Beginner’s Mind, 17 Years In: How Evan Novack Went Back to Management School
Manager Success Spotlight: Evan Novack, Vice President of Technical Training and Development at Hickory
Overview
Evan Novack has spent close to two decades in his family's air conditioning business, most of it running service and wearing every other hat a small company needs somebody to wear. He managed technicians for more than ten years and eventually became co-owner.
So when Hickory ran a private Management Essentials cohort for its own managers, Evan could have made the case that he'd already covered this ground. Instead he went at it the way he'd approach a piece of equipment he'd never seen before. In HVAC, the most dangerous thing an experienced technician does is assume he already knows what's wrong, which is why Evan figured the same trap was waiting for him as a manager. He calls it beginner's mind.
He was right. What he found wasn't a set of ideas he'd never heard. It was a structure for the conversations he'd been avoiding for years, and it arrived just as Hickory handed him a role he'd never held before: building a technical school from scratch, with a team he still has to hire.
Key Takeaways
More than a decade of managing technicians, and the honest admission that experience creates blind spots rather than eliminating them
His feedback ran on two settings, too nice or too angry, with no format in between
In a tight labor market he often avoided hard conversations entirely, worried a good tech would walk in the middle of the busy season
The frameworks gave him a way to name a problem without making it personal, which turned a dreaded confrontation into an ordinary conversation
He went through the program with no direct reports, preparing for a role he's still building, and studied his facilitator's technique as closely as the curriculum
Wearing Every Hat: Learning to Manage Technicians in a Small Business
When Evan came into Airtronics Air Conditioning, the family company he would eventually co-own, he could have run it from a desk. Evan went out into the field instead.
"My father didn't necessarily want me to have to do that work. But I said, this is what I want. I need to understand what this business is."
That decision set the pattern for the next decade and a half. He ran service and did everything else a small company needs somebody to do.
"I was a helper, I was the invoicer, I was the customer service guy, whatever it was. I wore just about every hat."
Managing technicians came with the territory, and by his own count he'd been doing it for ten to twelve years before anything about the job changed. What changed it was Hickory. Evan first met the group in 2019, the two sides circled each other through three versions of a possible deal, and they signed in 2025.
Why Experienced Managers Misdiagnose Their Own Blind Spots
By the time Hickory put its management layer through Management Essentials, Evan had roughly a dozen years of managing technicians behind him. Plenty of people with that much experience would have treated a training program as a box to check. Evan treated it like a service call, because he knows what happens when a good technician skips the diagnosis.
"The biggest problem with an experienced technician is assumption. He's gotten so good at what he does that without properly diagnosing it, he goes, oh, I know what this is."
Those are the expensive mistakes in his trade, and the technicians who make them are almost never the new ones. Management fails the same way, and Evan was willing to say so about his own.
"One could argue, and I would argue, I do know how to manage. But I know I have blocks. I know some of my fundamentals aren't great."
That kind of self-assessment is rarer than it sounds. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found that while about 95% of people believe they're self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are, which means most managers are working from a diagnosis they never ran. Evan ran his, and what came back was specific.
"I'm kind of a quirky, out-there guy, and sometimes I need to be more professional. How do I present myself professionally instead of being the guy who's too nice to you in one moment and too upset with you in another?"
Giving Constructive Feedback Without a Framework
The gap he's describing shows up first in critique, the part of the job that came around every week and that nobody had ever shown him how to do.
"I was not great at critiquing. I was either too nice or too frustrated. I didn't know there was a format."
Without one, every correction became an emotional event he had to manage on both ends. He'd lose his temper, then spend the next half hour walking it back.
"I'd get frustrated, and then I'd have to talk to them for half an hour afterward to tell them how great they were so they weren't too down on themselves."
Even the timing turned into a nightly debate with himself: say it now and risk distracting a technician on a live job, or wait until the end of the day and let it sit. Neither option was a method. Both were guesses.
Avoiding Difficult Conversations in a Tight Labor Market
The harder admission is what happened when he decided not to say anything at all. Airtronics was a small, non-union shop, and losing a technician in the middle of the cooling season wasn't an inconvenience, it was a crisis.
