The missing layer in most L&D strategies: How Adam Hickman operationalizes engagement at a Walt Disney company
.png)
Adam Hickman did not take a straight line to his role leading employee development at Partners Federal Credit Union, part of The Walt Disney Company.
He trained for the UFC, worked in telecommunications and airlines, and spent nearly a decade at AT&T building learning programs across eighty call centers before finding his way to Gallup and, eventually, to Disney.
That unconventional path gave him something many L&D professionals develop much later: a deep, instinct-level read on people. "Talent falls out of people's mouth every single day," he says. "You just have to listen for it."
The discipline he developed as a fighter, not focused on competition but on the rigor of preparation, shaped how he thinks about training. If the event is five percent of the work and preparation is the other ninety-five, then what an organization does before, during, and after a learning moment is what actually determines outcomes.
Rethinking how we hear talent
Most organizations screen for talent through resumes and interviews built around generic prompts. Hickman argues those tools are reliable only if you know precisely what you are listening for and whether your questions reveal it.
He draws a distinction between warm-up questions, which have their place, and pointy questions designed to surface how someone thinks and what they are wired for. Instead of "tell me about yourself," he asks questions calibrated to reveal specific talents. The goal is alignment: matching the demands of the role to the genuine strengths of the person sitting across from you.
"You need to have the talent conversation," he says. "Not just the experience conversation."
Why training fails: the belief layer nobody addresses
Hickman has a framework he returns to when organizations ask him to fix a training problem. Think of a triangle: experiences at the base, then beliefs, then actions, then results. Most L&D programs jump from experience to action, skipping the middle entirely.
The problem is that an experience cannot produce a reliable change in behavior without first shifting the belief that underlies it. An employee who has been burned by a previous initiative, a team that has heard the same message repackaged every year, a manager who does not trust the process: these are belief problems. No course corrects them.
"Your experience builds your beliefs," Hickman explains. "If you miss that layer, you're creating experiences and expecting actions you haven't earned yet."
He has also changed how training itself is designed at Partners FCU. Inspired by the Walt Disney experience, his team applies a simple principle: the ride begins in the queue. Preparation materials, short audio pieces designed for LA and Orlando commutes, contextual articles, all of it starts before anyone walks into a room. By the time participants sit down, the foundation is already laid. The session can move directly into dialogue, case studies, and the kind of messy, generative problem-solving that actually builds capability.
Operationalizing love: why engagement precedes performance
Hickman uses a word most L&D professionals avoid in professional settings: love. What does it mean to love your work? And more practically, how do organizations create the conditions for it?
His starting point is a deceptively simple question he asks team members: "What do you love to do here?"
The speed and specificity of the answer tells him more than most surveys. The goal is to ensure that each person spends roughly eighty percent of their time in work that uses those strengths, with the other twenty percent being what he calls the grind.
This is not a soft idea. Hickman grounds it in research from Gallup, Buckingham, and others: highly engaged employees are an organization's most significant performance lever.
"Your most engaged employees are your secret weapons," he says.
The opposite, organizations that optimize for replacement rather than development, tend to see the predictable result: their best people get recruited away.
"Your most talented person has a recruiter sitting in their inbox waiting for that day to happen," he says.
The advice Hickman would give his younger self
When asked what he would tell the version of himself first stepping into the AT&T training role after the fighting career ended, Hickman's answer was short.
"Listen more than speak." And alongside it: develop an appreciation for everything and everyone in front of you. The most influential people he has encountered across his career were almost always the most humble. They led with less, and it landed further.
It is, in its way, the same principle that animates his approach to L&D. The best training is not the loudest training. It is the kind that meets people where their beliefs actually are, earns their engagement, and gives them the experience of growing into work they genuinely love.
Resources
Ready to turn insights into impact?
