Building Great Managers at Flat Iron with Gina Knight

When Gina joined Flat Iron three years ago, it had nine restaurants and around 540 employees. It now has 23 locations and more than 1,300 people. The informal ways of working that worked for a small company no longer fit. Managers needed clearer processes, more support and the confidence to handle tough conversations early.Adam Lacey talks with Gina Knight, who leads all things people at Flat Iron, about how her team is helping managers grow without making things more complicated than they need to be.Gina shares why development should keep going after someone becomes a manager. Her team looks at people data to see how talent moves through the company and spots where people get stuck. Then, they create simple tools to help managers handle these challenges.One of these tools is a decision tree for performance issues. It guides managers to check things like probation status, working hours, health and other underlying issues before deciding what kind of conversation to have. The tool doesn't give a final answer, but it helps managers think through the problem, make fairer decisions and feel more confident when talking with their team.Gina also talks about how Flat Iron builds these tools into induction, development programmes and operational reviews. About 70% of employees now say they've had a review with their manager in the last three months, up from 54%. Hardly anyone appeals disciplinary decisions anymore.They also discuss using AI to find better insights without replacing human judgement, why polished presentations can fall apart when candidates cannot explain the thinking behind them, and how broadening your perspective, creating access and taking action can shape your career.What you'll learn in this episodeWhy managers need ongoing development, even after they get promotedHow simple decision trees can help managers have fairer and more confident conversations about performanceHow people data can show where problems come up in hiring, development, promotion and retentionHow Flat Iron makes management tools part of daily work, not just a one-time rolloutWhy AI should support people's judgement rather than do their thinking for themHow broadening your perspective, creating access and taking action can open up more career opportunities🔗 Connect with Gina via LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ginamarieknight📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSjW0👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Brigid McCormack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidmccormack/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work, plus the AI Confidence Method, a workforce AI change programme that measures what your people really think about AI and then changes it. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSkk0Privacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

Most organisations know what their employees have done at work. They know far less about what those same people learn through hobbies, volunteering and life outside the job. Useful skills can stay hidden until someone thinks to ask.That gap is the subject of Adjacent Learning, a book about recognising the knowledge and skills people gain outside an organisation and bring back into work. Adam Lacey speaks to co-author David Hayden about where that knowledge comes from, why employers miss it and how L&D can make better use of it.David has worked in learning since 1988, with roles at Royal Mail, in manufacturing and at the CIPD. He is also co-author of the fourth and fifth editions of Learning and Development Practice in the Workplace. Through Talent Delivers, he now supports people who are new to organisation design and organisation development.For Adjacent Learning, David and Steve George asked around 40 contributors one question: “What do you do outside of work that makes you a better employee in work?” Only one person said they had consciously made that connection before. Their answers covered rock climbing, fishing, parkrun, a book club and a community of women going through menopause.David argues that the usual workplace systems make this knowledge easy to lose. Recruitment may uncover it, but induction focuses on what the organisation needs the new employee to know. One training coordinator, for example, had built his own website and knew enough about technology to help with a system problem. Nobody had asked him.His advice is to start with conversation, not a company-wide survey. Add “What have you learned this week?” to an existing meeting or training session. Use a World Café for a larger group. Let people choose what they want to share, especially where trust is low. As David puts it, L&D does not own people’s learning.David and Steve also include a framework for L&D teams that want to use Adjacent Learning. It starts by defining the development question they need to answer. From there, they can look for relevant knowledge, decide what might help and work out how to use it. The same questions can help an individual think more broadly about their own development.What you’ll learn:What Adjacent Learning means, and why life outside work can change how someone performs at workThe question David and Steve used to uncover skills that contributors had never linked to developmentHow recruitment finds useful experience that a “steamroller induction” can quickly leave behindWhy David recommends conversations, meetings and World Cafés instead of another mass surveyHow the book’s framework helps L&D teams and individuals think beyond formal workplace learningWhere organisation development goes beyond L&D, plus four lessons for new practitioners🔗 Connect with David via LinkedIn - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/david-hayden-8176919📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSjW0👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Brigid McCormack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidmccormack/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work, plus the AI Confidence Method, a workforce AI change programme that measures what your people really think about AI and then changes it. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSkk0Privacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

