Every business must set a firm structure around growth and development to ensure every team member has equal access to continuous learning. Brian O’Neill is here to present his very own development tool kit that could help foster a culture of learning in your own organization. He explains how leaders must prioritize the human aspect to achieve a more innovative, well-rounded, and successful team. Brian also details how to create a workplace environment where continuous learning is not just encouraged but deeply embedded into the very fabric of the organization, which results in better talent management and retention.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Brian O’Neill – The Development Tool Kit: Creating A Culture Of Learning

Welcome to the show. We are privileged to have Brian O’Neill. Brian O’Neill is a renowned leadership consultant who is an expert at crafting transformative learning experiences. He has over two decades of experience in operations and human resources. Brian has dedicated his career to molding organizational cultures that thrive with continual learning. We want to make sure that we’re continually upping our game there.

He’s also the recipient of the CLO Gold Strategy Award for his outstanding leadership development initiatives. Brian is going to share insights on the development toolkit and how that can transform your organization. He’ll be providing us with invaluable tools to foster an environment where continuous learning is not just encouraged but embedded into the very fabric of the organization. Join us as we dive in with Brian. He will deliver the value that he has promised.

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Thank you, Brian, for being with us. We can’t wait to jump into this conversation.

I hope I will deliver the value promised. It’s the folks who are reading to determine that. That’s how the measurements look.

Introducing Leadership Consultant Brian O’Neill

There is no doubt. We’ve had you on the show before. It was in 2023. We had great feedback there. Without a doubt, we’re going to have a great conversation here. Before we get started on going into the material, I would love to make sure we inform the audience of how you got to where you are, the work that you do, and how you make a difference in the organizations that you work with.

I’ve always thought of myself as an architect or a builder of leadership, culture, organizational development, leadership development, and overall learning and development for companies that really care about the human experience. You’ll see it on my banner on LinkedIn. I truly believe that human beings are not an asset. There is this phrase that’s out there a lot of times that many companies throw out there that say, “Our people are our greatest asset.” I worry about that kind of phrasing because, from my point of view, things like a photocopier are an asset. A notebook computer is an asset. What do you do with assets when assets break, they reach the end of life, they have a problem, or so on? You toss them out and come up with some other asset and put them in.

We need to think of people not as assets but as the human heart of what businesses are all about. This ties into some of the philosophy of people like Simon Sinek and the long view, and how that can help guide companies instead of thinking about the next quarter and whether or not we’re making projections for stock price. It is to really think about, “Where are we going? What do we want to do? How does our company want to be seen ten years from now, a generation from now, or 100 years from now?”

The truly successful companies in the sphere that I’m familiar with all think more in terms of this long view. One of those components of the long view is how we look at our people not so much as assets but maybe more like trees or plants in terms of overall growth and development. They need care and attention. They need continual watering and feeding in order for them to flourish and grow.  A seedling doesn’t look like much at the very beginning. A mighty oak tree looks like something else. It looks like quite an accomplishment after 20 or 50 years. If we adopt that philosophy first, then we can begin to decide how we can grow and develop our people moving forward.

Using The Development Tool Kit

That’s a great analogy. As we go into this topic of how to do that, I know that the big piece is putting together a development toolkit. Can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve used this development toolkit in other organizations? What is your experience with this?

What you’ll see here is an adaptation of something that we developed at AMH, a single-family rental company that I was involved with for the last few years. AMH is a big-growth or high-growth company but pretty conservative in terms of overall leadership where they were. I was asked along with others to come on board and create this culture of overall growth and development. It was like, “How do we do this?”

One of the things that I’ve been successful with in my career is the whole paradigm around development plans. Normally, when people hear the word development plan, they think, “I’m in trouble. I’ve done something wrong. They’re going to fix me. They’re going to make me do things to try to make me a better person to avoid the idea of me being terminated,” or something like that.

What I espoused at AMH, and that’s the beginning of this whole development toolkit idea, was, “Everybody in the organization should have some kind of development and growth plan. They should know where they’re going based on how we perceive them and their place within the organization and potentially their future place within the organization.” That’s what we did. What we decided was we should create an ongoing, continuous growth mentality around the whole concept of the development toolkit.

