Kat Cole’s 3 drivers for career growth

Kat Cole, president and COO of Athletic Greens, is perhaps the greatest living embodiment of an executive who started at the bottom. She began her foodservice career as a teenage waitress at Hooters, worked her way up to vice president by her mid-twenties and has taken on a series of C-suite positions, transforming companies such as Cinnabon along the way.

It might be easy to chalk up her success to incredible good fortune, or a by-the-bootstraps work ethic. Neither one would be wrong, but that’s not the full story. Rather, Kat attributes the entirety of her success to three simple drivers she’s used, one way or another, since day one: be helpful, get creative and look after yourself.

That formula has worked well for her: after leaving Hooters, she became the president of Cinnabon and turned that business around out of the recession, launching its well-known multi-channel division and extending the brand beyond its legacy channel into CPG, wholesale and other types of retail. She then became president and COO of Focus Brands, which develops global multi-channel food service brands as well as franchising and operating more than 6,300 restaurants, including Jamba, Auntie Anne’s, McAlister’s Deli and others in addition to Cinnabon. Then, after a year spent helping other people build their businesses, she fell in love with the fastest-growing nutrition company in the US and became the president and COO of Athletic Greens.

In this interview, we asked Kat to dig into how she took a chance on herself as an entry-level waitress, and how she turned these three drivers into the diverse and successful career she’s enjoyed so far.

First driver: Be helpful

When she started as a waitress, Kat could have stuck to her job description and achieved perfectly exemplary results. But she decided to find a way to do more—which she says typically means finding a way to help out other people—and that elevated her quickly to the point of opening new stores internationally.

“Helping others is just a good foundational practice,” she says. “I didn’t set out to build a restaurant resume that would make me a great candidate to be a new store opener. I just really wanted to help.”

Kat learned to work every role in a Hooters restaurant out of pure natural need. When cooks quit, she went to work in the kitchen. When the bartender needed to pick up her kid early, Kat became a bartender. When the manager needed help, she jumped in.

She recalls the aphorism about doing the job before you get the job. She wasn’t satisfied by doing a great job as a waitress; so what if she wasn’t technically a cook, or a bartender, or a manager? The jobs needed to be done, and she did them.

By the time she was 19, she was working every job in the restaurant and had become uniquely suited to teach new Hooters employees around the world. So the company invited her to join the training team as part of its international expansion. Her first store opening took place in Australia. Two months later, she was helping to open the first Hooters restaurants in Central America. Soon, she was not just a member of the training team—she was leading the openings herself.

A year later, she took a corporate job running the employee training department. By the time she was 26, she was one of the vice presidents, and Hooters was doing about $800 million in annual revenue.

All because, back when she first started waiting tables, she was willing to assist wherever her restaurant team needed it.

That helping-out mentality continued to serve Kat as she grew into more executive roles. “Most of the roles I have had in the last twelve years did not exist before I took them,” she says. “The companies were growing and evolving and changing. So I couldn’t have possibly envisioned myself in exactly that role.”

Second driver: Get curious

It wasn’t enough that Kat was game to help out in any role. She also had to get curious about how those roles worked.

“I was super curious,” she says. “When the cooks quit and I went back in the kitchen, it was really about, ‘Can I do it? Do I know enough to do it well?’ I didn’t put pressure on myself to be perfect. It was more like, whatever I do is better than zero.”

Kat offers her perspectives on how she took this curiosity-driven approach to expand her skills.

Reframe risk as learning

“I was lucky that I came from such humble beginnings,” Kat says. “I didn’t have much to lose.”

So she never operated from the standpoint of What happens if I mess up? “I was more afraid of what would happen if someone else did those things, or what would happen if I didn’t say yes,” she says.

So she repositions failure as F-A-I-L: first attempt in learning, to destigmatize the natural bumps that come along with saying yes to something before you’re completely ready for it. Besides, what was the worst that could happen if she didn’t do a great job the first time? With no cooks in the kitchen, customers already weren’t getting their food—so she figured even if it took a little longer for her to make their meals, that was at least preferable to getting no food at all.

Asking questions shows strength

Some people look at Kat’s career trajectory and see all the risks she took. She looks at it and sees all the questions she had to ask. And she understands that asking questions can be vulnerable—which some people experience as “weak” or “showing a lack of confidence.”

“If you think about it,” Kat says, “you’ve got to be pretty comfortable in your own skin to ask for help. There’s actually implied confidence to the person asking the questions.”

So she was relentless in asking for help—not as a damsel-in-distress, looking for someone to fix problems for her, but as a capable employee assessing what’s going on, what she already knows and who is experienced enough to offer her wisdom.

“And then I circle back with people and thank them for their advice or their counsel or their support or their resources,” Kat says. “That makes people want to be on your team. No one trusts someone who says ‘I’ve always got it.’ Nobody always has it.”