You have a disability inclusion policy. The hard part is making a disabled colleague actually feel the difference. That part costs nothing, and most of it sits with your line managers.Esi Hardy has spent almost ten years turning disability inclusion policies into practice. Her company, Celebrating Disability, trains line managers to spot the barriers a disabled colleague faces and fix them. At Homes for Students, the UK's largest student accommodation provider, disability disclosure rose by 91% in the first 18 months of that training.Brigid McCormack sits down with Esi Hardy, Managing Director of Celebrating Disability. They ask what a policy can and cannot do, and how to run training that includes every person in the room.Esi is a disabled leader herself, and Celebrating Disability was named Best Disability Inclusion Consultancy 2026 in South West England by Corporate Vision.For Esi, a policy puts your intentions in writing, and nothing more. The real work is testing it against the working day. She also draws a line between accessibility and inclusion. Accessibility is the tools that get a disabled person to a meeting. Inclusion is how they feel once they are in it.Her message is simple: be inclusive even when you think no one is looking. There are a billion business cases for disability inclusion, but the main reason is why not.What you'll learn:Why over 80% of disabled people have a disability you cannot seeWhat separates accessibility from inclusion, and why you cannot do one first and the other laterHow to stress test a policy against a real working daySmall changes to any training session that cost nothing, from reading slides aloud to sending codes early🔗 Connect with Esi via LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/esihardy/📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSjW0👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Brigid McCormack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidmccormack/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work, plus the AI Confidence Method, a workforce AI change programme that measures what your people really think about AI and then changes it. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSkk0Privacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

Your programme ran well. People learnt something new. Then they went back to their desks, and six months later nothing has changed. Usually L&D gets the blame.Amy Brann thinks the blame lands in the wrong place. Her argument is about the way a company is set up: decision rights, meeting load and psychological safety. That set-up can cancel out good training. She calls it friction architecture. The skills are still there. People just cannot use them once they are back at work.Adam Lacey sits down with Amy Brann, founder of Synaptic Potential, the people strategies consultancy she started after leaving medical school.Amy has spent 20 years helping organisations around the world get better work out of their people. She writes books on the brain, advises chief executives, and recently took this argument to the McKinsey Global CFO conference.Most L&D leaders have already felt the workplace undo their work. What they have lacked is the language to prove it. Amy builds that case from what a company actually does rather than what people say they feel, which is much harder for a leadership team to wave away.She also explains why your brain reacts to a social threat much like a physical one. She covers what she would ask a chief executive before taking an L&D job, and the free calculator that puts a rough cost on the whole thing.Amy's point is that training people and fixing the place they work in are not two things competing for the same budget. They are two halves of one job. Whatever L&D builds, the workplace decides how much of it survives.What you'll learn: Why the way a company is set up can cancel out training that worked How to tell a skills problem apart from a workplace problem Why a problem that comes back after you train different people is a system fault, not a people fault Three things to check instead of asking people how they feel How to quantify what the problem is costing, so the CFO engages with it Amy's three tips for anyone starting out in L&D, including why the biggest fixes are rarely training🔗 Connect with Amy via LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amybrann/📮 The Assembly Debrief A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSjW0👋 Come and connect with us We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world. Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Brigid McCormack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidmccormack/More from The Assembly & Assemble You Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work, plus the AI Confidence Method, a workforce AI change programme that measures what your people really think about AI and then changes it. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSkk0Privacy & Data This podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

