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You Don’t Learn Management From a Book: An Interview with Ashley Fina, Co-CEO of Oxygen, the Leading Provider of Management Training, Benchmarking, and Effectiveness Scoring
By OnedayEstimated read time: 4 minutes
Oneday is built on a simple conviction: you learn to build a business by actually building one, with real stakes, real feedback, and a cohort of peers beside you, not by sitting through lectures. It turns out that is exactly how people learn to manage, too. The founders who graduate into running real companies quickly discover that leading a team is its own skill, and it is learned the same hands-on way the business was.
To unpack that parallel, we spoke with Ashley Fina, Co-CEO of Oxygen (opens in a new tab), the leading provider of management training, benchmarking, and effectiveness scoring (leadwithoxygen.com (opens in a new tab)). Ashley has spent her career studying how managers actually develop, and her view lines up closely with Oneday’s: the skills that matter most are built through practice, not absorbed from a page.
In this interview, Ashley shares why management can’t be learned from a textbook, and what it takes to actually build the skill.
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Interview
Oneday: Our whole model is learning by building a real business, not sitting in a classroom. Does becoming a good manager work the same way?
Ashley Fina: Almost exactly the same way, and I love that your model makes that so obvious. You can read every book on management ever written and still freeze the first time you have to tell a teammate their work isn't good enough. Most of how anyone actually develops as a manager comes from hands-on experience and the people around them, not from formal coursework. Management is maybe the clearest example there is. You learn it by doing the uncomfortable thing, seeing how it lands, getting feedback, and trying again.
Oneday: A lot of our founders are becoming managers for the first time as they hire. What trips them up most?
Ashley: The job quietly flips, and nobody warns them. As a founder you win by doing: you build the product, close the deal, do the work. Then you hire a team and suddenly your job isn’t your own output anymore, it’s getting results through other people. That’s a completely different skill. The things that got your company off the ground, the hustle and the hands-on control, are often the very things you now have to let go of. It’s not a flaw in them. It’s just the next skill to learn, and most people have never been taught it.
Oneday: If experience is the best teacher, does structured training even matter?
Ashley: It matters a lot, because unguided experience also teaches bad habits. You can spend three years “learning by doing” and simply get very good at avoiding hard conversations. What changes that is structured practice with real feedback, and knowing where you actually stand. That’s how we built Oxygen. We start by scoring a company’s managers (opens in a new tab) to get an honest baseline of their strengths and gaps, then develop them through Management Essentials (opens in a new tab) and coaching (opens in a new tab), where they practice the hard conversations with peers before doing them live with their own team. Then we measure again to see what moved. It’s experience, but aimed.
Oneday: What would you tell a founder in our program who wants to build this skill now, before they’re running a big team?
Ashley: Start getting reps immediately, on a small scale. Lead a project where your job is to make other people successful instead of doing the work yourself. Give someone direct feedback and notice how you handled it. Ask your squad how you came across. Those small, awkward moments are the real curriculum. Treat management as a craft you build the same way you’re building your company, through practice, and you can see the kind of change that produces on our client results page (opens in a new tab). The earlier you start, the better your company scales when it matters.
The Takeaway
The best founders already understand that you build a company by building it, not by reading about it. Management is no different. As Ashley puts it, it’s a craft learned through reps, feedback, and knowing honestly where you stand, not a chapter you memorize once. For anyone turning an idea into a team, treating management as something you practice from day one may be the highest-return habit they form.
About Oxygen
Oxygen is a leading provider of management training, benchmarking, and effectiveness scoring, helping growing organizations improve business performance by measuring and developing how well their managers manage. Oxygen scores a company’s managers (opens in a new tab) to establish a baseline, then strengthens them through training like Management Essentials (opens in a new tab) and ongoing coaching, equipping managers with practical tools for feedback, accountability, and difficult conversations. Learn more at leadwithoxygen.com (opens in a new tab).