“I can’t find the right hair.”
"Hey, pass me that cape."
"Can I get the sword?"
And along with these quotes is a familiar rattle, the sound of thousands of plastic LEGO pieces being rifled through, people looking for just the right piece.
Not long ago, we (Megan and I) heard that sound and those quotes coming from nine grown adults. In a conference room. In the middle of a Thursday.
They're a leadership team. Serious people doing serious work that a lot of other people depend on.
And here they were, digging through the LEGO bins saying things like, "Any clowns in the bin?" "Pass me some heads!"
Then one of the better jokes came when someone, holding a LEGO person, looked around the table and asked, "Why are we all bald?"
Hearing adults talk with each other like this is priceless, especially when you consider how serious everything else about their week is. It's important, even maybe necessary.
Confession time?
Dropping a box of LEGOs in front of a leadership team can look like a very unserious thing for a facilitator to do. I'm fully aware of that. It's a little scary.
Some people would take one look and say, “Send me the notes (if there even are any), goodbye, I'm out. Going back to real work.”
Credit to this group. We put the bins on the table early, and their first question was, "What are these for?" Then they dug right in. Nine serious people, willing to give it a real shot.
Two self-portraits
One exercise asked everyone to build two LEGO self-portraits: one of who they are at work, and one of who they are at home.
The leader who brought us in, Austin, built the exact same LEGO creation twice. He thought he was “boring” in both places. Serious in both places.
(Sidenote: I played soccer against Austin back in 2007 and 2008, and I hated when he showed up because he was/is that good. "Boring" is not the word I, or anyone else, would have picked.)
Outside of work, it turns out, Austin goes into the woods and flips over rocks to see what he can find. Megan said he is doing ecosystem surveys, he says he just likes to see what’s cool underneath.
Oh, and last week he got bit by a squirrel. He'd been training it for months to eat out of his hand on his deck. (Again - boring?! We think not.)
The whole room lost it, trying to picture this happening to their boss.
It was easy then to talk him out of his own self-description.
One leader built the time they learned to fly a plane in New Orleans. Another built a car to show they love to take road trips. We later found out that there was someone who BUILDS cars, and can even inspect them. Those two definitely talked over lunch.
A couple people made themselves into knights, as protectors of their homefront. One made themselves a fireman, always putting out fires.
It was a pretty small group, so I got to draw every single one of their creations. With 60 people, that’s impossible. Here, everybody got to see themselves on the sheet, and that goes a long way.
Then one of them told the room, “If my family knew me at work, they’d be shocked.”
It also worked in reverse, because the team could start to see how people saw themselves when not at work. It’s an important distinction.
Teams like this cover so much in a day. Things like contracts, emergency response, safety, the mechanical and electrical work keeping everything running.
What they almost never get? Time set aside getting to know each other. Spend years in an office with someone and you might only ever meet the work version.
But plop a bin of LEGOs down in front of them for a session, and you find out who flies planes, who spends weekends on a motorcycle, who flips rocks in the woods.
Oh, and it helps with the tough conversations, too. Because LEGOs just take a little bit of the seriousness out of a situation. It grounds people, breaks the ice, and lets a little humor in when things get tense.
A box of LEGOs should not work in a room like that…but it does, and we watched it happen.
At work, we’re so often focused on the deliverable, so focused on the work, that we don’t leave room for that side of things.
The science behind adult play is really good, and we weren’t messing around when we brought the bins. We knew exactly what we were doing.
When did we get so serious, so driven, so stressed, so cut off from that side of ourselves?
If somebody slid a bin of LEGOs across the table to you tomorrow, would your two self-portraits match?
Would you know how your coworkers would build their own versions?
And would you ask for the cape?
Grateful you are here,
Wade
PS - Want to see how this exercise and others would work for your team? Let’s talk. Reply here with “Wade - It’s LEGO time”
