She Was the President
Kat Cole was eighteen years old, working three jobs at once. One day, her Hooters manager sat her down because she had been late for shifts more than once. The woman across the table from her was quiet, almost small in the way she carried herself; nothing about her suggested she needed to raise her voice to be heard. She told Cole plainly that she needed to know she could depend on her. Cole has said that the conversation made her feel like she needed to be bigger.
Cole had started at Hooters the year before, at seventeen, one of several jobs she took on to help her mother, who was raising three daughters alone on the income from three jobs of her own. Cole worked the same way almost by instinct, taking whatever shifts she could get, learning the kitchen when the cook quit, learning to run a shift when the manager needed her to. She was just a teenager trying to help cover the bills rather than pursuing a career.
Two years later, at nineteen, Hooters asked her to help open the company's first franchise outside the United States, in Sydney, Australia. Cole had never been on a plane. She had only left Florida twice in her life, and didn’t even have a passport. She said yes despite all of that. Afterward, she admitted to herself that she didn't actually know how to open a restaurant. She spent forty days in Sydney getting it open, and by the time she came home, what she'd expected to be a once in a lifetime trip had turned into the actual start of her career. She's since said that knowing how to do the job well, and train other people to do it well, was what made her qualified. It didn't necessarily make her feel capable, at least not in her own mind.
The company kept sending her to open new markets, one country after another, and the promotions followed just as fast. She was a vice president by twenty six. At thirty two, she was named president of Cinnabon, running a brand doing business in sixty eight countries. On paper, it read like an uninterrupted climb, each year bigger than the one before it, with no obvious place where anything had gone wrong.
Not long after she took the job, Cole inherited an initiative that had already been set in motion before she arrived, and something about it didn't sit right with her. She had questions worth asking, about whether the plan actually made sense. She didn't ask them. She's described the reasoning she gave herself at the time: who was she to question a plan other people had already put in place, people who'd been with the company longer than she had. It felt like the responsible thing, staying humble, trusting others who'd been there longer. She's called it an ironic kind of humility, like modesty but is really just avoidance wearing a nicer outfit. Plenty of new leaders would have made the same call and never thought twice about it.
The initiative went off the rails. It created business problems that didn't stay contained to one department, rippling out across a brand doing business in sixty eight countries, and it damaged trust in her leadership at exactly the moment she needed people to believe in it. She's said she went home in tears most nights for weeks. Looking back, she's been direct about what actually happened: if she'd honestly answered her own question, who was she to speak up, the answer was obvious. She was the president. Minimizing her own role had been the easier thing to do.
It's a strange kind of mistake to make for someone who'd been told years earlier, by a manager not much taller than the counter she stood behind, that being trusted meant showing up and doing her part. Cole had built an entire career being the person who did her part visibly. She opened restaurants and trained staff in country after country. The one time doing her part actually meant speaking up in a boardroom, she went quiet instead.
She's talked since about what she'd tell that version of herself, the one sitting in meetings with those doubt. She needed to speak up more, sooner, even knowing she'd sometimes be wrong. Yes, she would ruffle feathers at time, but staying quiet would cost her more than being wrong ever could. The manager who once told her to be bigger never got the chance to see how literally Cole would eventually have to learn that lesson, years later, in a boardroom instead of behind a hostess stand.
Sources
• On Resilience: How Kat Cole Rose From Hooters Hostess To President Of Cinnabon, Forbes — https://www.forbes.com/sites/bogardandhoffman/2016/12/19/on-resilience-how-kat-cole-rose-from-hooters-hostess-to-president-of-cinnabon/
• From Hooters To Hot Buns: How Kat Cole Turned Cinnabon Into A $1 Billion Brand, Forbes — https://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/11/27/from-hooters-to-hot-buns-how-kat-cole-turned-cinnabon-into-a-1-billion-brand/
• 12 Communication Habits Made This Former Hooters Hostess a Billion-Dollar-Brand President at 32, Inc. —
