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LEGO Group believes that any employee can be a leader. It just takes training. To that end, the toy company has developed a leadership development model called the “Leadership Playground.” It is both a framework and a philosophy that enables workers at all levels to foster leadership throughout the company.
LEGO employees are deputized as “playground builders” to help facilitate organizational culture and problem-solving by channeling the spirit of play in a psychologically safe environment. At the most basic level, it looks like employees gathering around office campfires built out of LEGO bricks to have tough conversations and engage in decision-making play with the guidance of “playground builders.” It’s an unconventional approach, but LEGO’s chief people officer Loren Shuster says it has increased employee engagement since its 2018 launch and, indirectly, padded the bottom line.
“The top-line has grown quite dramatically—double-digit growth every year since 2020,” he says. “Metrics like our people pulse, which is related to motivation and satisfaction in the organization, is at an all-time high, growing from 76 in 2017 to 83.”
Shuster spoke with Fortune about the impetus for the new leadership model and how LEGO’s team members designed it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fortune: What inspired the creation of the leadership playground?
Loren Shuster: In 2016 and 2017, the LEGO Group experienced a growth stall-out. It wasn’t a financial crisis; the company was still financially very sound, with operating margins above 25%, but our growth stalled after many years of strong growth. We also had a change in CEO, and our current CEO Niels Christiansen came in 2017. As an executive leadership team, we needed a strategy to stabilize the business and get ourselves back into a growth trajectory.
Where did the leadership development strategy come into play?
We had to figure out what we wanted to achieve, so we asked ourselves about the kind of culture and leadership we needed to deliver on our ambitious agenda. I was tasked with answering that question. I took a step back and looked at all the existing articulations of leadership within the LEGO Group. We found almost 30 different descriptors of leadership within LEGO. If you just joined and you asked what it means to be a leader at the LEGO Group or what was our leadership culture, it was confusing to answer.
We went for a relatively innovative approach. We decided not to work with consultants or define this as an executive leadership team. Rather, we put together a working group of colleagues from all different backgrounds and functions and tried to maximize the diversity of this group. We basically said, ‘Who better to tell us what kind of leadership culture we need for the future than our employees?’
How would you describe the team’s work in developing the leadership model?
Our team wanted something uniquely LEGO—something where you couldn’t just erase the LEGO name and put it on another company, which you often get with different leadership models and values. It had to be an intrinsically LEGO Group-related and inspirational model.
Many of us within organizations operate on multiple teams. Sometimes we’ll be the leader of a formal team, and other times we’re just a project member, so we wanted the team to think about the qualities of leadership that everyone has an opportunity to demonstrate, regardless of their role in a traditional hierarchy. We came up with a new definition for leadership: to energize everybody daily. And then, we came up with the concept of a playground as a metaphor. The playground is a metaphor for the notion of creating psychological safety.
So what does the leadership playground look like in practice?
The leadership playground is where people feel safe to evoke certain behaviors. When you think of kids in a playground, there is a certain safety for them to be curious, brave, and focused—those are the playground’s three leadership behaviors. All of them are super important for us in terms of how we expect people to lead at the LEGO Group.
We got 1,200 employee volunteers to be “playground builders,” and we took them off-site for about three days for an intro to the program. We train them with facilitation skills and use rituals, missions, and campfires. We have big campfires made of LEGO bricks across our offices where facilitators lead meetings.
When you call a campfire meeting, whether virtually or in the office, it’s a signal that this is a psychologically safe place because it’s within the playground architecture. Everyone can be curious and brave and focus on that discussion. They’re not going to be held to account, and it’s a place of common sense making for the group. These happen all over the organization about various topics, from D&I issues to the war in Ukraine.
By giving employees ownership for shaping the leadership culture, you get a much higher level of empowerment and a sense of accountability. Employees need to feel confident that they have the leadership qualities and the backing of the organization to make decisions without constantly looking for someone else to provide guidance.
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Amber Burton
amber.burton@fortune.com
@amberbburton
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