Women in Restaurant Leadership
Aug 25, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
Most leadership advice comes from people who've never worked a Saturday night shift. Kayla Henson has. She started as a McDonald's crew member in 2006 and worked her way to Burger King General…
Kayla HensonGuestSatineHostSo let's talk about leadership under pressure.
Now where you are, you know, you've mentioned dealing with call-offs, impossible shifts, like inspections, losing managers, just, this is real.
Like this is the real life and you are in it.
Can you give us a story from the ground floor, like a moment where, you know, everything felt like chaos and you just had to lead through it?
So when living in quick service, we have a lot of those 30-second moments where there's a chaos happening and you have to make a decision quickly.
that were scheduled for an evening shift, none of which had ever made a sandwich, all who were just service kids, you know, customer service.
And so I looked around at kind of the situation I was about to have, and I just said, you know what, somebody's going to learn how to make sandwiches tonight.
Who wants to try, you know? And I let these kids kind of, they're like raising their hand.
We had a lot of people that were very understanding and, of course, many that were not.
So let's talk about leadership under pressure.
Now where you are, you know, you've mentioned dealing with call-offs, impossible shifts, like inspections, losing managers, just, this is real.
Like this is the real life and you are in it.
Can you give us a story from the ground floor, like a moment where, you know, everything felt like chaos and you just had to lead through it?
So when living in quick service, we have a lot of those 30-second moments where there's a chaos happening and you have to make a decision quickly.
that were scheduled for an evening shift, none of which had ever made a sandwich, all who were just service kids, you know, customer service.
And so I looked around at kind of the situation I was about to have, and I just said, you know what, somebody's going to learn how to make sandwiches tonight.
Who wants to try, you know? And I let these kids kind of, they're like raising their hand.
We had a lot of people that were very understanding and, of course, many that were not.
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