IMD Annual Report 2019

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Inspired by very few design principles, the group embarked on the journey:

Kehlet reflected that the safe space of the Leadership Playground mirrored the environment fostered by IMD for the LEGO Group’s leadership and executive development working groups.

• No cookbook solutions: avoid the prescriptive and embrace the inspirational • Leadership is an act and for everyone, it is not a title or a single role • Solutions must be created by the LEGO Group, for the LEGO Group Aspart of thisprocess, theworkinggroupconducted interviews with more than 175 employees to gather ideas for its new leadership model. Armed with this insight and following further close collaboration with IMD, the concept of the ‘Leadership Playground’ was born - a model that, according to Kehlet, is designed to “create the space so that everybody feels energized every day.” Embracing a bottom-up approach, the LEGO Group recruited more than 1,100 playground builders from all areas and all levels of the company. This enabled each of its teams around the world to assign aPlaygroundBuilder to bring the Leadership Playground to life. These builders generate and implement “missions” from an inspirational library to improve how people work and connect, and to fully engage everyone within the organization in leadership. LEGO-brick ‘campfires’ are being installed in larger offices to encourage people from all walks of company life to meet and share ideas on topics such as diversity and inclusion. Using a similar co-creation methodology with IMD, and a smaller group of five senior leaders, the LEGO Group also designed its own ongoing executive development program, which was rolled out in June 2019.

“IMD enabled them to take concrete steps to increase their impact for the LEGO Group,” he said.

“We were expecting to find a new and progressive way of approaching leadership, and IMD made that happen. IMD took us on a journey that we could not have taken alone.” The impact of this new approach to leadership has been tangible, Kehlet said, from helping to improve the quality of engagement and conversations within and between teams to boosting morale throughout the organization. “We’ve reached the highest level of motivation and satisfaction as a company through time, and we have seen a very significant increase in 2019. This can only happen with a motivated and engaged workforce that embraces strong leadership at all levels – and the roll out of the Leadership Playground has been part of creating this space,” he said, emphasising that the engagement with IMD for many of the people (himself included) working with the initiative had been the best learning journey they had ever experienced.