# 8 Activities to Improve Communication Skills (and What Each One Trains) Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/activities-to-improve-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/activities-to-improve-communication-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Eight communication activities you can actually run at work, what behavior each one trains, and how to turn a five-minute exercise into a real habit. ## Key facts - Title: 8 Activities to Improve Communication Skills (and What Each One Trains) - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Confidence, Teamwork - Primary keyword: activities to improve communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/activities-to-improve-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Eight communication activities you can actually run at work, what behavior each one trains, and how to turn a five-minute exercise into a real habit. - Practical guidance for activities to improve communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The activities that actually improve communication skills share one feature: each isolates a single behavior — listening without interrupting, describing something precisely, dropping jargon — and gives you a way to see whether you got it right. Back-to-Back Drawing, Zen Counting, Taboo, and summarize-back drills all work this way. Most people arrive here after reading plenty of advice about communication that never changed anything on a Tuesday afternoon. That is not a discipline problem. Advice tells you what good communication looks like; it gives you no repetitions and no feedback. The eight activities below supply both, and each one names the behavior it trains. ## Eight activities to improve communication skills The training site PathWise makes the point that separates a useful exercise from a time-filler: a good activity isolates one behavior at a time and gives you a way to measure progress. That is exactly what the big roundups drop. SessionLab lists 43 communication games, edstellar 20, Symonds Research 12 — variety without direction, so a listening drill, a non-verbal game, and a trust exercise sit side by side with nothing telling you which to reach for. Each entry leads with the behavior it targets; most need one colleague and ten minutes. ### 1. Back-to-Back Drawing Two people sit back to back. One describes an image; the other draws it without seeing it and, in the strict version, without speaking. It is the most widely reproduced exercise in this space — a formal worksheet at Therapist Aid, HR training material at Brigham Young University, a facilitator guide at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. Run it in 5 to 10 minutes timed, 15 to 25 for a complex image. What makes it work is the ban on questions. Because the listener cannot ask you to clarify, every vague phrase shows up as a wrong line on the paper. It trains being specific and being brief, and it exposes a habit most people do not know they have: describing details before the overall shape, so the drawing goes wrong from the first stroke. The same failure produces handover notes nobody can follow. ### 2. The summarize-back rule One person talks for two or three minutes about a real disagreement at work. The listener may not respond until they have summarized it to the speaker's satisfaction. Symonds Research calls its version Best Summary; Unboxed Technology and PositivePsychology describe the same paired drill, with the listener using non-verbal feedback, summarizing, and asking clarifying questions. Several of these sources recommend anchoring it in a real conflict rather than a neutral topic, which is worth following: neutral topics are easy to summarize because you were not defending anything while listening. The ordering constraint is the whole mechanism — you cannot compose your reply while the other person is still speaking, because you do not yet know what you will have to repeat back. It is also the cheapest drill here: no props, and you can impose the rule on yourself in your next meeting without telling anyone. ### 3. Zen Counting A group counts to ten. Each person says exactly one number, there is no planning beforehand, and nothing else may be said. If two people speak at once or a number repeats, the count restarts at one. Strip the words away and the only information left in the room is turn-taking cues — a breath, a shift in posture, a micro-pause. That is the sub-skill behind never getting a word in: people who go quiet in meetings usually do not lack opinions, they miss the half-second opening and wait for a cleaner one that never comes. Four people at a table can run it in three minutes. ### 4. Taboo, with your own banned words In Taboo, one player gets others to guess a keyword without using any of the banned words printed on the card. Read it as a workplace exercise and the banned list is a jargon ban. The upgrade is obvious: throw away the deck, write your own card using your team's five most-used acronyms, and explain your current project to someone from another department. It transfers almost one-to-one — the operation you practice in the game is the one you perform in the meeting — and the behavior it trains is adapting to the receiver rather than to your own habits. ### 5. Question and Question Two people hold an entire exchange using only questions; any statement ends the round. edstellar lists it as an active-listening exercise, though it does something more specific. It inverts the default failure mode of the anxious communicator, which is over-explaining. You cannot lecture in questions. What you get instead is practice in what actually moves a conversation — asking something relevant enough that the other person has to think — and in steering it without dominating. If you have ever come out of a conversation realizing you did eighty percent of the talking, this is your drill. ### 6. One description, many drawings A variant described by axonify and MindOwl: one person describes an object or image while a whole group draws it simultaneously, and then all the versions are compared side by side. The difference from Back-to-Back Drawing is variance. The pair version tells you that you were unclear; the group version shows how many different ways one instruction can be read — eight drawings, all defensible. Run this one if you write briefs or instructions that more than one person acts on. It demonstrates that ambiguity is not an occasional accident but the default state of ordinary wording. ### 7. Feedback rehearsal Practice delivering one specific piece of feedback to a partner before you deliver it for real. In the material from MindOwl and