How to use serious games for leadership development

How do you develop “leadership?” It’s broadly classified as a soft skill and really, anyone in any business function who assumes more responsibility than their coworkers can be defined as finding themselves in a position of leadership. From the shift supervisor at a fast food restaurant, to the general on the battlefield, up to the current NASA administrator, competent and effective leaders with the necessary skills can have an enormous impact on an organisation’s ability to function day-to-day, as well as achieving broader objectives.

Definitively, a leader is in charge. Typically, you follow the leader, and the project or mission lives and dies inline with their performance. At the highest corporate level, leaders oversee all business departments, with intermediate leaders reporting to them in matters on HR, communications, sales, and research and development. Within those departments will be more leaders, responsible for more specific business functions, all of which need to be under effective management for the organisation en masse to thrive.

What qualities make a good leader?

While what a leader is may be obvious, defining what qualities or skills make a good leader can be slightly more challenging to pin down, and while the minutiae may be debatable, fundamentally it’s not hard to pinpoint some broad strokes of what makes a good leader.

Think about all the managers you’ve worked with in your career. What separated the good leaders from the bad? If you feel like you’ve only had sub-par leadership, or feel like your current organisation isn’t exceeding expectations in its leadership development strategy, you can always reverse engineer what isn’t working to identify what the best possible form of leadership looks like for your company.

Take it to its extreme. The worst ones take credit and apportion blame: they’re out for themselves, are poor performers at negotiation, and look for ways to pass the buck when projects fall short. They tend to be unwilling to venture out of their comfort zones and develop new skills. By contrast, the best ones focus on the good of the team and the organisation, looking to inspire and mentor the people around them to do the best work they can, and are able to exert their influence when it comes to negotiation. They also typically exhibit what can be described as a growth mindset: they aren’t bound to industry dogma, always look for training opportunities, and are willing to take intelligent risks to innovate effectively.

Developing leadership skills through serious games and gamification

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to typically less playful tasks, such as corporate training, and serious games are games designed with serious purposes in mind, which is to say, a purpose other than pure entertainment. The two concepts are related, but differ from one another in that gamification adds the game mechanics to tasks and processes, while serious games apply learning or behavioural coaching to the context of a game.

Define your purpose

Earlier we asked you to consider what made the good leaders you’ve had effective in their roles. This is important to consider before you begin developing your serious game, as different leadership styles will work better in some company cultures and management functions than others.

A disruptive tech start-up, for example, may call for a renegade maverick at the wheel, but while the renegade maverick may be the shot of adrenaline needed to fight it out in a new frontier, they’d be a loose cannon and a liability if they were to run a legacy institution like a bank responsible for thousands of pensions and mortgages. For this reason, identifying the appropriate style of leadership, and the nuanced qualities that you want to develop within individuals on your programme is essential.

Online serious games are a great addition to the HR toolkit when it comes to leadership and management training in your teams. Their immersive, playable environments provide an engaging medium for your employees to practise and learn in risk-free, virtual scenarios. Customising game formats like the Quiz on Drimify allows you to simulate some of the problems your teams may encounter as leaders, but without the potential high-stakes consequences their actions might have should they make the wrong decisions. The content provided in the form of text question scenarios or short videos, coupled with the correct answers, allows you to gently encourage participants to embody the values and attitudes you want in your leaders.

Customise your game to encourage desired behaviours

Some people were born to lead, headstrong, capable, and gifted with vision and purpose, but the naturals are the exceptions rather than the rule. An organisation needs more than one leader, for multiple inputs, to facilitate growth, and to manage succession. Given that most leaders can be made, incorporating a programme of serious game training as a form of e-learning gives you an immersive method for ensuring strong and consistent leadership throughout your organisation’s management structure.

Adapting the Dynamic path™ format, for example, gives you access to every game engine on the Drimify platform. You can build a longer, more immersive learning pathway made up of multiple interactive levels. You can simulate business-applicable scenarios to develop and test their problem solving skills and advanced people skills like conflict resolution and negotiation. Additionally, you can include some modules of more instructional content relating to the interactive modules. Because they’re immersed in the narrative of the game and their own progress, you can use content modules to introduce ideas and strategies around strategic planning and mentoring.

Through interactive online learning experiences, you can introduce your company’s decision-making and planning frameworks, encourage desired behaviours and responses, and collect data through the games to assess a participant’s proficiency, aptitude, and progress. Every aspect of your serious game made through Drimify is fully customisable, from the content and difficulty level, down to the branding and the appearance, so it can be representative of your company and be effective in helping you achieve your training objectives.

Define and develop the right leadership for your company

Developing and coaching leadership is a long term process, so you should consider any game based training solutions as a long term process too. The functionality of serious online games to collect useful data, both on a single employee’s performance and progress, and over multiple subjects to identify trends and commonalities, allows you to perfect your programme of game based learning over the long term with minimum labour input.

Online serious games offer a razor sharp tool through which you can develop the types of leaders which will help your organisation thrive. Constant feedback through data collection sharpens the tool and makes it more precise. The playability and repeatability allow remote or onsite skill development and knowledge acquisition in highly immersive, highly effective learning pathways which you shape inline with your objectives.

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