Let’s face it. Development for people when they are first coming on board is their onboarding. It’s like, “Where are the bathrooms?” It is things like, “What is this culture all about? What’s my relationship with my manager? What’s the team like? How do we function? What are the unwritten rules?” It is those kinds of things. In the first three months for any new team member coming on board in any organization, the focus of development should be on the onboarding, developing that overall sense of what the company is about, the vision, culture, and so on.

Around the fourth month, what we recommend is that you create this idea of a development plan using this concept of a development toolkit. From the fourth month forward, your coaching can be centered around this idea. You have an anchor point in which to create conversations around coaching. You have a document. It can be an online document in your HRIS. We had an interactive PDF idea that we did because we’re a smaller company and it was easier for us to do it in that particular way.

By having something to anchor yourself to as a manager, you can then guide the conversations every week, every month, or however often you normally do your coaching, which gets you away from this idea of, “I only coach at the annual performance appraisal. The only time I ever speak to my team members is once a year.” We wanted to eliminate that paradigm as well within the company. This development toolkit idea kills many birds with one stone.

Brian, one thought there. You said that there’s that three-month period of going through onboarding. Is there any magic around that timeframe of three months?

My sense is that it takes a good 90 days. There’s a famous book called The First 90 Days, which is about how managers onboard themselves moving forward. The idea is that in that 3-month period, and perhaps it can be 60 days in some companies, if it’s too quick and too compressed, you’ll sometimes get a sense from the team member of, “There’s too much coming at me. I’m drinking water from the fire hose and I’m still not quite sure exactly what’s going on.”

The focus in the first three months, in my opinion, is the culture, the technical skills needed in order to perform your job well if you have a job that focuses on particular technical skills, the vision, the mission, learning about what the company is all about in meetings, talking with your leaders and team members, learning about various organizations that are a part of the company, and so on. That is a strong focus.

There are too many companies, for lots of reasons including low unemployment or low ability to bring those team members in, who will look at that team member on the very first day and say, “Thank God you’re here. That huge thing in front of you over there is your computer. Go ahead. There are seven issues already. I’m glad you’re here. That’s great. Now get to work.”

Even ATD has shown that in many cases, team members make a decision to leave a company on the first day of employment. They don’t necessarily leave on the first day but they make a decision, “This was wrong for me,” on day one. Day one of onboarding is an extremely important component too. I’m working with a client at Korn Ferry on building onboarding for them to emphasize this idea of welcome and reassurance as part of the onboarding process.

The components we looked at for effective development are the things that I have developed in my own mind over the course of twenty-plus years of looking at these various pieces. You see performance and potential. Some of you are saying, “That’s 9 Box. That’s McKinsey. Let’s look at their performance. Let’s look at their potential.”

In general, I tend to agree that the best way to look at the development of an individual is to understand, “Are they performing well? Are they making the numbers? Are they hitting goals and business metrics? What is the potential of that person within the organization?” The problem with the old-style McKinsey 9 Box was everybody immediately focused on the bottom boxes of McKinsey 9 Box. They’re like, “Who do we have to get rid of in order to make this organization better?”

The best way to look at an individual’s development is to understand how they are performing, how they are hitting goals, and their potential within the organization. Share on X

My sense, especially if you take the long view if you think of Simon Sinek and The Infinite Game, is you’re a company that believes, “Let’s focus on those solid performers and those high-performers. What do we need to do to develop them? What do we need to do to continue to grow them and develop them so they’re contributing and being an important part of our overall business strategy?”

We changed some of the definitions around performance potential and decided that instead of 9-boxing the entire 1,800 people at AMH, we would group them instead into 3 specific groups, which would have then 3 specific strategies on how to grow and develop them using development activities as a part of a development plan.

