Red Lobster CEO: 'You can't be a perfect candidate for anything'—this mindset helped me become a CEO at 31

Damola Adamolekun at the EBONY Power 100 Gala held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on November 04, 2025, in Los Angeles, California.

Damola Adamolekun rose to prominence after becoming Red Lobster's youngest CEO in August 2024, helping the restaurant chain recover from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and building a cult following in the process.

But Red Lobster isn't his first CEO job. Adamolekun was appointed chief executive of P.F. Chang's in April 2020, shortly following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though he followed up an older, more seasoned executive — eight-time CEO John Antioco — Adamolekun says he never let that stop him from getting his job done.

"In anything you do, you need to recognize your strengths and your weaknesses," the 36-year-old told the "How Leaders Lead with David Novak" podcast in a December 11 episode. "I have a lot of strengths, but in this situation, experience is clearly a weakness, right? Some people've done it for 20 years, and I had not."

"You can't be a perfect candidate for anything," Adamolekun continued. "There's always going to be some area where you're weaker. So, for me, it's about recognizing that and accentuating your strengths and shoring up your weaknesses."

In his case, Adamolekun had years of experience with the restaurant industry from a financial standpoint. He was a partner at investment firm Paulson & Co., leading the acquisition of P.F. Chang's in 2019 in a $700 million deal, a private equity associate at TPG Capital, and an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs prior to taking the restaurants' helm. He was also Antioco's chief strategy officer for a year, establishing P.F. Chang's self-delivery business before the pandemic hit.

He also had people skills, he said. He wasn't above "putting on the hard hat" and working on the ground to help reopen stores. Whatever Adamolekun didn't know, he leaned on and trusted his colleagues and employees to fill in the gaps.

"I had experience around me," he said. "So long as you're willing to listen to that, that can become your own experience, right? So long as you're willing to engage with these people. … If I didn't have [information] myself, it was around me."

"My job was to align the team, build a strategy, motivate people, get things moving, empower the right people, promote the right people," Adamolekun continued. "And so long as I was able to do that, we built a great team and were able to move the business forward."

Hiring the right talent and letting them own their jobs is a crucial responsibility for business leaders, according to billionaire Mark Cuban, who was once a micromanaging boss. Be too overbearing, and you risk harming employee morale, he told the "Bio Eats World″ podcast in 2023. "I wish somebody told me to be nicer, because I was always go, go, go ... Ready, fire, aim. Let's go. Let's go faster, faster."

"Sometimes it took my [business] partner Todd [Wagner] telling me, 'Look, you're scaring some people, [and] they're typically going to [quit] and you can't get mad,'" Cuban added.

In 2021, a year after Adamolekun became CEO, P.F. Chang's revenue rose to $922 million from $601 million, according to research and consulting firm Technomic's Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report. Red Lobster is on track to a similar rebound, as it's out of bankruptcy and betting on menu innovation and a heightened emphasis on hospitality to draw consumers back, he said during a July interview with Good Morning America.

The company has also cut 10% of its corporate professionals and 200 restaurant staff as it eyes steady profitability, a spokesperson recently told Bloomberg.

On facing significant challenges at work head-on, Adamolekun has a piece of advice: don't let the pressure get in the way of doing work that you're proud of. 

"If you're too worried about the pressure, it takes away clear thinking because you become stressed," he told the David Novak podcast. "You don't want pressure to force you into a mental corner where you're making bad decisions because you're freaking out about the stakes. You need to make decisions calmly regardless of the stakes."