Leadership impact
Christiansen‘s tenure at Lego has been impressive thus far. Below are 4 case studies to demonstrate the lasting impact of his leadership on the Lego company.
Retail Expansion
Despite the ease at which customers can buy Lego toys online, retail locations remain an important part of Christiansen’s strategy towards increasing brand awareness and sales. Since stepping into the CEO role, Christiansen has focused on enriching the retail location experience. Through his leadership, Lego has mastered the “retail theatre” experience, with many of its storefronts containing life-size models and figurines as well as hands-on play stations where children and adults can tinker with bricks (Tansel, 2021). During a 2020 interview, Christiansen told BBC that he “wanted people to get their hands on bricks and be a part of the brand.” Christiansen knows that customers visit brick-and-mortar stores in search of an entertaining and interactive brand experience (Harris, 2020). And enjoyable shop experiences lead to more purchases.
Christiansen continues to expand Lego’s retail locations across the globe despite the pandemic, opening 134 new retail locations in 2020 alone. Recently, Christiansen has pushed Lego to expand into the Chinese market, which presents Lego with a huge opportunity for growth. He knows that Lego will need to work hard to promote their brand in China, given its relatively unfamiliar to many consumers there. As Christensen explains in a 2020 interview, “I believe brand awareness in large cities such as Beijing or Shanghai is high, almost matching Europe, but our research has established that smaller cities and rural areas are less familiar with LEGO so brand stores are more vital in those regions”(Interview with Niels B. Christiansen, CEO of The LEGO Group, 2019).
Unlike in the United States, many adults in China did not grow up playing with LEGO so it is less of a household name. And the lack of retail locations means fewer opportunities for children in China to interact with the brand hands-on. To meet those challenges, Christiansen opened 91 stores in China in 2020 and hopes to expand that number to 300 by the end of 2021 (Whitten, 2021). Through his efforts, Lego brand recognition is starting to take shape in China.
Digital Transformation
With more and more children spending time on tablet computers and smartphones, Lego recognized the need to modernize its toys for the digital age. Lego needed a CEO with demonstrated experience leading digital transformation efforts. Christiansen was the perfect fit. While CEO of Danfoss, Christiansen transformed the traditional industrial company into a technology leader. He invested in R&D and digital capabilities, launched new products that linked to GPS and smartphones, grew sales through acquisitions, and moved the company’s technology to a single consolidated platform to provide more seamless and connected services to its customers (Chaudhuri, 2017). This was exactly the type of innovation that Lego needed for their own brand.
To be successful at Lego, Christiansen must push for innovative product lines to create growth without straying too far from the traditional bricks at the core of who they are. His challenge is to make sure the organization has the right tools to incorporate digital as another form of play: “The biggest difficulty is the mindset you go in with. If you had asked people back when they had horses what they wanted, they wanted faster horses, not cars. So sometimes these changes need to be driven by the company being visionary” (Milne, 2018). Christiansen does not see digital as replacing but rather enhancing the traditional brick. His goal is to layer digital on top of their modular toys to create a seamless and blended experience for children. In doing so, Christiansen believes that Lego can better respond to competition from games like Minecraft and Fortnite (Milne, 2018). And to support these digitalization change efforts in 2021, Christiansen committed to hiring “several hundred” employees with computer game development and website experience to its roster (Hotten, 2021).
Lego’s recently developed Duplo train is evidence of Christiansen’s new philosophy — it is a train designed for toddlers that can be pushed forward and backward on the track but also controlled through the flick on a mobile device (Milne, 2018). The mobile app includes mini-games and ways to interact with the train’s conductor. The train is the perfect blend between digital and physical. Other items developed under Christiansen’s influence were “Lego Boost”, which allows children to code their own lego creations on a mobile device, and “Lego AR Studio”, which is an app that allows children to augment reality with “digital” lego sets (Hall 2019).
When the pandemic hit, Christiansen still found ways to enhance their digital presence. Recognizing that 90% of school-age children were outside of their normal learning environment, Christiansen instructed the company to post play ideas and building suggestions online. As a result, visitors to the lego.com website doubled to 100 million in the first half of 2020 as children and their parents frequented the site to seek inspiration (Handley, 2020). As Christiansen explains, “It was not about trying to sell more. At the center of it is really creative ideas of what to build” (Shapiro, 2020). The result was a booming online community where lego builders can collaborate by sharing images of what they have built and seek inspiration from other builders for what to build next. In fact, someone uploads a new lego creation to the digital platform every 2.77 seconds! (Hotten, 2021)
Although he has built a solid foundation towards digitalization, Christiansen acknowledges that Lego has a long road ahead of them. Christiansen explains that although Lego has been investing quite a lot in long-term initiatives to diversify their products and add more technology, they are still in the beginning stages. “ It is really about this entire digital ecosystem and creating that future. And that’s a long-term journey, that’s a 10-year journey” (Handley, 2020). But, Christiansen recognizes the importance of having an agile and responsive business and continues to push the company to more rapid innovation (Hotten, 2021).
