I Didn't Think This Was For Me: How a Seasoned Manager Found the Magic in Management Essentials
Manager Success Spotlight: Rico Gardaphe, Head of Mission Control at Hickory
Overview
Rico Gardaphe has been managing people for most of his career, leading teams across a range of industries over more than two decades before landing as Head of Mission Control at Hickory. By the time Oxygen's Management Essentials cohort came around, he had given feedback, run meetings, and led teams thousands of times.
So when Hickory decided to put managers through the program, Rico assumed his job was to nominate first-time managers, not to attend himself. Then he saw his own name on the list. He went to the first couple of sessions expecting a refresher he'd mostly sit out, and instead, in his words, "absolutely fell in love with it." His story is the one plenty of experienced managers need to hear: the value wasn't being taught something new, it was finally putting names, structure, and shared language around instincts he'd spent twenty years building. You can see more of those outcomes across Oxygen's programs.
Key Takeaways
A highly experienced manager who assumed the program was for first-timers and was surprised to see his own name on the list.
He went in skeptical, expecting a refresher, and "absolutely fell in love with it"
The payoff wasn't new information. It was names and structure for instincts he'd built over years, which made them easier to teach and repeat.
He credits the program's "magic" to facilitation that pulled lessons out of the room instead of lecturing.
A point he's repeated since the program: leadership is a behavior, not a spot on the org chart.
Management Training: Not Just for New Managers
Rico came into the program certain it wasn't meant for him. He has real management pedigree, and he'd sat through plenty of leadership trainings over the years.
"I heard through the grapevine that we were going to put people through an executive training program, and I was asked to nominate first-time managers. I have a lot of management experience in my career, so I didn't think I was going to be part of the cohort. I thought I was putting up the names of first-time managers. Then I saw my name on a list, so I went to the first couple of meetings, and I was like, oh, I guess this is for me too. And I absolutely fell in love with it."
That skepticism is exactly why his reaction matters. He'd been in the room before and expected more of the same.
"It is the most comprehensive, sticky, relevant, and digestible arrangement of these principles I've ever seen, and I've been in a bunch. That's honestly why I thought I wasn't going to do it. I'd done these trainings plenty of times. I figured I'd get my new managers up and running and skip most of the sessions myself."
Rico is far from alone in being self-taught. By some estimates, nearly 60% of new managers receive no formal training before stepping into the role, and many experienced managers never get it either. As Rico put it, reflecting on his early years running teams: "I was learning all this stuff on my own, how to give feedback, how to read whether someone's happy or not with a decision. I fell in love with it. But no one ever actually trained me on that stuff."
The Magic Was in How It Was Taught
Ask Rico what made the difference, and he keeps returning to the same word.
"I'll use the word magic. Michael, our facilitator, magically kept us on schedule and on point. He never rushed anybody through a long-winded answer, but he'd get to the heart of the matter without you realizing you were digesting it. The academic side, the psychology, the best practices, the white-paper takeaways: you were just talking about your own daily work."
Rather than lecture the frameworks, Michael pulled them out of the room.
"He'd say, ‘Someone tell me about a time you had to give tough feedback,’ and I'm thinking, I've done that a thousand times in my life. And the way the terms were phrased, from having done it really well and really poorly and while you're tired and distracted, all of that matched the content of the curriculum. The content was a wonderful blend ofthe best thinking from literature and psychology, without pushing it on you. He elevated it through the stories we brought to each session. It was extraordinarily seamless."
He also points to a small piece of facilitation that quietly kept everyone moving: nobody fell behind.
"You could imagine a version of the program where if you missed session four, the lessons of sessions five and six wouldn't stick. But Michael always did a quick callback: remember in session four when we talked about X and Y. Even if you weren't there, you understood the context. You could watch this week's episode and not miss a beat. That was kind of masterful."
When a Framework Finally Gets a Name
The clearest example of what a veteran gains showed up around feedback, something Rico had done more than almost anything else in his career.
"I've managed dozens of employees in a lot of different contexts. I've given feedback a thousand times. I'm very comfortable with it, and all of that can lead you to say, I don't need any training on this. But there was still stuff I found a way to do better."
The turning point was a framework the program calls SBI+.
"One of the feedback frameworks is SBI+: situation, behavior, impact, and then a plus, what are you going to do about it. What clicked for me was that it put a name on something I'd earned through years of experience. I wasn't seeing the idea for the first time, but now I'll never forget it.
And once it had a name, it became something he could hand to someone else in seconds.
"I was talking to somebody who's probably going to be in our next cohort, and he was describing how he was going to strategize to give someone feedback. Instantly I just said, SBI+. In about 45 seconds I explained what would have taken me 19 minutes before, if I hadn't had that really tight definition. The frameworks are pulled from the leading management thinking out there, and they're packaged in a thoughtful way, where you're not just handed the framework and sent on your way. You get to apply it."
Leadership Is a Behavior, Not a Title
The second thing Rico calls "magic" is an idea he's been repeating around Hickory ever since.
"The other part of the magic we got from this program is something I've been trying to say a lot, which is that leadership is not about where you are on the org chart. Leadership is a behavior. From a dispatcher's seat, here's how you can lead. From a service manager's seat, here's how you lead. Don't worry about who outranks who. Everybody has an opportunity to play a leadership role, and a lot of our sessions demonstrated that on a regular basis."
He connects it to a lesson from his organizing days about multiplying yourself through the people around you.
"In the political organizing world we used to talk about ‘organizing yourself out of a job.’ You're not trying to knock on 700 doors yourself, you're recruiting fifteen volunteers who knock on a hundred each. You build an infrastructure alongside you to get the work done, and that takes trusting others, delegating, empowering people. A lot of the lessons in this program show you how to do exactly that. You multiply yourself a little bit."
Why the Format Made It Stick
Rico's first reaction to the calendar was the same one a lot of busy managers have.
"The first time I saw it, Michael said we're doing this over the next twelve weeks, and I was like, what, I don't have time for that. But when I think back to the bite-size, three-hour versions I got earlier in my career, the most you can hope for with three hours and sixteen people on a call is an introduction to a concept."
Stretched over weeks, the program did something those crash courses never could.
"None of the concepts had to be rushed. It genuinely builds. Each week builds on the last, and you can refer back to everything you were introduced to before. You have to tell someone something five or six times before it really clicks, and this program gave it the time to do that."
That's the pitch he now gives when someone asks him what Oxygen actually is.
"It's like taking the sixty best books on the six concepts that matter most to being a good manager, ten books for each, and bringing them to life for your teams in a way that's stickier than anywhere else I've seen. It is a time investment, but the return is real. The single,three-hour session is cheap, and you get what you pay for."
What He Tells People on the Fence
Rico's advice for the experienced manager who thinks they can skip this is essentially the story of his own conversion.
"You can buy these books for your teams and they'll sit on the shelf, or you can go through the training. It's an MBA-level education for the middle-management layer, hyper-focused on it, in a way nobody else has really figured out how to do as well. It's really hard to hire management talent at every layer of an organization, so building it this way is a smart move."
And the value, he says, was as real for him as it will be for the first-timers he originally set out to nominate.
"For some of our managers this will be the first time they've ever heard these ideas. For some it's the fourth, and for me it was probably the fifteenth. It didn't matter. It's the most comprehensive and sticky version of it I've ever been through."
Ready to give your managers more than another online course? Explore Management Essentials or see what other managers have to say.
