How good of a leader are you?
Try building a lego sports car with your 3 and 5 year old kids to find out
If you want to see how much (or little) patience you have I would recommend trying to build some legos with young kids and see how you do. In the ever failing quest to keep the kids away from tv, we’ve hit on a great, but challenging new activity, building lego sports cars. Legos are wonderful toys, if you’re old or young, chances are you have taken some little plastic blocks and built something wonderfully creative and/or built a beautiful set that the genius designers have imagined up. Lego sets also contain wonderful instructions on how to put the sets together. As an engineer, I love them and am so excited my kids love building them as well.
I also pride myself on being a great leader who is empowering my people, not micro-managing and setting the right expectations so they can grow in the ways that are meaningful to them. Now, let’s see those skills put to the test. Can I empower my five year old son and three year old daughter to work together and build the Koenigsegg sports car? Will everything go up in flames and will this end in a fight where we lose pieces? Let’s find out!
To compare this to software engineering, we’ve got a built in product designer (thank you lego for the refined instructions aka wireframes!) and product manager who have given us a clear vision for what we need to do (build the car). In my role as engineering manager for this project, I need to help facilitate both kids working together in the somewhat difficult tensile task of putting all these small pieces together and their attention span in it enough that they see progress and don’t get bored so it’s just me building the car!
As we get into it, we have our first clear roadblock, both kids want to build and my son thinks it’s his car, which does not go over well with his younger sister. I need to think fast and an idea comes from a tried and true software development practice, one kid will “refine the user story”, finding new pieces to put together from the page of instructions for the other one to build! We start with my daughter gathering all the pieces for page 1 and needing to help her as the junior engineer on the project along with gathering them and then coaching her older brother on patience and following the instructions (the high fidelity design) on putting them together. We continue this process back and forth between the two of them for “refining the user story and building the feature” and I am having to be a little more interventionist with my “QA and direction” than I’d like, but we get really humming and the car is coming together. Unfortunately, all does not stay humming as the little one gets a little bored and starts playing with pieces and deciding she’s not close enough to the action and needs to sit on my lap. The older one pulls a tried and true this is my baby and you can’t touch it (love those engineers who build a feature, start up building a new application or service and it’s suddenly theirs) with the car. Thus we have a meeting of the minds where our daughter moves to a less in the way part of my lap, we reorient that this is a shared car that we are building together and what we want to accomplish tonight is to finish the first part of the sports car.
Around an hour after we started, after our daughter got bored and I help our son finish off the last part of part one, my nerves are a little frayed. But we got there!
So what did I learn in this exercise?
We accomplished the goal… no TV and we built something!!!
I still need to work on my leadership skills. It’s really hard to lead 3 and 5 year olds on a project together. Giving them both a part to do helped them complete the work, but I need to do a better job in creating the environment where they can do more themselves and are less reliant on me.
Stay tuned for part 2 and if I can implement more of my work leadership in lego making…