Les Pardew Of Mystery Escape Room On 5 Tips For A Successful Performance Management Process

An Interview with Rachel Kline

Know what good performance looks like. I remember visiting with a wise manager of one of our programming teams. We had finished a meeting where the team had flatly told him that what he asked them to do could not be done. I was stumped on how we could finish our project. He smiled at me and said not to worry about it. All he had to do was find where someone else had solved the problem they were working on. He told me he just had to find where someone else solved the problem. Their egos would not allow them to fail to find a solution.

Good performance requires clear expectations. When the team knows what good performance looks like they know where they need to go.

Performance management is notoriously difficult to get right, but not impossible. In this series we speak with experts to get their insights into creating an effective performance management system. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Les Pardew.

Les Pardew is a business leader with a background in entertainment product development. He has founded three entertainment companies. He is the current owner of Mystery Escape Room Inc., a leader in location and remote team-building activities. He worked for 30 years creating video games. He entered the live entertainment industry 10 years ago. He has extensive experience managing teams composed of divergent personalities. His real-world experience and extensive research have made him one of the nation’s top experts in managing for innovation.

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Before we drive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I didn’t start out thinking I was going to be a business leader. I graduated college with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. I thought I was going to be an artist. For the first several years of my career, that is what I was, an artist. But something changed when I discovered that I was limited by how much art I could produce. It was the beginning of video games and I found that I was one of the very few artists who knew how to create art for games. I decided to create a studio and train other artists. The studio grew. We hired programmers, musicians, testers, and production managers. I had to learn business from running my own business.

I’m never one to shy away from a challenge when it will benefit my work or my company. I was able to use my artistic skills of observation and analysis. As an artist drawing something well requires more than seeing it. A good artist has to know how it works. That is why artists take anatomy classes in school. You can’t draw a believable hand without knowing how the bones fit together. You have to know how the muscles and tendons work to move the hand. The same thing is true with anything in life. Business is no different. To know how to run a successful business you must know how it works.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Less than a year after we opened in downtown Salt Lake City, I had an experience I will never forget. We had a new room that we’d developed. It had a terrorist hostage theme. We wanted to make the experience fun and unique. One of our game guides would greet them in a ski mask with a toy gun and pretend to be a terrorist. He would tell them to put their hands up and usher them into the room. Before leaving he would set the timer on a fake bomb that we had mounted on the exit door. It was a fun concept, and the customers had a good time with it.

I was sitting in our front lobby having a meeting when my receptionist told me there were police all over the mall. When I looked out the window, I saw police everywhere in full riot gear. They were motioning us to come out of the lobby. I thought there might be a live shooter or something so we came out the front door as quickly as we could. When I was leaving my phone began to ring so I reached to answer it. I heard the police say, “Sir take your hand out of your pocket”. I complied without hesitation. When I got to the side out of the open area, I asked what was going on. They told me that they got a report of an armed robbery at our location.

Someone walking by our place saw our employee ushering a group into our new room. I tried to explain things to the officers. While I was doing that, they sent eight SWAT officers into our place. They had all our employees standing against the wall with their hands up. Our location manager was trying to explain that it wasn’t an armed robbery. They were playing an escape game.

Back then escape rooms were new and none of the police had ever heard of one before.

The officers heard our customers inside the escape room trying to solve the puzzles. They yelled for them to come out with their hands up.

During this point of the game, our guide was no longer playing the part of a terrorist. Instead, he was playing the part of the police trying to help the group escape. The group thought the real police were part of the game, so they yelled back, “We can’t there is a bomb on the door.”

Not the best answer in that situation.

Eventually, we were able to convince the police that it was only theatrics. They were pretty good about it and some even showed some interest in coming back and playing a few of our rooms.

Yet, I must say it was the most guns I’ve ever had pointing at me in my life. I was lucky that day.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I don’t think I would be where I am today without the support of my father and father-in-law. Neither one of them was anything but positive when I changed my major in college to art. I know they were worried, but they had enough trust in me to know that I could be successful in anything I set my heart on. I remember my dad telling me that, “there is always room at the top for the best.” That confidence in me has helped me push through the hard times.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I mentioned a good one but here is something that my in-laws sent us as a gift. On a plaque, they had a quote that stated. “You have done so much for so long with so little that you are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” It made me laugh but there is some real truth hidden in that exaggeration. Sometimes it isn’t the lack of resources that keeps us from success. It is the lack of determination and grit. If a person works and looks hard enough anything is possible.

Thinking back on your own career, what would you tell your younger self?

I would tell myself to not be afraid of starting things on my own. In the beginning, I thought I needed partners to start a company. I feared trying to run a business by myself. Partners can be great, but they can also be a problem. In my case, some of the problems were tough to deal with.

