Director of Learning & OD | Author of Quick Bites of Insight | Transforming enterprise talent strategy by engineering leadership into the daily rhythm of work
The average manager does not wake up wondering how to be a visionary. They wake up wondering how to survive a calendar packed with back-to-back appointments. They are moving from a budget crisis to a personality conflict, then straight into a strategic planning session. In these high-pressure transitions, the formal leadership training they received three years ago feels like a distant, polite memory.
This is the tension where Ryan McCrea operates. He understands that leadership is rarely found in the grand gestures or the off-site retreats. It is found in the quiet, often overlooked decisions made in the two minutes before a call begins. It is a discipline of small moments. If development does not happen in the middle of the work, McCrea argues, it simply does not happen at all.
Most organizations treat learning like an event. They pull people out of their environments, douse them in theory, and expect them to return transformed. McCrea sees the flaw in this architecture. He views leadership through the lens of industrial organizational psychology, recognizing that behavior change requires more than just information. It requires a system that meets the leader exactly where they are.
The Dojo of Patience
McCrea’s perspective on human development started long before he was managing talent for thousands of employees. It began in his father’s martial arts dojo in a small Indiana town. As a young instructor, he initially believed leadership was a performance of authority. He thought the person with the most answers won.
The dojo corrected that assumption quickly. He watched students struggle with techniques not because they lacked effort, but because they lacked confidence or focus. Pushing harder only caused them to shut down. He realized that his instinct to direct was often an obstacle to their growth.
He began to replace instructions with inquiries. He asked what felt off or what they were trying to achieve in that specific movement. This shift from commander to curator of space changed everything. People responded to being understood rather than being managed. It was an early lesson in the power of the question, a tool he still carries into executive boardrooms today.
From Education to Product
Throughout his career at giants like Ameren, Monsanto, and Atlassian, McCrea has noticed a persistent gap in how companies handle growth. Many Learning and Development teams operate like school districts. They focus on curriculum, completion rates, and “teaching” their employees.
McCrea argues for a pivot toward a product mindset. In his view, a leadership program is a product, and the managers are the customers. If the customer isn’t “buying” the behavior change, the product is a failure, regardless of how many people finished the online module. This commercial reality is what separates his work from traditional HR functions.
At Ameren, this meant consolidating learning infrastructure to save $1.3 million while simultaneously increasing manager enablement participation by 40%. It wasn’t just about cutting costs. It was about making the development experience so seamless and relevant that leaders chose to engage with it. He stripped away the fluff and focused on the ROI of human capability.
The Weight of the Manager
We often underestimate the impact a direct supervisor has on a person’s life. McCrea frequently points out that a manager often has more influence on an employee’s emotional wellbeing than their partner or their friends. A bad boss is a health hazard; a good one is a catalyst for life-changing growth.
This realization led McCrea to write Quick Bites of Insight. He saw that leaders were drowning in content but starving for application. They didn’t need a 300-page manual on servant leadership. They needed a two-page prompt they could read between meetings and apply in their very next conversation.
His philosophy centers on the idea of micro-learning as a social habit. He encourages teams to take five minutes during existing meetings to discuss a single concept. This bypasses the “I don’t have time for training” excuse. It embeds development into the rhythm of the business, turning the workplace itself into the classroom.
The McCrea Playbook: 5 Lessons
- Own the Architecture: No one cares more about your career than you do, so you must be the primary architect of your own growth.
- Shorten the Feedback Loop: Growth happens in small, consistent increments, not in once-a-year performance reviews.
- Ask, Don’t Tell: Leadership is not about having every answer but about creating the psychological space for others to find them.
- Think Like a Product Manager: Learning programs must solve real user problems or they will be ignored by the people who need them most.
- Focus on Impact over Effort: True leadership is measured by what changes for other people, not by how hard the leader is working.
The Commerce of Culture
While at Commerce Bank, McCrea led a transformation that saw development focused engagement jump from 66% to 82%. He did this by replacing the antiquated annual review with a model called ALIGN. This shifted the focus toward continuous conversation.
It was a move away from the “event” of the performance appraisal and toward the “habit” of coaching. By achieving an 85% monthly check-in rate across 4,500 employees, he proved that people actually want to grow when the system supports them. They don’t want more meetings; they want more meaningful interactions.
McCrea’s work suggests that culture is not a set of posters on a wall. It is the sum of every small decision made by every manager every day. When those decisions are grounded in intentionality, the organization becomes more than just a place to work. It becomes an engine for human potential.
The Next Frontier
As McCrea looks toward the future, he remains rooted in his hometown of St. Louis while keeping an eye on the global landscape of work. He is currently focused on how AI can enable more personalized learning and how distributed teams can maintain a culture of development across time zones.
He is not looking for roles that simply maintain the status quo. He seeks environments where strategy meets reality, and where the work of growing people is seen as the primary lever for growing the business. For McCrea, the goal is clear: make leadership hard to fake and impossible to ignore.
He continues to push the boundary of what talent development can be. He remains a student of the craft, always looking for the next “quick bite” of wisdom that can turn a mundane meeting into a transformative moment. In a world of noise, he is a proponent of the signal.
Leadership is a series of everyday decisions that either build or break the people around you.