Performance is more objective. You always have numbers. You always have ways to establish, “Is this person performing well in the technical aspects of their job?” Potential is more subjective. It is like, “Can we give people better guidelines around dealing with an admittedly subjective part of looking at this component of whether or not they have potential?” We introduced things like desire and capacity but we also said, “This is the desire and capacity for the company to promote someone in the future and to move them into growth and development opportunities. It’s also the desire and capacity of the individual as to where they want to be in the long view or in the infinite game.”

Many companies miss the idea that there are so many people, I believe it’s 75% or so of employees in a particular company, who are happy at what they’re doing and want to continue to do what they’re doing. I go back to my hotel days when I was a hotel general manager. I would speak with many housekeepers and say, “You’re doing such a great job. You could become a supervisor. You could become a housekeeping manager.” Many of them said, “I enjoy doing the work that I do. It’s fulfilling to me. That’s all I want. As long as I can do that, I’m going to be happy.” There are many of those positions throughout companies.

If we all were trying to go for the CEO role, the head of IT role, the head of HR role, or accounting and finance, I always joked with folks at AMH and said, “You’re talking the Hunger Games. Everybody’s racing to the cornucopia to try to get the food, and they’re shooting each other in the back to try to get them out of the way so that they can get to the food.” That is no way, in my opinion, to run a company. Don’t run your company like the Hunger Games. Run it instead by understanding that the potential of people is not just the potential you see in them but also the potential they see. That’s how we build this particular tool.

A quick story, I was talking to this gentleman and he was talking about taking a career break. He is a leader of an organization. He sold his company. He is at home and he’s thinking about getting a job in an organization again, but he wants to take some time off. He is at home and he’s like, “I miss the busyness and the interaction with people.”

He took a job as a dishwasher in a fast-paced restaurant. He’s very overqualified but he’s enjoying himself. The process of doing an exercise routine by interacting and seeing the action, he’s really enjoying that at the moment. It’s interesting when we think about phases in our careers where we might want to take a break, reset, and enjoy ourselves for a while.

Grouping Team Members Into Three Categories

I can explain that a little bit more, the idea of what these groupings were all about. This is how I developed M&A in AMH in terms of these strategies. Our team began to spread the word to the entire company and all the managers about how we could group our team members into 1 of 3 categories or groupings to help understand what the strategy was for the overall development of these people.

There are three basic groupings here. One is developing performers. These are folks whose performance is usually lower but they still may have medium or high potential in the organization. To be honest, the new hires who are learning on the job and learning about what their role is and what it all involves, you can consider them, at first, to be developing performers.

The strategy here is performance-based. The strategy here is, “How do we improve overall performance?” We can use SMART goals for that. We can do skills training or upskilling. We can use whatever performance tools are available within that particular department, discipline, or area of the company. New team members in their first 30 to 90 days, normally, you would list them and think of them as a developing performer. The development activity should be centered around things like skills training, performance tools, SMART goal setting, and so on.

There are solid performers. The vast majority of team members throughout an organization, I call them the steady eddies. Within any organization, they’re dependable. They’re usually medium or high in performance level. Their potential might be lower. Maybe it’s because of the needs of the company, but maybe it’s their own desire to stay in a particular position. Maybe they’re in what I call a cul-de-sac department where there isn’t an area for them to move up into. We have a lot of that kind of employee there.

The leadership positions are pretty set, and they’re going to be set for quite a while, so what do we do with solid performers? These performers benefit from a strategy that focuses on things like recognizing and appreciating what they do for us within the organization, so the appreciation of efforts, getting their institutional knowledge and best practices shared with others throughout the organization, and then mentoring.

This can be 1 of 2 ways. It is either being a mentor to developing performers or being mentored by high performers or pure solid performers so that they can continue to feel that they are growing and developing even though their actual position title may not change.  They may themselves feel quite happy in terms of where they are in the organization. People always still have this need for, “I want to know more. I want to contribute more. I want to feel recognized and appreciated for the things I do to help the organization.” That strategy focuses on those areas.