Most L&D teams know the frustration: you run the workshop, people enjoy it, the feedback is positive… and then everyone goes back to work and nothing really changes.Kira Squire is taking a different approach. When LastPass identified continuous feedback as a significant organisational challenge, she didn't just build a training programme. She designed an ongoing system around it, combining pre-work, live practice, conversation guides, quarterly feedback cycles, manager briefings and continued reinforcement.Adam Lacey sits down with Kira Squire, award-winning Learning and Development professional at LastPass, to explore how she's using L&D to help create a culture where feedback becomes part of everyday work rather than something reserved for annual performance reviews.Kira was named the 2025 winner of the Unsung Hero (Vendor/Distributor) category at the CRN UK Women & Diversity in Channel Awards, and the LastPass Learning & Development team is a finalist for the OnCon Top 100 Learning & Development Team Award 2026.Kira's starting point was simple: understand the problem before creating the solution. Following feedback from LastPass's annual people survey, she worked with senior leaders, People Partners, managers and employees to understand what was getting in the way. What emerged wasn't a motivation problem. People wanted to have better feedback conversations, but many lacked the skills and confidence to know how to approach them.She explains how she built the business case, why leadership was already behind it before she started, how she designed for a global remote-first organisation across different cultures and time zones, and how she deliberately built reinforcement into the programme from the beginning.For Kira, workshops are a catalyst, not the destination, and the real measure of success is what happens when nobody from L&D is watching.What you'll learn:Why continuous feedback needs to become part of everyday work rather than something reserved for performance reviews How to identify the real problem behind an L&D request before jumping into solution design Why leaders buy solutions to business problems, not training, and how to approach senior stakeholders when you're new to an organisation Why a workshop is a catalyst, not the destination, and how reinforcement can turn learning into lasting behaviour Why confidence, not willingness, is what usually stops people from having feedback conversations🔗 Connect with Kira LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kira-squire/📮 The Assembly Debrief A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter👋 Come and connect with us We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world. Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Brigid McCormack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidmccormack/More from The Assembly & Assemble You Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.comPrivacy & Data This podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

Most L&D is built for a captive audience: employees who have to attend whether the training is any good or not. Emma Ackers builds for the opposite, an audience that can walk away. Her learners are external insurance brokers, free to ignore her work entirely, and that one difference sharpens how she designs it.Adam Lacey sits down with Emma Ackers, Learning and Development Manager at Aviva and President of the Insurance Institute of Manchester. Emma is not a typical in-house L&D lead. She designs learning for Aviva's broker partners, the firms who sell insurance out in the market. It is offered to those brokers as a service, which means they only take it up if it genuinely helps them.With 21 years in insurance, starting out as a broker herself before moving into learning, Emma knows first-hand the day job her learners are trying to do.She explains why the first question is always the business problem the broker is facing and never the course itself, the ambassador model she uses to test an idea with a trusted group of brokers before rolling it out to everyone, and why she judges success by whether people apply the learning back at work more than by how many turned up.What you'll learn:Why building for an audience that can walk away makes learning sharper and more useful for everyoneHow starting from the business problem, rather than the training, builds the value in from the first conversationThe ambassador model: testing a new idea with a trusted group of customers before you roll it out to everyoneWhy the best insurance professionals need both technical knowledge and people skills, and how Emma develops bothHow volunteering, including leading the Insurance Institute of Manchester, builds skills your day job never will🔗 Connect with EmmaLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmaackers/📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.comPrivacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

If the value conversation happens at the end of your projects, the only question left is how to justify what you have already built.Adam sits down with Tom McDowall, who through Evolve LD helps organisations upskill their L&D, training and HR teams in practical ways of working, to unpack a distinction that changes how a function operates: the difference between proving you were valuable after the fact and asking how you can be valuable before anything gets made.From managing a sales team, to delivering the same induction week after week for a year and a half, to leading digital teams and chairing the Learning Network, Tom brings a practitioner's lens to measurement, with a fully worked example and real numbers to go with it.He breaks down the metric chain that connects an intervention to a board-level objective, why line managers are already doing the observation L&D is not capturing, and where AI has finally become good enough to do the statistical work.What you'll learn: Why proving value after the fact is a conversation no other business function has to have, and what to ask instead How to build a metric chain from intervention to behaviour to KPI to organisational objective, and how certain you should expect to be at each link Why every learning asset needs a sunset date, and how zombie content survives in most catalogues How to get closer to your own business, from reading the annual report to what to say when you ask for an hour of the C-suite's time🔗 Connect with Tom LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-mcdowall/📮 The Assembly Debrief A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter👋 Come and connect with us We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world. Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/More from The Assembly & Assemble You Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.comPrivacy & Data This podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