kapable.club this usually comes attached to the sandwich method — a positive, then the improvement, then another positive. The template is debatable and you can ignore it. The reframing underneath is the valuable part: feedback becomes a rehearsable drill with a fixed shape rather than an act of spontaneous nerve. Rehearse only the first two sentences — that is where these conversations are won or lost, and the part people rewrite in their heads for a week without ever saying out loud. ### 8. Guided navigation and the non-verbal tier One person is blindfolded while a partner talks them through an obstacle course using verbal instruction alone; Indeed and WIN Learning both feature it for building verbal precision and trust at once. Charades and Guess the Emotion round out the non-verbal group — useful for reading faces in a meeting and for noticing what your own posture broadcasts on a video call. One caveat the roundups skip: these are the least portable activities here, needing space, props, and a willing group. Keep them for the day your team schedules something. ## Turning an activity into a habit that shows up at work Doing one of these once is a pleasant fifteen minutes with no effect on Monday. Three things make the difference. Pick a behavior, not an activity. Decide whether your problem is being unclear, not listening, never getting the floor, or avoiding the conversation entirely — then run the drill that isolates it three or four times over two weeks. Rotating through novelty is what the 43-game lists quietly encourage, and it is why people finish a workshop entertained and unchanged. Name the transfer moment before you practice: decide which real situation this week is where you will use it — the Thursday stand-up, the handover email, the colleague who cuts you off. Then judge it by what changes there. None of the top sources for these activities cites a controlled study showing durable improvement at work — the case for them is mechanical rather than statistical, which is a good reason to trust your own next meeting over the game's reputation. That is a low bar, and you can clear it this week. The one thing this list cannot do is tell you which behavior is costing you. Left to ourselves, most of us practice what we are already comfortable with, which is why the drilling feels pleasant and nothing improves. If you are not certain where the gap sits, it is worth [pinpointing the weak behavior first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than committing a month to the wrong exercise. ## The skills behind a conversation that goes well Look at what the eight drills have in common and they stop being games. Each isolates a behavior that carries over into work you already do — and behavior is the operative word, because none of this depends on being naturally outgoing. **Communication** is the obvious one, and the drills map onto its parts with unusual precision: listening well enough to summarize, being brief, saying the main point first, adapting to whoever is receiving it rather than to your own habits. The harder parts sit at the same level — disagreeing without damage, giving feedback, apologizing properly, staying steady when someone is angry. These are components you practice individually, not a general talent you either have or lack. **Building Confidence** is what makes the practice work at all. You drill in a low-stakes setting precisely because the real one feels too exposed, and that is the correct order: competence first, then the feeling. It works by breaking something large into steps you can complete, practicing at each level before moving up, and deciding in advance exactly when and where you will act rather than waiting to feel ready. Nobody feels ready. **Teamwork** enters because you will be practicing with colleagues, and the drills land on its territory anyway — disagreeing about the drawing without making it personal, showing up for the second session after you said you would, telling a partner honestly that their description was unusable. Proposing one as a shared ten-minute habit also removes the awkwardness of asking someone to rehearse with you. None of the three sits alone, and communication may not even be the skill costing you most — worth knowing before committing a month of practice to it. The free Job Skills Test covers **all twelve work skills** this framework treats as learnable, so you can see [where communication actually ranks](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) against everything else, and anything it surfaces is something you can close. ## What this looks like a month from now Some of this probably describes how you already work — repeating a brief back before you start on it, asking one more question before you answer. Those are the same moves the drills isolate, without a name attached. Nothing here asks you to become a different sort of person. The behaviors are learnable in the ordinary sense: you run them, they get easier, and the version of you that speaks up on Thursday is still recognizably you. That matters more as you go, not less — the further in you get, the more of your work happens through other people rather than at your own desk. And you have already done the part most people skip. You went looking for something to practice instead of another article explaining why communication matters, which is the difference between knowing about this and changing it. ## Start with the behavior that will move the most You have the drills. The only open question is which one to start with. The **free** Job Skills Test is a seven-minute self-assessment of your work skills: you answer a set of questions and see immediately where you stand across all twelve, including the ones behind the conversations you have been putting off. Take it, pick the single lowest-scoring behavior you can practice with one colleague, and run one activity from this list against it for a week. Then look at your results again and see what moved. **Take the skills test** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear the moment you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Eight communication activities you can actually run at work, what behavior each one trains, and how to turn a five-minute exercise into a real habit. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Confidence, Teamwork. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/activities-to-improve-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Eight communication activities you can actually run at work, what behavior each one trains, and how to turn a five-minute exercise into a real habit." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.