People always desire to know more, contribute more, and feel recognized. Business leaders must focus their strategies on those areas. Share on X

There are high-performers. Quite frankly, they’re usually only about 10% or 15% of any workforce. These are the team members who consistently always exceed your expectations for performance. They’re excited about new opportunities and you can see them in a potential new role. In our case at AMH, we put the timeline as around the next eighteen months or less that we thought they were going to be ready.

This is part of succession planning. We create a good succession plan for them and involve them in job shadowing so that they see what other areas of the company are like. What we said was, “These folks need to be the role before they become the role,” which means involving them in more senior-level meetings. If there is a project that you, the manager, were going to head up, can you possibly have this high performer head up that project for you and report to you on how it works?

These are the kinds of things that are elevating their visibility, in general, around the company. These are the kinds of meetings, projects, and other activities that are all good ways to create effective development for these high performers. If you assess performance and potential and craft a plan based on how you group a team member, you’ve got that along with all the basic principles behind how people grow and develop in that planning. We felt that you would need some tools to put all this together. That’s where this idea of the interactive development toolkit came up.

That’s great. Shar, in your experience with a lot of the startup businesses that you’ve done, have you implemented something like this to really develop your people in these categories?

With my startup company and some of my organizations, yes. I am also trying to take it to a more advanced level because even in my big system companies, we would say, “Every employee needs an IDP.” Brian, this is why I love this. It’s a lot more advanced than saying, “Every employee should be on IDP.” I used to have CEOs who say, “Every employee should have an IDP.” That’s great, but what kind of IDP are we talking about? An IDP can’t be like, “What are your goals?” or, “How many training hours are you going to take this year?” or, “Did you complete your learning management system hours?” and check the compliance boxes.

You’re 100% right. Our new and upcoming talent is way advanced beyond even our seasoned professionals’ perspective about the skills, capabilities, and competencies of some of our up-and-coming talent. Saying to an employee, “I’m going to put you on an IDP,” and throwing them an IDP form is worthless. How do we truly customize it? As you’re differentiating for our new performers, solid performers, and exceptional performers, you customize that to that specific talent. That’s what you’re doing. You’re differentiating those levels.

Changing Leaders’ Mindset On Talent Management

It’s beyond the tactical activities. I think strategically. A lot of our leaders struggle with strategy skills to be able to take your toolkit and be very strategic with it in the talent management space. This all applies to my businesses and the little companies I have. Brian, do you find that some of the leaders that you coach and support perhaps have a challenge in understanding the strategic aspect of this and why it’s important that they have to have a mindset beyond throwing a piece of paper to an employee and saying, “Give me your IDP at my next one-on-one.” How do leaders embrace this and want to invest in it? How do you change that mindset so that it’s more of a talent management strategy in the organization?

Some of those conversations happened in the previous company as we were developing this. The initial mandate from the senior leaders was very similar to that, Shar. It was like, “Everybody should be on a plan, so make that happen.” What you have to do in those situations when you’re talking with senior leaders in the C-Suite and so on, one of those coaching things I’ve always espoused is you’ve got to figure out a way to ask questions. It is so that you can self-discover and realize that the path is a little bit more complex than, “Tell everybody they have to be on a plan. Make them write a plan,” and then magic happens, and then suddenly, everybody is on this plan.

It’s asking questions like, “What do you think the overall outcome will be? What are the most important reasons why you want to have people on a development plan? What’s the current state like? What are your pain points? What causes you to say that you want everybody on a plan? Which do you think would be more effective for you if someone asked to write up a plan or if we can get those folks together, the manager and the team leader, and integrate it into part of their overall coaching strategy so that they are moving towards more of a culture of continuous learning and continuous coaching? That also then begins to erode this concept of the annual performance appraisal. It is a giant surprise once a year where you’re like, “I made it through there, so now I don’t have to do anything for the next year.”

I asked Mike, the senior leader at this previous company, AMH, “Would you be interested in something like that? Would it work?” They all said, “That sounds much better. That sounds great.” By moving to a more question or query-based approach rather than telling them, “That’s not going to work,” you can move paradigms a little bit more easily among the senior leaders.

