Lessons from Legos…

I spent a great deal of my vacation time building legos with my family and wanted to share some valuable lessons I am taking back to work this new year..

Backstory on legos:

We bought a lot of legos over the years and in the process we accumulated more than 20000 bricks/pieces. Our plan was to rebuild some of our favorite sets, the only problem we had was all the pieces ended up mixed in one large pile. Finding a piece in a pile of 20k pieces? Quite a challenge and we were up for it..

Below are some of my takeaways which are very valuable for me and I hope it does for you as well..

#1 Communication & Tagging

While working together as a team to search for specific lego bricks, it was very important for us to come up with an identifier/tag for every lego brick. The identifier would dictate the attributes of the lego piece — for example: Green2by2Brick or Yellow1by2Flat. This helped us communicate well amongst ourselves and was more efficient.

My takeaways:

-On communications: This is a great lesson to ensure the communication protocols are very clear within the teams — be it KPI’s, tasks, performance reviews, anything and everything. When we know exactly what is needed, it is much more efficient.

-Tagging: Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your teammates, you will find more opportunities to make it a more cohesive ecosystem where we can help each other grow.

#2 Diversity

The beauty of legos is the diversity (size, shape and colors) and what can be achieved together with them. While trying to find an effective way to search for a lego brick, I tried an approach by grouping the legos by color and it was a terrible idea. It was very difficult to find a brick in a pile of bricks all of the same color.

My takeaway:

• Diversity is what makes us strong, makes everyone stand out in unique ways. Diverse teams have more to offer.

#3 Focus

Another fail was trying to search for multiple lego bricks at the same time. While it seemed efficient, it was not in practice. Sometime the piece is sitting right in front of us, but we are not able to notice it as we have multiple things to search for.

My takeaway:

• Multitasking sound good on paper, in reality it does not help gather the right attention to things.

#4 Every brick is important

No matter the size or shape or color, every brick is equally important for the role it plays to complete a set.

My takeaway:

• Appreciate what every teammate brings to the table, everyone is important. There will be days when all we need is that one person to complete the task.