You Can't Prepare for Everything
But good capability building can prepare you for anything
In college, I got a job waiting tables at Red Robin. And who would’ve known that they delivered some of the best capability training I have ever received.
The leadership at Red Robin had figured out something that apparently eludes most of the corporate world: they couldn’t possibly present every scenario a waiter would encounter, but they could prepare a waiter to handle any situation.
A customer wants anchovies on their burger? A kid is having a birthday celebration and wants a yellow balloon (and we have none in stock)? Someone needs their fries arranged in order of length?
You can’t prepare for everything; but you can prepare for anything.
So instead of doing what most companies do—which is hand you a binder the length of War and Peace, chock full of scenarios that you’ll likely never encounter, a mission statement so vague it could apply to either a restaurant or a cult, and expect you to memorize it—Red Robin taught a very simple guiding principle:
“We have an all-out unbridled desire to create happy guests.”
Now, if they’d stopped there, this would be just another eye-rolling corporate slogan, the kind of thing you’d see on a poster next to a stock photo of people high-fiving. But Red Robin didn’t stop there, because they understood something crucial: words don’t mean anything until you define them, illustrate them, and demonstrate them.
They broke “unbridled” down. They illustrated it. They made us explain it. They made us demonstrate it. I knew it so well, I can still recite it 30 years later.
What does unbridled look like? If a customer said, “I want anchovies on my hamburger,” and we didn’t have anchovies, unbridled meant we sent somebody to the store to get them.
Because unbridled means having no boundaries to what we’ll do for a customer.
Here’s where most training fails: it teaches understanding instead of capability. Companies think if employees can define “customer-focused” or nod along to a mission statement, they’ve succeeded. But understanding doesn’t tell you whether to go buy anchovies. Red Robin didn’t care if we could recite their slogan. They cared if we could think our way through situations nobody had scripted for us.
As a trainer now, I see this everywhere. Companies build training around what’s easy to measure — knowledge checks, completion rates, certification pass rates — because those numbers are clean and reportable. But the question that matters is whether people can think their way through a situation nobody anticipated.
Information transfer is not the same as capability development. Red Robin understood that. Most companies don’t, and they wonder why the training didn’t stick.
Red Robin understood the power of building people with an unbridled capability; people who would go above and beyond to take care of customers. Everything else is just expensive theater.