If your learning programmes are built on instinct and inherited habits, the science of how the brain actually learns changes what good design looks like.Brigid McCormack sits down with Tessa Forshaw, a cognitive scientist who studies how we work, learn and create, to unpack what neuroscience reveals about how adults really learn, and the myths still shaping L&D.A cognitive scientist, award-winning designer, TEDx speaker and co-author of Innovation-ish, Tessa co-founded the Next Level Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaches at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She spent more than a decade designing corporate L&D before going back to study how the brain learns, and now brings that science back to real teams.She breaks down why learning styles do not hold up, why nobody can multitask and how memory really works, then turns the science into practical design: learning that is deep, durable and practiced.What you'll learn:Why the learning styles myth falls apart under the science, and how to match the method to the content rather than the personWhy nobody can truly multitask, and the switching costs that break focus every time a learner dips into the side chatHow memory really works, and why retrieval practice beats leaving recall to chanceThe groove in the sand model for building deep and durable learning through effort and desirable difficultyWhy the strongest L&D leaders are moving from content provider to strategic advisor as AI automates the rest🔗 Connect with Tessa ForshawLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessaforshaw/📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.comPrivacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

If your L&D team keeps landing the last seat at the table, the way in is to get close to the commercial reality of the business.Brigid McCormack sits down with Lori Anne Powell, leadership development consultant and co-founder of LVL London, to unpack how L&D earns influence the way any function does: with credibility, trust and results the business can see.Lori began her career at Harrods and went on to lead learning and development across Europe, the Middle East and Africa as Director of L&D at Tiffany & Co., supporting multi-territory teams at scale. She brings a commercial, human-centred lens to how learning drives performance in premium service environments.She breaks down how to build a commercial mindset in L&D, how to influence stakeholders when you do not hold budget or authority, and what luxury retail's high-stakes shop floor teaches every learning leader.What you'll learn:Why the most impactful learning creates a pull rather than a push, and how to build that appetiteHow to influence without authority by diagnosing before you prescribe, and making the stakeholder part of the solutionWhat it means to be the commercial thinking partner, and how to reverse engineer learning from sales, retention and developmentWhy the shop floor is where strategy meets reality, and how to close the friction between it and head officeThe skills for life that retail builds better than anywhere: presence, reading a room and recovering from rejection🔗 Connect with Lori Anne PowellLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-powell/📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.comPrivacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

If your leaders keep asking for the perfect words before every difficult conversation, what they are missing is not a better script. It is confidence in their own judgment.Brigid McCormack sits down with Amy Smith, Inclusion Campaign Manager at Business in the Community, to unpack person-centred leadership: the idea that fairness does not necessarily mean sameness, that leaders shape people's experience of work and not just their performance, and that inclusion is a leadership challenge rather than a language one.With over seven years designing and delivering culture, engagement, belonging and workplace wellbeing initiatives across complex organisations, Amy brings a lens shaped by her own lived experience, being mixed race, neurodivergent and moving continents, to how leaders create dignity at work.She breaks down the psychological contract and why neglecting it surfaces later as lost trust, innovation and retention, the three-part toolkit she leans on in place of a script, and how DEI work is changing as leaders try to sustain connection and fairness in a more polarised environment.What you'll learn:Why fairness does not necessarily mean sameness, and what person-centred leadership looks like in practiceThe cost of promoting leaders on technical expertise alone, and why it only shows up later in trust, innovation and retentionHow leaders weaken the psychological contract without noticing, and why picking apart superficial details signals that uncertainty is unsafeThe three things in Amy's leadership toolkit in place of a script: accountability, change capability and capacity buildingWhy AI can hand you a script but not judgment, and how to interview, develop and measure for the skill that matters🔗 Connect with AmyLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-smith-yprofile/📮 The Assembly DebriefA short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter👋 Come and connect with usWe're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/More from The Assembly & Assemble YouLearning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.comPrivacy & DataThis podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/