Let’s now move to the central part of our interview. Why is performance management so tricky to get right?

There are so many variables and distractions. It is difficult for managers and team members to be in accord with each other. For one thing, I don’t think most managers or team members know what great performance looks like. We only know what we’ve seen or experienced. If they haven’t seen a great performance in their work, they don’t know what to shoot for.

I go back to art. I thought I knew how to paint when I was going through school. It wasn’t until years later that I had a chance to visit some of the major museums. Places like the Met in New York and the Louvre in Paris. that I saw what a great painting was. You can’t see brush strokes in a print or in a book. It was something I had to see in real life. The same thing is true for a team struggling to have great performance. They must know what a great performance looks like.

Where do you see a lot of organizations go wrong with performance management?

The place where I see the most problems is in the area of creativity and innovation. Most businesses become very good at managing their daily routines. They are good at setting up repetitive tasks and boundaries. They manage their people like well-oiled machines. This is great for a lot of situations, but it is a problem when it comes to innovation or solving a pressing problem.

Based on your experience and success, what are your top 5 tips for a successful performance management process?

1 . First, I will go back to what I said earlier. Know what good performance looks like. I remember visiting with a wise manager of one of our programming teams. We had finished a meeting where the team had flatly told him that what he asked them to do could not be done. I was stumped on how we could finish our project. He smiled at me and said not to worry about it. All he had to do was find where someone else had solved the problem they were working on. He told me he just had to find where someone else solved the problem. Their egos would not allow them to fail to find a solution.

Good performance requires clear expectations. When the team knows what good performance looks like they know where they need to go.

2 . There is no “one size fits all”, when it comes to performance management. Different team objectives need different management. If one team’s goal is to eliminate errors and another team’s goal is to come up with a new product, managing them the same is a mistake. Eliminating errors requires strict discipline and finite standards. Developing a new product requires creativity and inspiration. In one case you are trying to fit everything into a box, in the other you are trying to come up with a new box.

Team management should be adapted to the team’s objective. I see this problem a lot with companies. They try to manage their creative teams the same way they manage their production teams. We studied this for years in a joint project with Carnegie Mellon University. Over a four-year period, we analyzed the performance of more than 5,500 teams in an escape room. We were looking to see how groups of people solve problems together.

What we found was sobering, to say the least. We found a problem with well-defined hierarchical relationships. the more well-defined relationships were, the worse the team performed. Our worst-performing teams were families with a 34% success rate. Families have the most defined hierarchies. Roles like Mom, Dad, children, the oldest child, and the youngest child are clear.

Our next worst-performing group was corporate teams with a 37% success rate. Not very good for teams that are trained to work together.

Groups of friends did much better with a success rate of over 42%.

But our highest performing group were people who met for the first time in our lobby at almost 49% success rate. When strangers can solve problems 12% better than corporate teams something is wrong. That leads me to my next tip.

3 . This might seem a little counterintuitive. Internal competition harms performance more than it helps. In our study One of the primary reasons that teams failed was internal competition. The pressure to never look bad or make a mistake carried over to an escape room game. Often, I talk to teams after they finish one of our adventures. I tell them the solution to a puzzle that they were unable to solve. Someone will say, “I thought that was the answer.” I asked them why they didn’t say anything during the adventure. Their response is almost always, “I was going to, but I didn’t want to bring it up because if I was wrong, I didn’t want to look dumb to my peers.”

When good solutions are left unspoken the whole organization loses out.

One of the best environments for non-competition among team members is inside an escape room. This is because all the team members have a common goal, to get out of the room before time runs out. I always ask teams what the most exciting moments of the escape room experience were. The answer is always when they solve a puzzle or find a solution. My next question is, “Did it matter who solved the puzzle?” The answer is always a resounding No it didn’t. We were happy that it was solved.”

For a moment the celebration was not for who solved the puzzle but that the puzzle was solved. The team was as happy for the success of their colleague as they would have been had it been they who solved it. True team unity comes when team members celebrate the success of any team member as if it were their own. I don’t know of a truer definition of team unity.

I also asked the team if anyone made a mistake in the room. They always laugh and say yes there were plenty of them. When I ask them how they handled mistakes the answer is always the same. We learned from it and moved on. None were blamed for making a mistake. They moved on and tried something else. The mistakes lead the team to the solutions.

4 . As much as possible align team compensation to team goals. Nothing says you want something like putting money behind it. I’ve never been a fan of hourly pay. I think it is the biggest deterrent to team performance there is. The reason I dislike it so much is because it pays for time, not for performance. Time spent on anything is not a very good measurement of how much it is worth.

