5 ideas for team building with LEGO® bricks

Bricks McGee offer facilitated team building workshops with LEGO bricks throughout the UK, with hire of LEGO bricks, travel costs and seasoned facilitators to lead your event all included in our costs. Alternatively, you can hire LEGO bricks and run your own corporate team building event using our ideas below!

Here are ideas from some of our most popular team building challenges and activities for businesses and organisations of any size. Not sure team building with LEGO bricks is for you? Read why LEGO bricks are great for team building activities here.

1. Classic tower build challenge

LEGO team building workshops - tower building challenge

A classic team building challenge, building the tallest tower from LEGO bricks helps exemplify communication, problem solving and team work all in one. You can introduce rules to make this a more challenging experience for teams, such as using only a single colour of LEGO brick per team, restricting participants to adding one brick at a time clockwise around the table, or rotating the colour teams can build with every 60 seconds.

Teams of 2 – 5 work well with this activity. We recommend leaving around 15 – 30 minutes depending on how many rules you add! Once the time is over, measure towers with a tape measure or using a measurement app on your smartphone.

2. Portraits team building activity

This is great ice breaker activity for groups of colleagues who aren’t very familiar with each other, or who don’t work in the same office or physical space together very often! Use LEGO bricks to build a portrait of yourself, including a prop or item you can use to introduce an interest or hobby you have outside of work.

Once everyone is finished building (we recommend 15 – 20 minutes for this team building activity), take it in turns to showcase your model to others and talk about the item and what it represents to you. For larger groups, this is more streamlined if sharing is restricted to a smaller group around individual tables (eg, 5 – 10 people).

3. Build a large LEGO model as a team

LEGO corporate team building workshops in London and UK

For a more gentle, creative approach to team building with LEGO bricks, try splitting a seasonal item in to components for teams to build. For example, for a summer themed collaborative model build teams could build segments of a palm tree to put together at the end of the time.

The benefit of this type of task is the communication between teams, as each team should agree standards to ensure that the tree trunk – or palm leaves – they are building will fit both the section above and below their own built by other teams.

Seasonal tasks might include building a LEGO snowman, Santa’s sleigh, or a Christmas tree in winter, or a heart for Valentine’s Day. For appeal all year round, try local or global landmarks (eg, Tower Bridge in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco), or a large car, house or spaceship.

We recommend spending around 20 – 30 minutes on this activity type. Once building time is up, invite teams to try and connect their components together! This last step may require 15 – 20 minutes as teams adjust their sections to connect fully.

4. Puzzles and brain teaser activities

If you like a brain teaser, why not introduce LEGO bricks in to a puzzle for your next team building activity?

Splitting your colleagues in to teams, ask each member to build one or more letters of the alphabet (depending on team size – ten or more letters per team is a good start). After allowing suitable building time (5 – 10 minutes), you can then set a range of conundrums for teams:

what’s the longest word you can spell from the letters in your team? (Make this even harder by banning the use of Google and other search engines!)
how many words (with a minimum of three letters) can teams create from the letters they’ve built. Allow 5 – 10 minutes for this task.

This can be adapted for maths-based puzzles too – build LEGO versions of the numbers themselves (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), or for more of a challenge, build towers to represent numbers (i.e., a tower 5 bricks tall represents 5).

5. Storytelling activities for team building events

LEGO bricks are a great way to create a story telling activity for your team building event. Split your colleagues in to teams of 4 – 8, and task each with building a puppet to use:

a self portrait can involve colleagues in the story to be told – a great way to be inclusive
a famous character from films, books, TV shows or computer games – allow them to add one superpower to be used in the story

Once the characters are built, introduce a scenario to stimulate teams creating a short scene together. Naming a place – a desert island surrounded by sharks, a fairytale castle, a mysterious forest – and a recent event such as a natural disaster or the first human on Mars – is a great way to ignite creativity. You can round off the event by asking each team to present their short play.

Build your own team building event

Don’t see any activities you think will work for your team? Contact Bricks McGee about our bespoke activity packages for team building experiences in the UK – we’ve been building events since 2012 and are happy to lend our expertise.

Download our team building ideas PDF

Our PDF of team building ideas with LEGO bricks contains ideas for activities for teams from 5 – 250.

Download our team building ideas PDF »