"The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative—whatever form that creativity takes—and that to encourage such development is a noble thing."

- Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull was the Co-Founder of Pixar (and at one point the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios) who built a multi-million dollar animation studio through trust, creativity, communication, and building a thriving workplace. He and his team were able to create incredible works of art through not just hard work but by creating an environment of creativity and learning which allowed him and his team to push beyond their boundaries of creativity.

Here at Chick-fil-A Greystone, we not only want to create an incredible experience for our guests but create a work environment that pushes our team members past the boundary of growth they believe is possible and help mold/guide them into being the best possible worker and person that they can be!

I believe that there are three aspects n order to create this healthy and thriving environment:

1. Understanding your teams' strengths and weaknesses
2. Pushing your team members through encouragement and trust
3. Constantly having an open learning mindset (accepting failure)

Understanding your teams' strengths and weaknesses

• To create a healthy and thriving environment, you must first do the work in getting to know both the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Without knowing your teams' strengths and weaknesses would be like trying to bake a cake without the instructions. You could buy all the ingredients beforehand but if you are not a seasoned pastry chef then your cake is going to turn out awful.
• You must be able to know where your team is at so that you can successfully create specialized plans for their growth. The more you know about your team, the more you as an organization can achieve.

Giving them tasks/roles that complement their strengths

• Once you have a good grasp of the strengths/weaknesses of your team, you then can start to place them into roles (and give them tasks) that are more suited for them. 1 Peter 4:10 "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms.” The Lord has given each of us specific gifts to use and our role as leaders should be to help those on our team develop those gifts.
• Now, that does not mean that since someone is a good bagger, that we must place them on bagging every single day until they finally collapse from burnout. It means that to have a successful business, we must be constantly on the lookout for new skills to develop in our team members and place them strategically within the restaurant.

Constantly having an open learning mindset (accepting failure)

• The last and final component is to constantly have an open learning mindset within your restaurant environment. Just like I talked about putting people into roles that complement their strengths, you must also be looking for places where people could grow and improve upon their weaknesses. A good example of this is Grand Opening Trainers, whenever they train people on bagging at grand openings, they make sure that they don't step in to take over until they feel is it utterly mandatory from the person they are training. They will leave their trainee in the red until it is ultimately detrimental to the business because once they leave after their week of training, they want whoever they trained to be set up for ultimate success!
• That is the same way here at CFA Greystone, we want people to be pushed as much as possible but understand that it is okay to fail every once in a while. It's what you do with the failure that ultimately matters. Are you going to take what happened and learn from it or are you just going to move on and just become stagnant in your growth?