- June 4, 2025
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Karen Sainsbury is an accidental restaurant industry executive — so much so that, before she landed her first job, at a Chili’s in Colorado, she applied for a position at a Blockbuster video across the street.
The Blockbuster wasn't hiring that day, back in 2001. The Chili’s was. But when the then 18-year-old Sainsbury told the restaurant manager that as a high school cheerleader she couldn’t work nights or weekends, he balked. “He just looked at me, started laughing, and he said, ‘here's the thing, you have a great personality, but in restaurants, when are restaurants busy? Nights and weekends. If your availability changes, let me know.’
Her availability didn’t change. But a few hours later Sainsbury got a phone call from a different Chili’s manager, asking her to come back in. That manager interviewed her, too, and the next day, while the first manager she spoke with was on vacation, the second one hired her. Not to spite the other leader, but by mistake: That manager was supposed to call a different candidate, with better availability.
Sainsbury found out about the mix-up five years later, and they all laughed about it. By then she had figured out her availability and was hooked on a career in hospitality, having worked her way up from entry level to training specialist to learning manager. Sainsbury says the culture at Chili’s, of teamwork, opportunities and positive-driven feedback, is where she found her place and her people.
Now vice president of talent for east Manatee County-based breakfast-brunch-lunch chain First Watch, Sainsbury, in her role for six years, is purposeful about one of her core missions: to help First Watch determine and define what its company culture is, then utilize that culture to enhance and maintain the company’s standing as a go-to place to work.
It’s a big responsibility: First Watch, with some 15,000 employees in nearly 600 restaurants across 31 states, was named No. 1 in Newsweek magazine’s 2024 list of America’s Most Loved Workplaces. The survey analyzed metrics such as employee collaboration, innovation, leadership trust and workplace belonging.
Sainsbury told the Chili’s story during a keynote address she recently delivered for a Manatee Chamber of Commerce Headliners Luncheon entitled “Cooking up Culture: How First Watch Creates Amazing Opportunities for Its People.”
Sainsbury’s core message? Culture — good or bad — is something every organization has, whether you know it or not. She found that at Chili’s, and later at First Watch, where it was exceedingly good.
“Even in the absence of a divine culture, there's still culture,” Sainsbury says. “There's cultural norms. The culture breaks down even further. It's not just your organization. It breaks down in the four walls of our restaurants. I would actually say that in our restaurants, that general manager is more responsible for the culture than how we even define it at our home office. It's how they show up every day, it's the attitude they bring, it's how they communicate, how they celebrate their people, how they give feedback.”
Sainsbury says there’s a lot of definitions of culture but one she likes best is “shared values, beliefs, behaviors that define how things are done with an organization.” Culture, she adds, “influences how employees interact, how they make decisions, achieve goals and ultimately shape the work environment.”
One of the most important parts of Sainsbury’s presentation, I thought, was the slide with the company’s mission, vision and values. Not only for the content, but for its simplicity. Sainsbury recalls how First Watch CEO Chris Tomasso once quipped, at a training session for high-performing managers, how the company’s culture, in the past, was sometimes absorbed by osmosis.
This puts the company’s culture to paper — and is something any business or nonprofit can do, not just a leading restaurant company that did $1.02 billion in revenue last year, like First Watch. The document, Sainsbury adds, “influences how your employees interact, make decisions and achieve goals, ultimately shaping the overall work environment. It's easy to remember at all levels of the organization.”
Under a North Star image, the less-is-more one pager includes:
Sainsbury detailed the points in the statement, then she left attendees with an integral piece of cultural leadership advice: consistency matters. “Has anybody ever been part of an organization where you got a lot of words, but you don't necessarily see it come into reality? For culture to live,” she says, “it's got to be lived at every level of the organization.”