"If somebody did something egregiously wrong in the middle of July, I'd be hesitant to tell them. Because if they left tomorrow, that would create a big problem for me."
That fear only has power over a manager who believes the conversation has to be a confrontation. Without a format, correcting someone meant putting the relationship on the table, so silence looked like the safer trade. It wasn't, because the problem didn't go anywhere. It just got older, and harder to raise.
"A week later that problem gets forgotten, or it's now a weird thing to bring up. It sounds passive-aggressive. So I used to let many of those things slide. And I wasn't being a good leader, because people needed to know what those boundaries are."
The people on the other side of that silence usually want the conversation. In Zenger and Folkman's research, 72% of people said their performance would improve if their managers gave them corrective feedback, and more of them preferred corrective feedback to praise.
How to Give Feedback Without Making It Personal
What changed wasn't Evan's willingness to have the conversation. It was having a shape to put it in, which took the charge out of it.
"What Oxygen gave me is a framework to be assertive and communicate where problems are without it becoming a personal issue. Just a professional issue."
In practice that means naming the behavior and the ripple it creates, and stopping there.
"Hey, when you do this, customers are unhappy and your coworkers don't respect it. You're not a bad person, I'm not saying it's malicious. This thing needs to stop because it has this impact."
Then he connects it to something the technician actually wants, which is the step that keeps it from landing as a reprimand.
"Better teams make more money, and more money means more money for raises. You tie that sequence together instead of, bro, you messed up. That last one is personal, and that's often how it felt."
Manager Training Before You Have Direct Reports: Putting a Facilitator to Work
Because the cohort was private, the room was full of Hickory people, managers from across the brands who went back to their teams on Friday and used the material on Monday. The curriculum was built around the work they actually do. Evan had no team to go back to.
"I literally have to develop a team, which I don't have yet. Most people were managing people already, so they could use what they learned that day. For me there's a lot more extraction, but still valuable."
Hickory created the role for him: Vice President of Technical Training and Development, reporting directly to the CEO. The mandate is to build a technical school on the third floor of a Hickory building, with continuing education and paid training days for current technicians on one side, and a pipeline that teaches new recruits air conditioning from the ground up on the other.
The freedom is total, and that's the problem.
"With that carte blanche comes so many possibilities that it's easy to get stuck. Who is the school for? What do I want to teach? Where do I have convention and where do I have innovation?"
That's where the program paid off for him, and not only through the curriculum. Evan came in with a second agenda, since he's about to teach for a living and has opinions about how his trade gets taught.
"Air conditioning is often taught too technically. I really enjoy it when I can convey something simply that was complex before."
So he watched Michael, his facilitator, the way a future teacher watches a good one: how he opened a room of 20-some people who didn't all know each other, how he kept it moving without rushing anyone. Then he took his own work to the one-on-one sessions that come with the cohort, and used every one he could get.
"He really held the space, and he intuitively knew the right questions to ask. He had the ability to find my obstructions to my leadership and even to my creativity."
What came out of it was more concrete than a mindset. With Michael's help, Evan built a survey and sent it through the managers of every Hickory brand, asking technicians what they actually want to learn. That turns the first and hardest question about the school, who it's for and what it teaches, from a guess into data. The floor goes under construction shortly, continuing education starts before the buildout is finished in what Evan calls a white box, and recruiting is targeted for around the winter.
"You Get Out What You Put In"
Asked what else people should know, Evan aims his answer at the companies writing the check as much as the managers in the room. Oxygen holds participants accountable, he says, but the sponsor has to do the same, or send people who'll do it themselves.
"Some of it depends on you, and your exposure and repetition to the material. Everything can't be done in an hour and a half."
The reason to bother, for him, sounds like where he's from.
"If you have the aspiration to be great, you have to have those tools. You may know some, you don't know all."
Which brings it back to the assumption. The technician who's certain he already knows what's wrong is the one who misses it, and the manager who's certain he already knows how to manage is running the same risk with people instead of equipment.
Ready to train your whole management layer together instead of sending people off to another online course? Explore Management Essentials, see what other managers have to say, or look at the results.