Midway through their season, Pelham’s Our Lady of Perpetual Help fourth-grade Catholic Youth Organization cagers are looking solid: 4-0 in league play and 6-1 overall. They recently manhandled the lads from Resurrection in Rye 33-17, and the Resurrection five had been 3-0 in league play.
Fourth graders being fourth graders, the boys may not suspect just how well they are coached. Their coach is, in fact, a big-time coach of the business variety for the likes of Xerox, McDonald”™s and Texaco. He teaches business people how to:
Ӣ run effective meetings;
Ӣ coach for effective performance;
Ӣ communicate effectively;
Ӣ maximize one-on-one meetings;
Ӣ delegate tasks; and
Ӣ build an effective presentation.
For example: “The tools that might have gotten a person promoted might not necessarily be the same tools that will allow that person to thrive in a new position,” O”™Neil says. He speaks of the top-producing sales person who has been elevated to running the sales department and is baffled by the new paradigms of the boss position. “That”™s the classic person who”™s in our workshops.”
O”™Neil brings a heady mix of experience and accomplishment to the seminars that keep him on the road up to a hundred days a year as a principal of his company, One to One Leadership. He holds a bachelor”™s degree from the College of the Holy Cross; a master”™s of social work from Boston College; and an MBA and law degree from Duke University. His work experience has run the gamut from “chasing down hooligans across central Massachusetts” as a child and family psychotherapist for Children”™s Hospital Boston, the pediatric teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, to a corporate real estate lawyer for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher L.L.P in Manhattan. He and his wife, Erin, and their four children ”“ fourth-grade hoopsters Matt and Ryan, 6-year-old Julia and 3-year-old Olivia ”“ live in Pelham, where O”™Neil runs the New York arm of One to One. His mother, Mary Ann O”™Neil, now divorced from Sean”™s father, Michael, runs the Florida arm of the company, which she founded, in Longboat Key.
One to One runs about 150 workshops per year, with Mary Ann and Sean splitting the duties 50-50. Business mostly comes via word of mouth, although in the last two years, One to One has exhibited at national law firm conferences.
O”™Neil also possesses athletic bona fides that make him a natural to coach his boys”™ basketball team. He was a guard for the Our Lady of Lourdes High School Warriors in Poughkeepsie: “I was good,” he says, sipping coffee on a recent cold afternoon. “I was not great. I was good.” He was also a Warrior harrier.
Seated in a button-down shirt in his dining room and later out twirling a basketball on his finger in the driveway, O”™Neil carries himself with the casual athleticism of one familiar to competition. Besides basketball, he also coaches his twins”™ Little League baseball team, though he admits, “Basketball is my passion.” He was a marathoner, but a back injury sidetracked his running. Now and then he sneaks in a short run “just for fun ”“ I do miss it.”
Every Thursday afternoon, the 11 OLPH pint-sized basketball players learn the fundamentals from O’Neil, a spry 38, in the school gym.
“They love it,” O’Neil says of the team’s attitude toward practice. “They can’t wait to get there.”
For 75 minutes, the lads learn hoops the right way, the O’Neil way: listen and learn; play hard; play as a team; never insult or show up a teammate; and, in a related vein, never forget the tenets of good sportsmanship. If the OLPH juggernaut is on a tear, the boys will gear back so as not to show up the opposition with a blowout. All the OLPH players see action.
Whatever the topic of conversation, it is clear in speaking with O”™Neil that he is a natural teacher: confident and calming; crisp of sentence and enthusiastic about the topic at hand. But he”™s also smart enough to know the business people at a One to One seminar are products of a media-saturated world and he takes advantage of that knowledge. “To highlight some things, we”™ll use clips from ”˜King of Queens,”™” he says. He also turns to the big screen to prove points: “Apollo 13,” the Tom Hanks space adventure, and “Miracle,” the story of the 1980 U.S. hockey team that won the Olympic gold medal in Lake Placid.
One point he drives home is to know when competitiveness is a disadvantage. “We talk about communication problems, resource allocation and competitiveness,” he says. “A lot of business teams are competitive for no good reason. Sometimes they”™re not even aware of it. In sales, some people think competition is the end-all. But it can lead to hoarding of resources and hiding of best practices.”
And, after the talking and the team-building, One to One is willing to walk the walk of results. O”™Neil has been gathering data to demonstrate One to One”™s quantifiable results in the business world, even linking the company”™s fees in one instance to followup performance by workshop attendees “so our interests are fully aligned with theirs.” The company Web site is www.one2oneleadership.com and the phone is 235-1525.
