What IKEA Furniture Does to Your Brain

If you’ve built a few pieces of IKEA furniture in your time, you might be amused by this quote from company founder Ingvar Kamprad, posted on their website: “IKEA[*] is not the work of one person alone. It is the result of many minds and many souls working together through many years of joy and hard work.” Whether or not Kamprad intended it this way, you could count yourself among those many minds and many souls.

As well as the lower costs of flat-pack furniture, there’s psychological value to building your own furniture (even if it is from a box, with instructions). Researchers have named it “the IKEA Effect“, in which we add value to things we’ve had a part in making. So why does this happen?

In building something – even from instructions – we spend time hands-on with each piece, getting to know the physical sensations of each object – the feel, the sight, the sound, the smell. During the building process, you also get a deeper understanding of the how the pieces connect; the strengths, the weaknesses. And in completing the build, your brain releases dopamine, creating an emotional attachment that stems from a sense of accomplishment and personal investment. Even when the process isn’t easy – trying to decipher confusing, textless manuals, or not finding the right kind of screws – this frustration can lead to an intensified feeling of competence and pride.

The same can be true in the workplace, of course. When an employee has autonomy to work on a project of their own design – even with some big-picture guidance from their manager – they experience the same psychological results as when building furniture, including when things get frustrating and they learn for themselves how to solve the problems that arise.

But managers often unintentionally rob their direct reports of such results. Most managers are solution-oriented people who have been rewarded throughout their career for their ability to problem solve, so it comes naturally to want to do that for the people they manage. But that is like building their IKEA furniture for them; the manager might feel that they’re doing something good (and they get the dopamine rush from solving the problem), but they’re not allowing their direct report to have those experiences, and the growth and development that comes along with them.

So if you’re a manager – or someone whose manager solves your problems for you – what could you try this week?

This Week’s Tips:

• For managers: Notice your inclinations when a direct report brings a problem to you. Do you get into solutions? Work instead to ask open-ended questions of your direct report: For example, “What do you think might be a good course of action here?” Use your questions to equip and empower the direct report. If this is something you already do, expand further to allow them more autonomy in creating and running projects that meet your organization vision and mission.

• To use with your manager: If your manager isn’t giving you as much autonomy as you’d like, use check-in times to start to manage up. When problems or questions about ongoing projects arise, come in with three different options for addressing it, including pros and cons of each, and then make your proposal for the course of action that you would take. You might need to do this a few times for your manager to see that you think through all aspects of issues. When the time is right you could then bring in a proposal for a new project you’d like to tackle; let them know you’d be happy to take the lead on this, with some guidance from them. Be proactive with check-ins and updates, and with sharing challenges and successes along the way.

Try these out this week, and let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear from you.

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* In case you’re wondering, “IKEA” is an acronym – Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd (the family farm where Kamprad was born), and Agunnaryd (Kamprad’s hometown in Småland, southern Sweden). Similarly, and curiously, the other famous Scandinavian customer-built product, LEGO, is also always capitalized, but not an acronym – it’s an abbreviation of the Danish phrase “leg godt,” which translates to “play well”.)