Clarity, Culture and Service: Leadership Lessons from Chick-fil-A

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit Chick-fil-A’s Atlanta Support Center with an incredible group of women business owners through the Women Presidents Organization (WPO). The experience was organized by our WPO leader, Tiffany Alley, and hosted by Liz Griffith with Chick-fil-A, who brought together several female leaders from across the organization to share candid perspectives on leadership, culture, brand, innovation, career development and navigating change.

There were plenty of ideas worth writing down. But what struck me most was how many of the conversations put different language around things I have been thinking about—and trying to build—at Silver Studio for years.

And then there were a few that challenged me.

The Support Center

One of the simplest ideas may have been my favorite.

Chick-fil-A doesn’t refer to its Atlanta headquarters as its corporate office. It is the Support Center.

That language matters.

The purpose of the people there is to support the Operators, restaurants and team members who are actually serving customers every day. As leaders move farther away from the front line, their responsibility increasingly becomes creating the conditions that allow everyone else to succeed.

I think the same should be true in an architecture firm.

As you become more senior, your value shouldn’t come from having more people report to you. It should come from becoming a better resource to the people doing the work.

At Silver Studio, we have intentionally tried to make our senior leaders accessible to everyone. Their experience and judgment should support our production teams, remove obstacles, provide direction and help people make better decisions.

I had never called that group a “support center,” but I love the mindset behind it.

Leadership isn’t about sitting at the top of an organization. It is about supporting the people who make the organization work.

Clarity, Focus and Alignment

Another framework that resonated with me was CFA: Clarity. Focus. Alignment.

Leadership requires all three, but clarity may be the hardest.

When you are running a business, it is incredibly easy to spend your time inside the business—answering questions, solving problems, reviewing work, talking with clients and responding to whatever needs attention that day.

But leadership also requires separating yourself from the business long enough to see it clearly.

What are we actually trying to accomplish? What deserves our focus? And once we know those things, is the rest of the organization aligned around them?

I know how important that time is, and I still struggle to protect it. The Chick-fil-A conversation was a good reminder that thinking is part of the job. Creating enough space to gain clarity isn’t stepping away from leadership. It is leadership.

Culture Is Part of the Business

I spend as much time thinking about people and culture at Silver Studio as I do about architecture.

Sometimes that can feel counterintuitive. We are an architecture and interior design firm. Shouldn’t most of my attention be on architecture and interior design?

Seeing Chick-fil-A reinforced my belief that the answer is no.

People and culture aren’t adjacent to the business. They are part of the business.

Silver Studio’s two highest values are Impact and Integrity. We have found that the more intentionally we hire people who align with those values, the stronger our culture becomes.

But publishing values is the easy part. Living them is harder.

Values only become meaningful when they influence who you hire, how you make decisions, how you treat clients and colleagues, and what behavior you are—and aren’t—willing to accept.

Chick-fil-A has built an extraordinarily recognizable culture because its values show up in its people and the experiences those people create. It reinforced for me that culture deserves significant leadership attention because culture ultimately determines how an organization behaves when leadership isn’t in the room.

Consistency Is a Brand

We also spent time talking about brand.

For an architecture firm, it is easy to think of brand as our visual identity, portfolio, website or the type of design we’re known for.

But I think there is another definition that matters more.

Brand is knowing what experience you’re going to get.

One of the most common frustrations I hear about professional service firms is that the client’s experience depends heavily on which team they happen to get.

That is something we work hard to avoid at Silver Studio.

Our project managers should have their own personalities and leadership styles. Our designers should bring different ideas and perspectives. We don’t want to eliminate individuality.

But the outcome should still feel like Silver Studio.

Chick-fil-A described this balance as being fixed and flexible: some things should be consistent enough to build trust, while others need enough flexibility to evolve.

That concept feels particularly relevant to architecture right now.

What Should Stay Fixed When Everything Else Is Changing?

It is almost impossible to predict what an architecture firm will look like ten years from now.

AI is already changing how we work, and I don’t think we can fully comprehend yet how much our processes, skills, technology and traditional roles will change.

Trying to identify every process we need to protect feels futile.

Instead, I think we need to protect the outcome.

For Silver Studio, the fixed point is human experience.

We design environments for people. We believe in comfortable, hospitality-driven spaces that support how people actually want to live. The experience of the person using a building has to remain central to the work.

That doesn’t change.

Almost everything about how we accomplish it might.

Our tools should change. Our processes should change. The services we provide may change. Even our definition of what an architecture firm does should be allowed to evolve.

Being fixed about our purpose gives us permission to be flexible about almost everything else.

Collect Skills, Not Titles

One of the Chick-fil-A leaders talked about careers not needing to follow a straight line and encouraged people to collect skills through each experience.

I loved that phrase because it is something I frequently tell young architects.

Early in your career, individual assignments can feel small. A detail, a code analysis, a door schedule or a coordination issue may not feel particularly consequential.

But every one of those assignments is an opportunity to collect a skill.

