A year after completing a team coaching programme, a management team reconvened for an away day. The previous 12 months had been intense and marked by significant change, restructuring, and hard-won improvements. While performance had stabilised, the team recognised lingering issues in their own alignment: differences in leadership styles, decision-making approaches, and internal communication processes were beginning to impact employee engagement.
With budget constraints in place, the day needed to feel like a meaningful reward. A chance to reconnect, reflect, and have some fun together after a demanding year. The team had two main objectives for their away day:
- To deepen their understanding of how their individual leadership styles were contributing to—or complicating—team cohesion and consistency.
- To improve collective decision-making and communication, particularly in how they presented a unified voice to the rest of the organisation.
We designed a half-day session supported by LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. This facilitated, hands-on method enabled the team to externalise and explore their leadership styles in a creative, non-threatening way. Each manager was invited to build a model that represented their default leadership approach—bringing metaphor, storytelling, and emotion into the room.
To complement the session, participants completed a leadership styles questionnaire, giving them language and insight into both their preferred and avoided styles. As a team, we explored where similarities helped create cohesion, and where differences required more conscious alignment. Importantly, the session created a playful, energising atmosphere—one that respected the depth of the work while also signalling that the team’s development was worth celebrating.
The session sparked new levels of self-awareness and mutual understanding. Leaders who had struggled to articulate their differences found clarity through metaphor and visual representation. The team was able to map their collective leadership presence—identifying gaps, strengths, and overlaps. The activity also opened up honest, constructive conversations about communication habits and group decision-making.
Leaders left with renewed energy, shared language for discussing their styles, and a sense of camaraderie rooted in tangible experience—not just talk. For a team still recovering from a tough year, the session offered both meaningful development and much-needed reconnection without breaking the budget.