 

When I was an HR business partner back in 2000, we had an IDP template. We thought we were so top age because we said, “Go to this link. Go to the HR link and print off this template.” The leaders would complain because they’d have to take time, sit down with the employees, and go over the IDP. Fast forward 24 years later, we need to leverage technology and AI and make it quick, easy, and efficient to make sure that we can have our devices and that employees can put in their IDPs. We do not just throw them a form. Using AI to learn is the way to go. We have to be more advanced. We have to be up to speed.

We do.

Go ahead. I’d like to know your other ideas on this.

Here are the components of this toolkit. I’ll explain what’s going on here. The technology that we had at our disposal at AMH was pretty limited. Oracle was our HRIS. Believe it or not, Oracle would have the ability to do everything inside the performance management module within Oracle, in my opinion. We had a chance to look at it and give it a try.

We did not have the access or the ability to light up that particular performance management module based on our contracts and based on the realities of the business. We were asked to do it almost the OG or the old-fashioned way. What we did was starting in Canva of all places, we created about an 11 or 12-page document that could be referred back to and could be changed and updated as needed. What we did was we created this in Canva, and then we ported it over to Adobe PDF. We used all the interactive features of PDF to light up fields, check boxes, and have the ability for people to go in, update, and then send along a new updated interactive PDF for the leader to send to the employee.

We started at the end. The very last page of this particular development toolkit was a talent profile. It was an ability in one page for a team member to list, “Here’s where I’ve been. Here’s how long I’ve been at this company. Here’s how long I’ve been at other companies that are similar. Here are some of my accomplishments. Here’s my education. Here’s what I have in terms of education. Here’s what I want to do next within the company. Here are my next three potential positions that I’m thinking about.”

We would give the team members the entire toolkit so they knew what was coming. They knew what the team leader was going to do to fill this out. We wanted them to have the whole toolkit and then fill out the last-page version. The last page was a talent profile. We had the team leaders send this over to the team members and have them fill out as many of the talent profile pages as they could because we knew we would come back to that later in coaching.

With the talent profile mostly completed, the team leader or the manager would then use a series of instructions that were listed to help assess this particular team member’s performance and potential. We are trying to keep it a one-page, a page where they could summarize what this person’s performance was. We showed them where to go. It is based on performance appraisal, other kinds of settings, numbers made, and key metrics. They also need to assess whether they were high, medium, or low in performance based on what they were seeing.

In the potential piece where we asked a series of questions, they would answer whether this team member is low, medium, or high in terms of various aspects of overall potential within the company. It was not only the company’s needs, wants, and desires but also what they thought their assessment of the team members’ behavior was, the team members’ stated desires to move up within the company, whether or not those were stated desires, and so on to create a situation where at the end of that little exercise, they would have low, medium, or high for performance and low, medium or high for potential.

Based on that, we directed them to a single page for developing performers, solid performers, or high performers. Remember, the team members knew all this too because they could see this entire document. The manager would see the list of suggestions. They would get a summary of what a solid performer is, what it is all about, what kinds of things we should emphasize, and what we should maybe de-emphasize. At the bottom of that page, there is a whole list of suggested activities this person could do and books that they could read and review with you, depending on where they were, whether they were developing, solid, or high performers.

Finally, the last step in setting up the toolkit is to meet with the team member and the two of them together. Based on the manager’s diagnosis of where this person was and the agreement of the team members, it would create one, two, or three development activities that they would focus on over the next several months. Some of these activities could go for the whole year and some of them might only take 9 days, 30 days, or whatever.  With that, the manager has a document that shows, “This is what you’re working on.” The team member has a document that says, “This is what I’ve committed to.”

It became the main topic in coaching sessions moving forward. Instead of a coaching session being, “How’s everything going?” and the team member says, “It’s going pretty good. Everything’s fine.” The manager says, “That’s great. I got a whole bunch of other meetings I got to get to. I’m glad you’re doing fine,” and off you go, the meetings between manager and team member became much more of, “Let’s look at the development toolkit. I know we talked about that one meeting that you were going to set up and plan. How is that coming along?”