There is an enormous difference between someone who completes a task and someone who asks: Why am I doing this? How does this affect the rest of the building? What requirement is driving it? What else can I learn while I’m here?

Those small pieces of knowledge begin stacking on top of one another. A year or two later, you can see a significant difference between someone who has intentionally collected those experiences and someone who has simply completed the assignments.

Expertise is accumulated. A title doesn’t create it.

Give Yourself Permission to Explore

I was also fascinated to learn more about Red Wagon Ventures, Chick-fil-A’s platform for exploring and investing in businesses outside its core restaurant operation.

What I like most about it is the permission it creates to experiment.

Chick-fil-A may be known for chicken, but over decades it has also developed tremendous expertise in service, hospitality, operations, technology, real estate and serving families.

Why assume those skills can only create value in one context?

That idea resonates strongly with me. The knowledge we accumulate throughout our careers can often be applied in ways we didn’t originally anticipate. Challenging ourselves to ask where else that knowledge might create value is at the heart of a growth mindset.

It is certainly part of what has led me to explore ideas beyond traditional architectural practice, including founding Nodella.

Not every experiment will succeed. That’s not really the point.

The value is maintaining the curiosity to ask what else might be possible.

Grace, Mistakes and Ego

Another conversation centered around mistakes and the importance of separating your ego from the work.

Architecture carries real responsibility. Mistakes matter.

But I learned a long time ago that everyone makes them—employees, consultants, clients, partners and owners included.

The most important thing is what happens next.

I want people on our team to know that if they discover a mistake, the best response is to bring it forward quickly and honestly. We will deal with it together.

Grace doesn’t eliminate accountability. I think it actually encourages it.

When people believe their leaders will help them solve a problem rather than punish them for revealing it, problems surface sooner. And problems identified sooner are usually much easier to solve.

Separating ego from work is something slightly different.

I think this can be particularly challenging for female leaders. The issue isn’t always an inflated ego around our successes. Sometimes ego shows up in how personally we internalize our failures.

We wear the mistake. We replay it. We allow it to become evidence of something larger about ourselves.

Learning from mistakes is essential. Carrying every mistake indefinitely is not.

That takes work.

Work and Family Aren’t an Either/Or

One discussion during the day touched on something deeply connected to why I started Silver Studio: family and career should not have to be an either/or decision.

Earlier in my career, I didn’t always experience workplaces that supported that idea. I think our industry—and society generally—has gotten better about it, but we still have work to do.

I don’t particularly like the idea of work-life balance because balance suggests everything should receive equal weight all the time.

Life doesn’t work that way.

I prefer harmony.

We live long lives and, hopefully, have long careers. There will be periods when work requires more of us and periods when family needs more. Our capacity changes. Our priorities evolve.

At Silver Studio, we allow employees to incorporate personal and family goals into their professional development conversations if they choose to share them. Career planning shouldn’t require pretending the rest of your life doesn’t exist.

The goal should be to build a career that can ebb and flow through the different seasons of a person’s life.

Maybe We Should Have More Fun

One idea from the day challenged me more than the others.

Several leaders talked about fun—bringing yourself to work, taking the work seriously without taking yourself too seriously, and Truett Cathy’s belief that if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right.

I’m not sure Silver Studio does enough of that.

Architecture isn’t “just fried chicken.” Buildings need to be safe. They need to function. There is real responsibility associated with the decisions we make.

But maybe that’s exactly why we need to distinguish between taking the work seriously and making the experience of doing the work unnecessarily serious.

Design is fun. Solving difficult problems can be fun. Creating something that didn’t exist before can be fun.

I don’t have a neatly packaged answer for how we infuse more of that into our everyday work yet.

But I left thinking it is a question worth asking.

Who Are We Here to Serve?

Ultimately, the idea I keep coming back to is service.

Chick-fil-A has created an organization where a service mindset seems deeply embedded in its people. Hearing from its female leaders, you could see that it wasn’t simply corporate language. It seemed to be a quality intentionally cultivated throughout the organization.

That challenged me personally.

Service probably isn’t the first word that would appear on a personality assessment describing me. I am naturally decisive, driven and comfortable pushing things forward.

Those qualities have helped me build Silver Studio.

But good leadership isn’t about surrounding yourself with people who reinforce all of your natural strengths.

Sometimes it is about recognizing what isn’t naturally strong in you and intentionally bringing people into the organization who provide it.

That may be part of our next evolution at Silver Studio: thinking more intentionally about servant leadership and asking some very simple questions:

Who are we serving?

How are we serving them?

And how do we do it consistently?

A day at Chick-fil-A reinforced many things I already believe about leadership, culture and building a business. But the most valuable experiences aren’t the ones that simply confirm what you’re already doing.

They’re the ones that give you new language for what matters—and leave you with a few questions you haven’t answered yet.

Thank you to Tiffany Alley for organizing the experience, Liz Griffith for hosting us, and the Chick-fil-A leaders who were so generous in sharing their experiences and perspectives with our WPO group. I left with pages of notes, plenty of validation—and, more importantly, some new questions to bring back to Silver Studio.