3 Keys to Building a Culture of Teamwork (from an odd business)

This blog was written by Nick Madden of Red Door Escape Room for the Small Giants Community blog. To learn more about Red Door Escape Room, a company offering fully-immersive escape room experiences and entertainment, click here. 

It’s been an odd thing being the CEO of an escape room company for the last 10 years. 

On the surface, it seems super niche: locking teams of people in themed rooms for an hour and asking them to pay us to try and escape. But then again, at one point, many of the markets we take for granted today were once considered “niche.” Roadside convenience stores like Stuckey’s are one great example, and delivery pizza is another. 

After spending years studying and learning from great mentors, I’ve come to realize that the business I’m in has a similar set of best practices, not just compared to retail chains, but in relation to all business focused on consumer services. In this short article, I’m going to unpack three of these best practices, specifically in the vein of building a culture of teamwork, with hope that this can level-up your operating system. 

Teamwork takes a “Game Master” 

Teamwork doesn't happen naturally; it takes a leader to set the rules of the game.

When we had 1 location and 20 employees in total, teamwork happened naturally with the right people in the room. I was wrong. Teamwork is more delicate than I gave it credit for, and I learned that the hard way. 

To paint the picture, we now operate 18 locations coast to coast with close to 400 team members. When we first started, I was serving as the General Manager and I was often in the "control room" with our game masters serving our guests. I'm naturally high energy, so as an owner, I would celebrate BIG every time a team member would get a review. High fives, good music, public compliments, this was my style. 

Insert second store, and I was “in the room” half as often. I did what any manager would do: I delegated. Or so I thought. I would ask our General Managers to be in charge of the high energy… I'll let you connect the dots. Fast-forward three years, and our once high-energy experience was declining. Luckily, there was a great manager at one of our stores. 

This manager had created rules to the game: he made a physical “key players” board to celebrate the wins. This board was grand, front and center and teammates would get keys for all sorts of things: tips, reviews, and personal shoutouts from guests. Every time a key was earned, the team would see it and celebrate. His team was killing it on the energy front, and it was showing up in the reviews and the revenue. 

I realized then that it was not enough to model the behavior or even to delegate outcomes. We needed to design a game, something simple with a scoreboard always present, in order for our team to keep the high energy. Now, we have players' boards at every location, gathering thousands of reviews, giving out thousands of rewards, and delighting tens of thousands of guests every month. It took time to design the game and bring it to life, but it has created a culture of teamwork that is paying off more than I will ever know. 

Defining the teams within your company is an ongoing process. 

One of my mentors was on the executive team that built Michael’s Arts and Crafts. One of the most impactful pieces of advice he gave me was to create a latticed, rather than a hierarchical, org chart. By this, he meant that we should have teams living within the larger team. Put differently, no manager should operate on an island; everyone needs a teammate. 

I saw the fruits of his advice at Red Door when expanding past our 12th store. We had Area Managers in place to oversee our General Managers, but the problem was that our general managers often felt like they lived on an island at their store. “Corporate” would roll out new initiatives or push competitions during peak times of the year, and many of our GM’s would struggle and get burned out. We were stuck in this cycle until we introduced a position that was explicitly made to be a teammate for our general managers. We called this position a Corporate Trainer, and they roamed between stores supporting our GM’s like a good teammate. 

We now have five of these positions within our company, and they are some of the most valuable players on our team. Early on, we worked hard and were very clear that this position was not a manager but truly a teammate for our GMs. It was like a tutor, not the teacher, there to help any GM who was struggling. We've extended this “team of teams” approach throughout our company, and it's been highly impactful.

Leading remotely requires more explicit communication to foster a culture of teamwork. 

One of the hot topics of today is how to lead remote teams. There are AI hacks, advanced project management softwares, and Harvard Business School case studies that are all geared toward solving this challenge. My experience has been that when leading a remote team, you, as the leader, need to be super explicit about your expectations regarding communication. 

When we worked in the same offices, we could see the behaviors happening around us. It was obvious when most people started their workday when teams would meet, and how 1:1 conversations should be held. As humans, we are hardwired to imitate each other and very much learn by example. Much of this disappears in a remote working environment when the only times we see each other are via a computer screen. As the leader, you need to design and share exactly what great communication looks like throughout your organization and measure that communication to ensure that it is happening. We have a saying at Red Door: if it’s not in writing, it’s not real. Apply this to your communication practices - if they aren’t in writing, there's a good chance they aren’t happening. 

A few clear examples from our company: 

• Every manager has at least one bi-weekly 1:1 with each DR for a minimum of 30 minutes. We use a common template that makes space for both parties to bring issues to the forefront and have “temp checks” regularly
• Every department sends a simple monthly summary of what went well and what challenges they faced to the leadership team so that folks across departments can stay informed
• Every month, all of our store teams gather to celebrate the wins from the last month and prep for the initiatives in the coming month. 
  
  

These practices may seem simple, but with a young and remote workforce, we've needed to be relentless about ensuring that these are done well and consistently to foster our culture of teamwork.

I hope that these tips have sparked at least one thought on how you might double down on teamwork with your organization. At Red Door, we are on a mission to deepen relationships between people, and that first starts on our teams. 

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