It could also be like, “You had volunteered to set up that employee resource group. How is that moving along? It is so that we can agree on whether or not we need to change deadlines or whether or not a development activity was completed. Meaning, it was time then to take that off the list and put a new one on the list.”

That’s generally how this particular toolkit worked. All of that kind of information can be done internally in most HRIS systems. If you want to do this in real-time where both the employee and the manager can go to the site, look up and see, and edit as necessary as they go, that’s great. This became a really strong ability for us to also imbue the whole coaching conversation piece that leaders would have with their team members into something that was tangible, something that they knew they had topics. They had things that they could discuss and talk about as they were coaching and people moving on.

I love it. This looks like a solid process, one that’s really easy to follow a way to develop a person and help them navigate their careers. It is making sure that they’re proficient in what they’re currently doing and then understanding their talent profile to see where else they may fit into the organization. Is that true, Brian?

Yeah. I’d agree. It’s interesting. Sometimes, you go low-tech in order to move forward a little bit more. In our company, we did not have the high-tech accessibility to be able to completely automate this. My sense from a principal point of view is that all of this can be completely automated in many companies. For larger companies, you have this inside your HRIS. It can be done in that way.

We used Canva to create it and make it look pretty. We also aligned with all the colors and the branding of the organization. It became a talisman for everyone within the organization. Since the mandate had come from the top and this was the original mandated chart, senior leaders will oftentimes say the what. They will say, “Everybody needs to be on a development plan.” It was up to us in leadership development to say, “Here’s how that’s going to work. You’re all going to get something that you can look at, determine with your manager what you want to do, and continue to revise over time as you continue to grow and develop.”

How Often The Tool Kit Must Be Used

When you have the development toolkit in place, how often should it be reviewed with the employee? Is that a quarterly process? What is typical?

You always wanted to bring out one of these blank interactive PDFs at the very beginning for each and every team member. The team member would fill out that talent profile, and then you’d complete the development plan and a coaching session with your team member. In our company, we originally recommended quarterly. We said, “You need to make sure this is being updated four times a year.”

Since it wasn’t as automated as other constructs can be, there was a little bit of resistance there to saying, “We have to update this and send it off, and then it’s uploaded into Oracle as a document instead of a completely interactive piece in performance management.” We compromised and said, “Let’s do it at least twice a year.”

Based on the calendar year of our organization, we thought March was a good time. It was coming up to the end of the first quarter. It was past some important beginning-of-the-year activities and so on that people were involved with. August was also recommended as the time because if we get this completely updated for each team member around the August timeframe, then it will be very useful going into September, which is when the annual performance review process is.

By that timing, we then began to create an ongoing cycle, a yin and yang of development plans and development toolkits updated, which feed into our assessment or our performance appraisal documentation which occurs between September, October, and November of the year. As we have that conversation around the annual appraisal, that feeds conversations around what we need to do for new development activities or revised development activities on the toolkit, which then began to feed this idea of, “It’s continuous.” The performance appraisal is one part of overall performance management within the company. The toolkits became an extremely important part of that as well.

We said, “You want to update. If a development activity is completed or revised, you want to make that revision or pull that completed activity off, celebrate, and then look to the employee for another one.” We never put a limit on development activities and we never put a minimum on development activities. We said one, two, or three is what we had space for on the single page of the development plan. We didn’t want to overwhelm people by saying, “You have to have fifteen development activities that are all operating at the same time.” One, two, or three seem to be a good number for most people to be able to work with in all the various aspects of the company.

That makes sense. I love the way that you’ve laid out the development plan itself. The really important message for our audience out there is that you don’t need an advanced system to get this done and do it. You can customize this using tools like Canva and making an interactive PDF that can be loaded into almost any system, whether it’s your learning and development system, your HRIS, or whatever it may be, to be a lightweight solution that’s easy for your managers to take a first step in helping their employees to develop and navigate their career.

Why Continuous Growth Requires Structure

Probably the biggest learnings around all of this that I could impart to other companies moving forward is that first of all, if you believe in this idea of continuous growth for your people, then the thing is that you still need some kind of structure. Let’s face it. Team leaders, managers, supervisors, or your leaders within a company are almost swamped with the technical aspects of what they need to do, the reports they need to take care of, the meetings they need to go to, the analysis that they need to make, the constant conversations, and so on.

