Useful Leadership Qualities
Facilitator Tips Episode 59

Useful Leadership Qualities To Never Leave Home Without

In this week’s Facilitator Tips episode, I reveal the top five, most useful leadership qualities or attributes that I never leave home without.

<< Go to Episode 58   Go to Episode 60 >>

This could easily be a very long list but I wanted to focus on those leadership characteristics that I believe have become the bedrock of my success as an experiential trainer. Some of these qualities may be really obvious, while others are not so much.

Click the play button above to discover what these leadership qualities are.

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Useful Links & Resources

• Ubuntu Cards – click this link to discover one of my all-time favourite props. So simple, yet powerful, I wish I had thought of them.
• Fail-Proof Activities – it would take too long to list every activity I know that falls into the ‘fail-proof’ category, but here are five to get you started: Gotcha, Categories, One-Two-Three, Crosstown Connections and Story of Your Name.
• Looking for No Prop activities? – click this link to get your hands on my latest activity book No Props No Problem – it comes with a 30-day free trial of our online activity database, featuring 530+ activities.
• Facilitator Tips Video Series – this fortnightly series of short video tutorials captures many of the essential leadership qualities I employ to make a difference with the groups I lead. Check ’em out.

…EE

Video Transcript

Howdy folks and welcome to Episode 59 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard, I’m an experiential trainer and author, and in this episode, I want to focus on this concept of what do I never leave home without. You’d be familiar with that old advertising tagline of American Express. American Express, never leave home without it.

This is the same for me. For the last 30 years, generally speaking, these are the things that I never leave home, that is arrive at program with, or without.

And the first one is a smile. Look, this is something that’s regarded as a critical element that is the shortest distance between two people, a smile, a laugh, looking someone directly in the eye, shaking their hands and introducing yourself. It really does make a huge difference to people. So I never leave home without that. Even when I’m really really tired, I turn on my extroverted self and make it work, and I know it has a powerful transformative effect on the groups I work with.

No props. More and more as I’ve matured in my career, I’ve discovered that there’s just less stuff I need to take with me. So often, especially when Qantas, for example, loses my luggage on my way to a program, I often don’t need any props to make it work, so increasingly going without as I turn up at a program.

And then there’s always those fail-proof activities, those activities I always take with me up my sleeve, like Gotcha, 123, and others that I will list in the show notes to this episode. You can never have enough fail-proof activities, those that you just know no matter what the situation is always going to work.

However, while I am the author of a book called No Props, I will tell you that if I was told that for the rest of your career, Mark, you can use only one prop, this would be it, the Ubuntu cards produced by High 5 Learning Adventures. It is a fantastic prop that speaks directly to the essence of Ubuntu that is “I am because we are”. It’s about connections. It’s about connections.

And so whether I’m using it in a small group or I just have multiple decks of it in a large group, this is… always I can fit it in the back of my pocket very easily to take with me to every program.

And finally, to be fair I never go anywhere without my handkerchief, because there’s nothing worse than being caught up in an allergic reaction or my eyes are stinging because I just want to be able to sneeze all the time. I want to be able to be composed and to be in a situation where I feel most comfortable when I’m presented in front of a group. So to answer that question what do I never leave home without? A hanky.

What about you? What do you never leave home without, both a prop and no prop variety? I’d love to hear it.

Please leave a comment. Be sure to check out the show notes at www.playmeo.com Episode 59, and I’d love to hear what it is that you always take with you to your programs.

Thank you so much for listening.

Do you happen to have our free app, our group games app? Then check our playmeo in your favourite app marketplace. It’s completely free, and curates all of the free resources from our website. That’ll be my last-minute tip. I’ll look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

Bye for now. Bye.