Sustainability
Christiansen is committed to building a better world for future generations and has engaged Lego in many initiatives to help protect the environment and become a more sustainable company. Through Christiansen’s leadership, Lego pledged over 400 million dollars to accelerate its sustainability and social responsibility efforts in 2021 (The Lego Group, 2020b). Christiansen said: “We cannot lose sight of the fundamental challenges facing future generations. It’s critical we take urgent action now to care for the planet and future generations. As a company who looks to children as our role models, we are inspired by the millions of kids who have called for more urgent action on climate change. We believe they should have access to opportunities to develop the skills necessary to create a sustainable future. We will step up our efforts to use our resources, networks, expertise and platforms to make a positive difference” (The Lego Group, 2020b).
To meet this challenge, Christiansen hopes to make all of its products sustainable by 2030 (The Lego Group, 2020b). As a big leap forward, Christiansen is investing in more sustainable plastics from which to manufacture its bricks. And given that Lego produces over 100 billion bricks per year, this has monumental potential (Shapiro, 2020). To be fully sustainable, the material must be responsibly produced using renewable or recycled resources, generating little or no waste, and be fully recyclable at the end of its life (Christiansen, 2021b). This is a complicated task. The material must be strong enough to survive rigorous play but precise enough to connect to lego pieces manufactured years before. It must have the longevity to survive being passed down from generations of parents to their children, as is the lego tradition, but cannot linger in landfills for hundreds of years. To tackle this complicated task, Christiansen has dedicated over 150 employees to finding sustainable solutions. To date, they have tested over 250 different variations of materials to find a prototype that will also meet their quality, safety, and play requirements (Christiansen, 2021b). They are now in the final stages of testing a product derived from sugar cane!
Additionally, Christiansen plans to transition the company to 100% ecological packaging by 2025. “At the LEGO Group, we are committed to making a positive impact on the world our children will inherit,” Christiansen states. “We admire children’s intuitive approach towards play and learning, and we in turn want to inspire them to take care of their society and environment. In our work, we strive to safeguard the natural resources that they will inherit and minimize our environmental impact” (Hall, 2019).
Christiansen has already directed Lego to replace the plastic bags in all 500 retail locations with paper bags made from 100% recycled materials (Sustainable Packaging, n.d.). In addition, 75% of the cardboard used to make their boxes are recycled materials. And after Christiansen said he received feedback from children to discontinue single-use plastic bags in their packaging, he has escalated efforts to test recycled paper bags as a replacement. “We have received many letters from children about the environment asking us to remove single-use plastic packaging,” Christiansen says. “We have been exploring alternatives for some time and the passion and ideas from children inspired us to begin to make the change” (My Modern Met, 2020). Through Christiansen’s vocal and sincere efforts, Lego is making good progress towards sustainability to help protect future generations.
First Ever LEGO Brick Made From Recycled Plastic Bottles
The LEGO Groups aims the packaging to be sustainable by 2025
Company Culture
Lastly, Christiansen creates an environment where his employees are empowered and inspired to be creative, brave, and focused. The most powerful example of this is the Lego “Leadership Playground”.
When Christiansen arrived at Lego, the company was struggling financially. Managers blamed an overly complex organization with too many overlapping jobs and poor product development (Milne, 2018). Others blamed its bloated and complex leadership model, which made it difficult for new and existing employees to thrive.
Christiansen wanted to foster better collaborations and promote individual autonomy (The Lego Group, 2019a). He also wanted a company culture where employees could innovate freely without being micromanaged or thwarted by bureaucracy. To tackle these issues, Christiansen chartered a working group of employees to help transform their company culture. He tasked them with simplifying and renewing Lego’s leadership philosophy to create a more empowered, accountable, and effective organization. After several months of surveying colleagues and analyzing those results against the existing leadership framework, this working group of employees proposed a new model for the Lego brand called the “Leadership Playground.” It would redefine how employees would lead at Lego.
The program is best summarized by its tagline: Create the space so that everybody feels energized every day (The Lego Group, 2020a). The program also identified three critical leadership and employee behaviors – curiosity, focus, and bravery. These behaviors are now a focal point when recruiting new employees to the company. Employees can also volunteer to become ‘Playground Builders’ to help their teams learn the concepts and explore the new behaviors through ‘campfire discussions’ or ’missions’. As Christiansen explains, the “leadership playground” creates a safe space for exploration but with boundaries, much like a playground would (The Lego Group, 2019a). It is a wonderful demonstration of how Christiansen inspires creativity, collaboration, and innovation within his workforce.