By giving people a little bit of structure around, “How do we make sure that people are growing and developing well?” You lessen that burden for them. They’re like, “I need to figure out whether this person is 1 of 3 categories. Based on those categories, I have lots of ideas here. I can use any of those ideas or I and the team member can figure it out on our own and we’re going to plug that into development planning.”

 

That becomes a conversation piece for me as a coach. That’s a lot easier than me trying to figure out what I am going to talk about with the eight, twelve, or forty direct reports that I might have in the organization. It lessens the burden for managers overall once you have the initial setup and you have the ball rolling. Within the first year, we had 94% of the company on individual development plans.

That’s incredible. That’s great.

It was a great paradigm shift away from the idea that, “I’m on a plan,” is bad news. Everybody’s on a plan. It’s a plan that you can see and you can share with anyone else and is dynamic enough that you can change it as you go. If at the end of an annual performance appraisal you have decided this solid performer has become a high performer, then that will change your strategy in terms of what you use in the development plan of the person going forward.

Congratulations on that outcome because it’s very difficult to get that kind of percentage for development. I’m impressed.

Thank you.

Getting In Touch With Brian And Closing Words

Brian, for organizations out there or the readers that are saying, “I want to get something like this in my organization,” how can they contact you to bend your ear on this topic?

It’s @ONeillB on LinkedIn and [email protected]. I’m always happy to share and to see what is out there and what things can be done. I have developed this over the years. This is the latest iteration that I have developed. I have done this for several companies over the course of my career. I’m happy to have those conversations. For those companies who really care about their people, this is something that can demonstrate that. It kills many birds with one stone. It’s extremely useful in that way. Over time, it lowers the burden for managers in terms of their coaching.

Thank you so much, Brian, for bringing this to our attention. For our audience out there, what are the top things that you want them to walk away with from this conversation?

First of all, decide what your company is all about. Do you care about the human aspect? If true, then what are you doing to support the growth and development of your team members, employees, or associates in a continuous process? In the same way that you would tend to a garden or a forest, you can’t get plants to grow by throwing fifteen gallons of water on them and then leaving them alone. It doesn’t work that way for people either.

You cannot get plants to grow by throwing fifteen gallons of water on them. The same goes with people. Share on X

What are you committed to? What tools and processes do you have in place or could you leverage in order to create that situation where people feel that they are always working on something to continue to grow and develop themselves within your organization? The end result will be a more lush, more fertile, more innovative, and more successful organization for the long-term for the infinite game.

I love that analogy. You don’t want to drown your people in training. Thank you so much, Brian, for being on the show. It was a great conversation. Thank you so much.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

Thank you.

For our audience out there, we’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you and take care.

 

Important Links

• Korn Ferry
• @ONeillB on LinkedIn
• [email protected]
• The First 90 Days
• The Infinite Game

 

About Brian O’Neill

Brian O’Neill is a dynamic consultant specializing in talent development and organizational excellence. With a reputation for transforming traditional notions of employee training into engaging, impactful, and profit-driving initiatives, Brian brings a wealth of expertise to organizations across industries, including hospitality, financial services, real estate, and beyond.

Leveraging his credentials as a Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) and a Senior Certified Professional with SHRM (SHRM-SCP), Brian combines these with his unique focus on process excellence. The result? Innovative programs that enhance employee engagement, drive retention, and deliver exceptional Net Promoter Scores—all while improving an organization’s bottom line.

Brian’s approach is rooted in creating structures, frameworks, and roadmaps that simplify the path to employee excellence. His work not only boosts organizational performance but also garners industry accolades, like the prestigious 2024 ATD BEST Award.

Passionate about the human experience, Brian thrives in organizations that see people as more than just assets. His specialties include global learning strategy, leadership development, employee engagement, customer experience, curriculum design, competency modeling, AI-enhanced learning, and performance improvement.