What management strategies does Cole Lindberg use to motivate young amusement park workers?
Cole Lindberg motivates his team of over 100 young employees at Worlds of Fun through a combination of season-long competitive tournaments, theatrical stunts, and high-energy daily rituals. His signature competitions include the Sweet 16 tournament, the Deathmatch tournament, and Toss the Boss — a crowd favorite in which the game station that ranked number one for the day earned the right to throw him into a pond. He supplements these with energetic morning shift meetings, original songs he writes and performs himself, and a rotating cast of fictional characters he embodies during shifts, including a persona called "Phil Bridges."
On the busiest days, Lindberg patrols the park with a Super Soaker, soaking employees mid-shift. The tactic is deliberate: he reasons that even a negative reaction — an eye-roll, a laugh, a shared complaint — keeps energy alive on the floor. His core management philosophy is that employees who are talking about their manager, for any reason, are employees who are still engaged. That logic is tested at scale during peak season: during one Sweet 16 round-two day, the Games 3 station alone gave away approximately 500 prizes, with prize pyramids reduced to roughly half their size by 10:30 PM.
This approach is especially meaningful given Lindberg's own history at the park. He has walked these same pathways thousands of times since he was a child, and he brings that accumulated emotional investment into every shift. Hear the full episode as it aired on This American Life on Listenly.
"This opportunity is probably only going to come along once in a lifetime."
— Cole Lindberg, Games Department Manager, Worlds of Fun
About Cole Lindberg
Cole Lindberg's career at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Missouri began the way few management careers do: at age 14, wearing a suit to a job interview at an amusement park. What started as a summer job never ended. Eleven years later, Lindberg is a full-time, year-round employee overseeing the park's entire games department — 32 individual game stations and a seasonal workforce of over 100 young employees. The role demands 60 to 70-hour weeks every week throughout the summer, alongside responsibilities that include hitting financial targets, purchasing all supplies, and hiring and supervising his whole team. During his senior year at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, he made the decision to leave school and accept the games manager position, a move he described as an opportunity that was "probably only going to come along once in a lifetime." That judgment has since been validated: his immediate supervisor Matt considers him one of the best games managers across all 11 amusement parks owned by Cedar Fair, placing Lindberg's performance at a park that is among the company's smallest in exceptional context.
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Cole Lindberg started at Worlds of Fun at age 14 as a summer job and never left, accumulating 11 years of experience before becoming a full-time year-round employee managing the park's entire games department.