Lisa Gressel

General Counsel/Chief Human Resources Officer, P.F. Chang’s

Lisa Gressel always knew she’d be a lawyer. It was clear from age 12.

“It started with wanting to help people, making sure they were treated fairly. To this day, I’m not sure what it was, but there was something inside of me that blossomed, the idea of pursuing justice,” she says.

Practicing law was not the family business. Her father was a barber and her mother a stay-at-home mom of six. But Gressel was passionate about her path—and, it turns out, about the restaurant industry as well. Her first job at 16 was as a busser at a Ponderosa Steakhouse in Cincinnati, her hometown.

She worked every front- and back-of-house position, including chef, until she went to the University of Cincinnati to pursue an undergraduate degree in economics and then law school. Even though restaurants remained a recurring theme in her life—she worked to help pay bills while in law school—at the time, she never thought to marry the two.

Post-grad positions included a long tenure at General Electric and several stints at other companies, including PetSmart.

“I was at GE for 16 years, becoming their international military lawyer even though I’d never been in the military or traveled outside of the U.S., she says, “but I worked hard and worked my way up to become the first woman deputy general counsel of one of General Electric’s major business groups.”

When a general counsel post at a small defense contractor came up, she left GE and moved to Phoenix with her husband and two kids. While there, the company went into bankruptcy and Gressel witnessed the yin and yang of business firsthand, having worked first at a company with enormous resources and another with very few. She became adept at navigating both. “Working at a big corporation like GE and then supporting that little company through its bankruptcy taught me real skills,” she says.

After that, she joined Nortel Networks, a Toronto telecommunications firm, which also went into bankruptcy.

“I was recruited by some former GE execs I’d worked with who’d gone over to Nortel, and I loved living in Toronto. Unfortunately, it was when the dot.com bubble burst and that company also went bankrupt. I swear it wasn’t me,” she laughs.

When Gressel returned to Phoenix, she took a position with PetSmart, but realized it wasn’t the fit she was looking for. In 2016, she heard P.F. Chang’s was looking for a general counsel, threw her hat into the ring, and won what would become her “dream job.”

“My entire career to that point, through all of the different companies and business experiences, prepared me for this job,” she says. “GE was an international conglomerate, PetSmart gave me multiunit experience, and the smaller companies that struggled taught me how to be an effective legal executive, provide creative advice to help accomplish the business goals, but also know when to say stop.”

But the biggest lesson she learned was to believe in herself.

“No matter the task or job—from defense contracting to telecom to pet retail to restaurants—I’ve never doubted my abilities,” she says.

Gressel supports mentoring, perhaps because she didn’t receive it regularly when she started her career. She had two great supervisors who advised her, she says, but would have benefitted from access to a network of mentors, especially at GE, where she was one of few women working in the aircraft engines group with retired 4-star generals.

Today, she’s involved in a group called Ladder Down, which helps young women attorneys achieve success.

“Now that I’m at the top of the ladder, I can reach down and pull young women up behind me,” she says. “Once they start progressing into the upper ranks, they need to know how to become successful, to believe in themselves.”

She offers four tips for woman executives to follow:

Don’t doubt yourself. Keep pushing forward. Try things you’ve never thought you could do, and believe you’ll be successful at them.
Have courage. The more things you do, the more courage you’ll have to try the next thing you don’t know.
Have the passion of your convictions. If you’re going into a legal career, you need a thick skin. You’ll be the one providing the checks and balances, saying whether the business can or can’t do something. Make sure you’re a partner, not an impediment, and come up with creative solutions that help.
Network with others. Gressel is a founding member and current Chair of the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Law Center, the legal advocate for the industry. Attending its meetings and annual summit are great ways to meet general counsel of other restaurant companies, she says. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to discuss the legal issues we all face.”

As P.F. Chang’s General Counsel and Chief Human Resources Officer, Gressel oversees its legal, human resources, risk and food-safety departments. She says the casual-dining chain is a great place to work. “The corporate culture is simple: we’re friendly, nice, kind, and competitive. We want to win, but we want to do it as a team. The prevailing attitude is to be of service. That's what I love most.”