Trained Before the Title: How Oxygen Prepared Daria Pozharko to Step Into Management at the Human Rights Foundation

Ask a manager when they last stepped back to rethink how they lead their team, and most will give you a blank look. There's never time. You're buried in the daily minutia, the calendar fills itself, and the question of whether your approach still works quietly never gets asked.

Daria Pozharko found that time before the manager title was ever official.

When she joined Oxygen's Management Essentials cohort in spring of 2025, she was the HR & Operations Coordinator at the Human Rights Foundation. She was already leading direct reports; the formal title just hadn't caught up yet. Passing the program was written into the plan for her promotion, and a few months after finishing she stepped into the HR & Operations Manager role, now with two direct reports and an intern.

That's the reverse of how it usually goes. Nearly 6 in 10 managers say they got no training at all before stepping into the role (CareerBuilder). Daria got hers first, then earned the title.

From office administrator to running HR and operations

Daria has been with the Human Rights Foundation for four and a half years, and her path there has been one of steady progression. She started as the office administrator, earned her SHRM certification along the way, and kept taking on more. She'd managed a report or two earlier in her career, but that was freelance work in a different setting. HRF is where her management experience became substantial, and, in her words, the most successful experience on her resume.

Her academic background had covered management, but from a distance:

"The courses I took as part of my bachelor's degree were more about how to manage an organization, rather than how to manage people or work. It was operations management, tracking financial assets, and so on. I had a course on HR, but more from the standpoint of legislation and paperwork. It was as if you were becoming the CEO of an organization from the jump, rather than working with people at the earlier stages of your career."

Oxygen was the opposite. As she put it simply: "it's more hands on."

Time to step back and actually think about the job

For Daria, the biggest value wasn't a single framework. It was the permission to stop and reconsider what being a manager actually asks of you.

"You're often so stuck in the daily minutia that you don't have the time to take a step back and reassess whether the schedules or the communication plan you have with the team is still working. Do I need to adjust something? Am I paying enough attention to certain areas of our collaboration? With Oxygen, it was this opportunity to step back and dedicate some meaningful time to reconsidering my role as a manager, and making it more meaningful, more structured, and better organized."

You can hear the relief in that. Not a new tactic, but room to think, which is the one thing a busy manager almost never has.

The training was part of the promotion plan

Daria went through Management Essentials as a coordinator. The promotion came a few months after she finished, and the two were connected on purpose.

"It was part of the discussion that once I passed the program and had the SHRM certification in place, it would be a good time to consider a promotion. It would give me the necessary assets to progress further in my role."

It's a different proof point than the usual "we trained a struggling manager and things got better." Here, the organization used the training to develop someone into a bigger role before handing her the title.

From transactional to strategic

The tools that stuck were about communication as structure, not communication as a soft skill. Daria came away thinking about her team proactively instead of reactively.

"It introduces ideas on how to strategically think about communicating and working with your direct reports, rather than just overseeing the day-to-day work transactionally. That's part of our general effort to bring more structure, document our processes, and create SOPs."

That fit matters. HRF has grown past 100 team members and is deliberately building more structure across the organization. Oxygen's emphasis on intentional communication mapped onto exactly where HRF was already trying to go.

The cohort and the mentor

Daria valued the format as much as the content. Six months, in a cohort, practicing real scenarios with peers.

"It was more beneficial for me to participate in person, to share ideas live, and to practice some of these workplace scenarios with other team members. It has a better effect than just watching a video."

She also singled out office hours with her mentor, Michael:

"He took the time to consider my request and have a discussion, and beyond that he was really attentive to what people were saying in all the group discussions. I really enjoyed working with Michael."

The view from the inside: who goes through it next

Here's what makes Daria's perspective unusual. She isn't just a graduate of the program. As HR & Operations Manager, she now helps decide who at HRF goes through it next, working alongside the organization's Chief Talent Officer.

Fifteen managers have completed the training so far, with about six more in line, and HRF is still growing fast, with new managers emerging almost every month. Daria weighs how many people someone manages against how much experience they already bring. The managers she sees benefit most are the ones who came up inside HRF:

"We have quite a few managers for whom HRF was their first workplace. They started with us as interns, progressed into full-time roles, and then into managerial roles. For them it's especially beneficial, since they might not have any other formal training on how to be a manager."

Her case for the investment is clear-eyed about the tradeoff:

"Considering the time commitment, it's a good thing to do to gain basic but very necessary tools for new managers and how to collaborate with their team. In the longer run it helps support the manager and makes sure they don't get burned out juggling multiple responsibilities and teams. You think about approaching communication with your direct reports proactively, rather than reactively putting out fires."

The goal, she says, is for every manager at HRF to go through it.

Why it matters

Daria's story makes a simple case: great managers are developed, not discovered, and the best time to develop them is often before they get the title. The stakes are hard to overstate. Gallup finds that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, which makes it the highest-leverage role in the company and the one most often left untrained.

At HRF, the investment started at the top and hasn't slowed, cohort after cohort. Daria is what that looks like in practice: someone who stepped into a bigger role already carrying the tools to do it well. And now she's the one deciding who gets that same head start next.

CTA: Give your managers more than another online course. Explore Management Essentials, see how Oxygen partners with HR and People Operations teams, or set up a discovery call.

Related reading: More Manager Success Spotlights on the Oxygen blog, including fellow HRF leader Michelle Gulino's story.