When we first started our escape room business, we paid our guides by the hour. We didn’t know how else to pay them. As time went on, we discovered a better way. One of the problems we were facing was getting enough good reviews. We wanted to move up the ranking for entertainment centers in our area. It was particularly frustrating for me when employees didn’t ask for reviews. Our competitors started getting more reviews than we were. It was a problem that I struggled with for some time.

At that time the most important place to get reviews was on a website that prohibited offering incentives to customers. About the best we could do is ask them for a review. No matter how many times I tried to train my people to ask for reviews they always forgot. Some of them said they were embarrassed to ask for a review. One day the solution came to me. The rule said I couldn’t give the customer an incentive, but it didn’t say I couldn’t give my employees an incentive.

We started offering our room guides a bonus when they were mentioned in a 5-star review. It changed everything. It overcame their embarrassment about asking for a review. It greatly increased their desire for every customer to have a wonderful time. In a matter of a few months, we had more than double the number of 5-star reviews as our closest competitor. We soon passed all the entertainment centers in our area. to become the highest-ranked establishment in the region.

What I liked about our incentive program was that it didn’t break tip 3 above. We didn’t make it an internal competition. It was open-ended. Getting reviews wasn’t about beating another employee. It was about making the customer happy. We even found guides helping each other and giving advice on how to do their jobs better. Yes, we had to pay for those reviews, but it became part of the employee’s compensation package.

5 . If you see “good performance” say something. This kind of goes along with tip three. In my business performance is everything. All my employees are performers. My company is made up almost entirely of actors. When they are working, they are performing. They are playing a character in a story. They are in costume, and they often speak with an accent. The stage might be small, but it is a stage, nevertheless. When I talk about employee performance, I am talking about it in the most literal sense of the word.

Actors thrive on applause. It is one of the biggest compliments you can give them to give them a standing ovation. I don’t think they are alone in that respect. We all need applause and approval. A little bit of praise for a good performance can go a long way. Respect and gratitude build performance. False gratitude does the opposite. Applause should be given when the performance is good. To give it when the person didn’t do anything to deserve it will seem artificial.

This was a hard lesson for me. I rarely give compliments. It is my nature to expect a certain level of performance. I tend not to say anything unless something is over the top and in my face. I’m learning to be better. This isn’t something I’ve mastered, but I am trying.

Not too long ago we had an abrupt management change at one of our locations. I was left with few options for promotions. I was struggling with one of our employees. He didn’t seem to want to learn the rooms. I wasn’t sure what to do. One day I was at the location and happened to watch him with the customers. He was amazing. A more natural actor, I hadn’t seen. Before I left that day, I complimented him on his work.

As time passed, I continued to compliment him. It had an almost magical effect on his work. Not only did he grow to take on more and more responsibility, but he became one of our most loyal employees. He is now my go-to person at that location.

How do you approach performance management in your organization? Do you tie it to compensation for example?

I try to follow the five tips I gave above as much as I can. I always look to find ways to tie compensation to performance. Sometimes it is tricky because it only works if the tie-in is in alignment with company goals. If there isn’t a good alignment, compensation can become a problem. If there is a way for employees to game the system, it will happen.

We had a situation where we were experimenting with a piece rate system for our employees. We wanted to pay them by the number of rooms completed rather than the time they spent at our location. What happened in the beginning was a learning experience. We allowed them to clock out to run an escape room and then clock back in when they finished. It didn’t work the way we intended. The employees took advantage of the system. They Stayed on the clock as much as possible and clocked out for as little time as possible. This made it so they were getting paid the piece rate for as little time as they could. We ended up paying much more for the work they were doing than we were under the hourly rate alone.

Eventually, we worked out the problems and now all our room guides work at a piece rate. We solved it by not paying an hourly rate and only paying a piece rate. Once we got rid of the conflict everything started working better.

Which tools do you use for your performance management?

We have an online scheduling system. We use it to notify our employees of customer bookings. This allows everyone to see events and stay on the same page. We also track reviews by employees. Employees can see what customers are saying about their performance.

How do you measure and improve your performance management process?

We hold weekly meetings where we do management training. Managers track team performance. They report each week how they feel team members are doing.

We also have designated trainers. trainers monitor performance and are responsible for maintaining a high level of quality. They work with our employees one-on-one. They are performance coaches.

We are very blessed to have some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a private lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this.

The one person that I’d love to have lunch with I can’t because he has passed away. Had I been alive when he was around, I’d love to have met Walt Disney for a private lunch.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I have articles on Medium. https://medium.com/@les-13155

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!