Building the Leader: A No-Bake Energy Bar Experiential Exercise

This experiential exercise uses a no-bake energy bar as a metaphor for leadership configuration. Students work in small teams to assemble a leader for a specific organizational context by selecting ingredients that represent leadership traits and capabilities. he exercise emphasizes complementary and supplementary trait interactions, contextual fit, and the limits of additive leadership thinking. It is low cost, scalable, and adaptable across undergraduate and graduate management courses.