dig deeper into the prompts and make their answers more applicable to themselves.

With the Be a Leader Thumball, find a full range of conversation starters, including:

1. Leadership traits that I have or aspire to have in myself and my team
2. Ways to motivate, inspire, and recognize employee contributions
3. Methods for dealing with disagreement, decision making, and mistakes
4. Reflections on challenges, frustrations, delegation, and impatience
5. Approaches to promote growth and learning
6. Techniques to get buy-in, promote diversity, and share feedback

When players discuss prompts like these, they gain deeper insights into their leadership strengths and areas for improvement, and they walk away with new ideas for how to improve their leadership.

Looking for a fun and effortless way to break the ice and spark meaningful conversations? Thumballs are one of the best collaboration activities for teams. Just toss, catch, and respond to the prompt under your thumb – it's that simple. With engaging and intuitive topics, Thumballs create a relaxed, stress-free environment that energizes any training session, encourages participation, and makes learning more interactive. Get ready to turn every toss into a chance for connection, insight, and fun.

Mary Miller Pembleton, a speech pathologist, created Thumball™ to engage her students with learning challenges by combining speech activities with ball games. After a dream inspired her to market the product, she and her husband Gregg developed and patented Thumball™, which is now used to improve communication and social skills in various settings. Their business, Answers In Motion, also customizes Thumballs for HRDQ and other companies. The product's success has grown with increased publicity and sales, fulfilling their vision of making Thumball™ a household name.