I created the following icebreaker game with an aim to get people talking to each other, and to also get people to talk about their own skills and the skills they share, which can be useful towards team building and staff self-awareness. It’s fun, easy to prepare and provides useful outputs of lists of shared skills among participants. Alternatively, you could do the activity not about skills but about other shared characteristics, but skills makes sense for team building type workshops.
My Skills Club
Instructions to participants
- Silently write a list of your top three work related skills on a cue card.
- Wander around the room seeking individuals you have never met and ask them if they share any of your skills.
- If they don’t, smile and move on.
- If you do share at least one skill, you can now form a club. Together look for others to join your club who have the same shared skill.
- Skills can be worded slightly differently. Skills should not be too generic e.g. “writing emails” or “making phone calls”.
- If you can find other individuals with two or three of the same skills, you can choose to break off and form a new more exclusive club.
- Goal is to form the largest club with the most shared skills.
- Clubs will get points for every club member x shared skills across the club. E.g.
9 members with 1 shared skill = 9 points
5 member with 2 shared skills = 10 points
4 members with 3 shared skills = 12 points - Countdown 5 minutes to finish.
- The Club with the most points gets chocolate for all members!
To help explain the process, I did a 1 minute demonstration with three accomplices with prepared cue cards.
It worked very well with lots of laughs and light hearted on topic conversations.