Real confidence is curiosity

Since curiosity and confidence go hand-in-hand, Kat likes to clear up a misconception around confidence. “People think confidence means I know what I’m doing. I have swagger. It's an old-school, overly masculine definition of confidence,” she says.

But real confidence—confidence that both others and yourself can believe in? “It’s not I know what I’m doing. It’s I believe we can figure it out,” Kat says.

For leaders who both manage out and around and continue to move up, this more humble form of confidence acknowledges that every single person on a team is also on a development journey. This confidence begets curiosity: “I need feedback to grow and evolve as the times and ways we do things change,” Kat says. “Self-awareness requires checking in with people and reflecting about your own presence, performance and style.”

Then, this inner reflection expands outward and that confidence of I believe we can figure it out becomes curiosity for how the team can succeed. “You’ll always be rewarded as a leader if you help your people win,” Kat says.

Third driver: Meet your own needs

Kat’s third driver might seem more self-serving. She got curious and made herself helpful not out of altruism, but because she needed to pay her bills, and picking up more shifts gave her better access to more income. But, it’s not selfish to align your career trajectory with your personal needs—whatever they are. In fact, doing so will help make certain you are on the right track for yourself.

Meeting our most basic needs is essential for any work. But beyond paying for food, shelter, and clothing for ourselves and our families, Kat offers other skills for meeting our higher needs, as well.

Find growth companies if you want to grow

“Join a company that’s growing,” Kat says simply. “It’s a lot easier to have growth opportunities when the company is growing.”

Now, joining an established company with flat or even shrinking growth is not necessarily a poor choice. Those companies can still offer plenty of knowledge and learning opportunities, and maybe just what you need to acquire skills and experience. But the simple math of the roles available suggests more of an opportunity ceiling, and that ceiling doesn’t keep getting lifted.

“The opportunities are a bit more fixed and a bit more challenging to come by,” Kat says. “Growth companies really matter in creating opportunity [for yourself].”

Reframe the power of saying no

It sounds like Kat said yes to just about everything early in her career, because she pretty much did. She was at a stage where she had no other major commitments (except college, which she left to focus on her career), needed the income and had the time to earn it.

The asks also were smaller then than they are now as an executive. Covering a shift is a much different commitment than spearheading a new marketing initiative, for example. So it was easier to say yes, and she didn’t need to say no quite so often.

But now her priorities require her to use that little challenging word much more frequently. “You don’t want someone to help you with something who isn’t all in and isn’t the best,” Kat says to them. “And I won't be all in and it won't be the best because I have other priorities, and if I have to choose, I'm going to choose the things that are my priorities.”

She learned the hard way what the price of overcommitting is in her twenties, when she vaulted into executive roles and continued to take on more and bigger responsibilities. She wanted to say yes, wanted to do everything, thought it all sounded amazing. Then she got to a point where she started letting people down—she had to cancel things, or couldn’t do her best work. Just like she reframed risk, she had to reframe what answering no meant to her.

“As much as I want to say yes, what I want more is to preserve this positive version of me in your mind that is going to get ruined if I overcommit,” Kat says. “The art of reframing is a superpower. It puts things in a perspective that helps me make the decisions I should be comfortable making all along, even when I want to please people or I really do want to help this person.”

Kat recognizes that it gets much easier to reframe no in these ways as you move up in both your personal and your professional life. A track record of experiences builds the confidence to be able to set your own needed boundaries and recognize your own capacity—and to leave space for the bigger and better things that come along.

Because for growth-minded people looking always to expand upward, something bigger and better always comes along. And you’ll be able to say yes to more of the best opportunities with Kat’s three drivers in place—prioritizing your own needs, being genuinely helpful and remaining eternally curious. As she puts it: “That trifecta is a really interesting cocktail for professional growth.”

Final thought: The starting point is “know thyself”

If you need a single starting point to transform your career growth—whatever stage you’re at—Kat has two simple words: Know thyself.

How to accomplish this? “Tune into your values,” she says. And if it’s daunting to dig inside yourself like that, it doesn’t have to be so personal. Kat recommends googling a common list of personal values by country or culture and seeing which ones resonate most with you across the board—from friends and family values to your faith, your intellect, your income, community service, anything.

“It’s a really helpful exercise to pick a top five (or so) of those and use that as a grounding mechanism for all the why’s behind how you react, what you say yes to, what you say no to, the companies you choose to join,” Kat says. “Are your values being met by your work? Not everyone has the same top three values.”

Kat thinks of this practice as a compass—all the advice you get and the books you read are roadmaps, but your inner compass helps you choose your direction. “If one job opportunity falls off or some unexpected opportunity comes up, the map changes,” she says. “If you have the compass you can navigate, literally and figuratively, those challenges or opportunities or moments with far more effective than you otherwise would be able to.”