4 Responses

1. One possibility …
   Hi Russell, don’t know if this meets your needs but a suggestion for a short exercise to do in pairs. If safe to do so send each pair to walk around an area outside the training room. A local high street is excellent. One half of the pair leads whilst the other follows. The individual following must match the walking pace of the leader and copy any movements, e.g. arms swinging as they walk along, picking up items and look at them, etc. Each pair returns after 10-15 minutes and swap places. The excellent feature of this exercise is that it temporarily puts the follower into the leader’s shoes and it is really surprising to see how we are so unaware of ourselves. Wonder if that gives you some food for thought?? 🙂

2. Match & Pace Exercise
   This is good and quick exercise to reinforce matching & pacing and the effects of mis-matching on rapport building. It’s done in two parts.

   For the first 2 minutes – Person A talks about something they are passionate about (or previous holiday, whatever) for 2 minutes. Person B listens attentively, matches and paces Person A for the first 30-45 seconds. Then Person B starts to mis-match (acting bored, playing with watch, breaking eye contact, etc.).

   For the next 2 minutes –
   Person B now talks about something they are passionate about (topical issue, hobby, whatever). Person A disagrees with them but continues to match and pace the person to keep rapport.

   Discuss with participants the effects of both scenarios. Moral of the story – matching and pacing help build and keep rapport. You need the rapport to lead.

3. refine Barbara’s excerise further
   Really liked Barbara’s exercise – as an added refinement, try asking the second person to only display one aspect such as avoid eye contact, or play with watch, or yawning. This might be more subtle, less obvious, andn more challenging? just a thought

4. Thank you
   Thanks so much for your replies.

   I really like both ideas.

   Cheers

   Russell