Building with LEGOs and Great Teams

I love LEGOs. When I was a kid, I couldn’t stop building. Really, who doesn’t love building awesome things? Just in the middle of my walk down LEGO memory lane, I discovered some new ideas about building with my team.

This isn’t a post about how to build a great team. It’s all about building with great teams. LEGO’s mission statement is to “Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow”. Your job as a manager is no different.

As you build things, your focus typically evolves. My own process building with LEGOs followed 4 unique stages. Here are my 4 stages and how they connect to my team. Maybe they’ll help you the next time you are inspiring and developing your builders of tomorrow.

Stage 1: Follow the Directions
For my first LEGO castle, I followed the directions. It was all about the “step by step” and obeying process. Nobody wants to screw up their new LEGO castle. When I first started managing my web team, it was very similar. We had set ways of doing things and I focused on helping in day to day assignments. It was pretty cut and dry and the pieces didn’t fall apart too much. As with most kids and LEGOs, directions fly out the window pretty quick.

Stage 2: Focus on the Product
I remember building my first castle and thinking, “Now what, I only have so many pieces?” Move a piece around here or there and your castle begins to look like the Gates of Mordor and you, the Lord of the Rings. My team was no different. We focused on delivery of great products and moving around the pieces to develop the castles. In this stage, your goals change and you develop takeover strategies for all the castles in the neighborhood. Why not? It’s all about building great castles.

Stage 3: Connecting the Sets
“Mom, can I get that new LEGO set?” Kids get bored quick. A year later you have the entire Medieval LEGO set in your living room complete with drawbridges and chariots. You begin to connect product sets together in new ways to develop stories that take you deep inside Sherwood Forest. After four years as a manager of a web team, my team evolved again and began snapping “sets” together in ways that told a story to our clients. Product development, usability testing, web analytics, customer satisfaction, social media consulting. It’s amazing what’s possible when you think beyond the castle walls.

Stage 4: The Building Blocks
At some point in your LEGO building adventures as a kid, your mom mixes all the pieces together in a gigantic Rubbermaid container. This is when the magic happens. No longer are you confined by directions, castles or the Medieval collection. You concentrate on creativity and the individual blocks that make building great things inherently fun. Perhaps this is also where building with teams becomes fun.

Our teams get handed mission statements, corporate targets, product objectives and individual goals. Inevitably, everything gets mixed and jumbled together. Want some advice? Stop trying to reorganize the corporate Rubbermaid container and focus on the building blocks of your business. Start by asking a simple question.

What does success look like and how do I build this with my team?

If I was building with LEGOs, I’d say, “Build one kickass LEGO fortress.” Or for my team, “Deliver great content.”

What’s next? That’s up to you. Just remember, building with LEGOs and with teams is supposed to be fun and inspiring. When we focus on the important pieces and think outside the LEGO “box”, teams have a way of connecting things together to form something even more amazing.

Now, go build some LEGOs with your team.